Cover the Planet

By David Poulson

Minutes after learning of a key appeals court ruling Friday, Nadia White “tweeted” less than 140 characters about its effect on the environmental crimes trial of five former executives of the W.R. Grace chemical company.

Andrew King-Ries simultaneously blogged a longer version of the report, linking it to the decision document and to a lengthy analysis of the issues prepared prior to the decision.

Those actions are some of the latest efforts of a fascinating new media experiment striving for fast, deep and accurate court coverage of a complex case involving one of the country’s worst industrial disasters.

University of Montana journalism and law students resume today this high-tech reporting of a high-profile case that involves hundreds of asbestos-related deaths in Libby, Montana.

But it was the two UM assistant professors  – White in journalism, King-Ries in law – leading the effort who had to handle the breaking news in the U.S. District Court trial in Missoula on Friday. Their students, taking advantage of a break in the trial, stayed on task - working on enterprise stories to enrich the coverage.

“It’s a big family effort,” White wrote in an e-mail.

The students themselves had already reported plenty of breaking news during six days of trial coverage. They made 716 posts - tweets - on the Twitter social networking site in addition to wrap-up stories on their blog.

Twitter users report information in 140-character installments. Trial watchers can follow the students’ real time coverage by searching Twitter for #GraceCase.

So who’s following their coverage of a trial in Missoula, nearly 200 miles from Libby where the crime is alleged to have taken place?

“I heard that people in Libby have been gathering around the computer at the library watching reports come in on the blog,” White said.

Local television stations unable to cover the trial full time are using the students’ efforts to inform their newscasts, she said. And the twice-weekly paper in Libby, The Western News, is using the UM reporting as the basis for its coverage and crediting the students.

Lawyers, too, are keeping track.

“I heard tell that at a law conference going on in Palm Springs they projected the blog on a big screen and just let it run,” White said.

Web stats show that employees of Grace and of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are among the top 10 groups of visitors to the Web site.

Just how many people are following the students is impossible to calculate.  The group’s Twitter identity, UMGraceCase, has 123 followers. But that doesn’t include readers who simply search for #GraceCase on Twitter.  Nor does it include the people watching the Twitter feed on the Web site. That site has had more than 13,000 page views and 6,500 unique visitors perusing news reports, profiles, backgrounders and analysis of key legal issues.

How’d they pull it off?

This is the kind of coverage that takes planning and a friendly judge.  The reporting team met with U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy, his clerk, the clerk of court and the court technology manager about six weeks before the trial started.  Molloy was enthusiastic and especially interested in a collaboration of law and journalism students that he hoped would improve the accuracy of the reporting, White said.

He granted two media passes inside the courtroom and authorized live audio and video streaming in a separate room. The judge - who does not allow cell phones, hats or gum into his courtroom - ultimately allowed laptops in, White said. But he doesn’t tolerate start-up jingles; students turn their laptops on before court or in the lobby.

The biggest technical problem: “There’s only one electrical outlet and students who don’t have their own laptop are working off of my seven-year-old old personal Macbook which has the battery life of a noodle,” she said. “If they can’t get a seat by the plug, they have to report from the media room.

Tweeting trial coverage is not unheard of.  The Wichita Eagle’s courts reporter Ron Sylvester says his Twitter coverage has brought him readers he wouldn’t otherwise reach. And the missives serve a dual purpose – a cut and paste of tweets helps with later stories he writes for the web and for the newspaper.

Still, you really have to be a courtroom junkie to drink from what often becomes a firehose of news. Even as a reader interested in both the trial and how it was covered, I found that an initial fascination with the Grace tweets eventually gave way to tedium.  I don’t need that level of detail.

It’s a problem that White says that the reporters realized. At one point the team peaked at five posts a minute.

Readers complained and students dialed back to no more than two a minute.

“They are aware readers have a tweet threshold,” White said.

Much of the overload is eased by regular online reports that summarize the action. Using the tweets to build those later reports can be helpful, White said. But she encouraged students to take separate notes for summary stories, helping to reduce the tweet rate and improve Twitter as a reader resource.

Separate from the technology is the unusual collaboration of law and journalism students. It seems to work.  The group has developed strategies for improving accessibility, posting long legal pieces as separate pages with short teasers that guide people to them. Law students help the journalism students with legal context and with what to expect.

Testimony is expected to last six to eight weeks, plenty of time to hone this technology and the collaboration into a new and aggressive form of environmental court reporting.

“Luckily it’s a long trial,” said White. “We accumulate wisdom on a daily basis.”

By David Poulson

You’ve got to hand it to the University of Montana’s schools of journalism and of law. They’ve joined in a project that pushes the bounds of traditional courtroom coverage and of new media.

The subject is the hottest environmental trial going. Five W.R. Grace officials face charges that they hid studies indicating the hazards faced by workers mining vermiculite in Libby, Mont. The company denies any wrongdoing.

It’s a typical messy environmental court action. After four years of legal maneuvering the case has finally come to trial. It will be interesting to see how the law students and the journalism students explain the legal issues to the public. Is it a clash of cultures or a collaboration from which we’ll all benefit?

But frankly, I’m much more interested in the new media elements they’re bringing to the coverage, particularly the use of Twitter as a means to cover courtroom action in real time. I’ll write more about that later; I want to see how that coverage progresses. But already they’ve helped set the #GraceCase Twtter hash tag, a role that I’ve argued is something where news organizations can take the lead.

And of course the students aren’t alone.

The Missoulian has a tremendous trove of backgrounders, links to news stories, videos, timelines and other elements. If you’re a nut for environmental litigation, here’s a place for not only ongoing coverage but instant background. It’s almost as if they’ve created the resources from which some novelist will someday write a bestseller.

And the journalists are not alone.

Grace itself has built an online presence to state its case. It even has its own timeline. For all I know, the plaintiffs have something similar. If you’re aware of it, send me a link. And if they don’t, they should.

But that is precisely why journalists need to so aggressively insert themselves into stories like these. There’s a lot of value in that “wisdom of the crowd” thing. But a blog battle here won’t serve the community.

A thorough, engaging and journalistically valid report will. Let’s hope we see one.