The transcript of Elizabeth Smart’s testimony in the competency hearing for accused kidnapper Brian David Mitchell drew thousands of readers to The Salt Lake Tribune ‘s Website, and the method in which reporters delivered that transcript drew some attention from a federal judge and other news media.
The U.S. District Court for Utah had issued an order for the hearing that forbade transmitting updates from within the courtroom or from a nearby overflow room. In an effort to provide a fast transcript while still complying with the decorum order, The Tribune sent two reporters to take turns transcribing and then leaving the overflow room to e-mail their material to the newsroom.
As Tribune Deputy Editor Tim Fitzpatrick wrote last week, “One of the reporters was told by a guard in the room that e-mailing was allowed from inside, and that was wrongly interpreted by The Tribune that it was OK to e-mail transcripts despite the decorum order. When court officials found out, they would not allow the reporter to continue.”
The Tribune pulled from the Website the material that had been transmitted in violation of the order. Reporters then went outside the courthouse and transmitted the same material in accordance with the decorum order.
After the hearing a Tribune editor and the paper’s attorney met with the judge to explain what happened. The Office of the Clerk of Court later issued a statement saying the court anticipates that ”no sanctions [against The Tribune ] will be necessary.”
Tribune Editor Nancy Conway explains, “It was through a misunderstanding that our reporters made the mistake on the conduct order. But in response to some of the criticism from other media, let me say we had an excellent plan for covering that hearing — one that was completely within the Rules of Decorum — and that was how we got the testimony out so fast.
“We recognize that we are in a new digital world, and we wanted to be competitive. And more importantly, we wanted to get high interest information out to our readers as fast as we could.”
It’s time the courts caught up with technology. The decorum order for the Smart testimony ignored the fact that transmitting from the courtroom — or an overflow room — would cause no disruption to the business of the court. Such transmission is silent. We are well past the era of noisy typewriters and huge TV cameras that interfere with court proceedings.
Freelance writer and former Palm Beach Post reporter C. B. Hanif knows how court reporting is changing. He recently used Twitter to send testimony from the trial of one suspect in the gang rape of a woman and her son in their West Palm Beach apartment.
“It took a minute, but I found Twitter’s 140 characters worked fine for reporting bites of testimony,” Hanif said. “I hardly had used my Twitter account before the trial. At certain points during the trial, I found my Tweets’ followers pouring in from around the country and the world.”
In this age of Internet fascination, this is the kind of reporting many readers seek but don’t always find. In a case like the Elizabeth Smart saga, reading a story about testimony may not be as interesting as reading a transcript of the testimony, especially when the transcript is available quickly.
