Legal Journalism At A Crossroads
By Sarah Kellogg

Who will tell the public the story of the American legal system?

Increasingly, it seems it’s the legal system itself, or more specifically, the players within the system—the courts, law firms, local bar associations, specialized legal news publishers, lawyers, and law professors. The days are waning for in-depth coverage of the courts by the mainstream news media. What has replaced it is an intriguing if confusing mix of law-related Web sites, publications, podcasts, and blogs, many of which are coming from outside of journalism, and all of which are contributing to a new definition of what constitutes legal news in America.

Up until a decade ago, the mainstream media were considered the first and last word on important legal news, whether it was a groundbreaking ruling from the United States Supreme Court or a jury verdict in a murder trial in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Traditional media outlets were the megaphones that trumpeted legal news to the wider world, along the way deciding what merited coverage and what was worth repeating.

Eroding circulation at daily newspapers and declining viewership of network television news has prompted a significant change in the way news is covered and reported in recent years. Not surprisingly, the competition from the Internet has driven much of this change, especially as painful budget cuts and staff reductions at newspapers have triggered the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in classified and display advertising revenues. But the changes in coverage also were the result of a delayed realization by publishers and editors at tradition-bound institutions that their business model had become as dated as movable type.

Today’s reporting on the legal system, and especially the courts, is frequently filtered through sophisticated media platforms, such as Web portals, video gateways, and blogs. What’s interesting (some would even say risky) about these new platforms is they are equal opportunity alternatives, open to one and all—from monster news media conglomerates to the daring innovators and citizen journalists who slap a masthead on a Web site and call it legal news. And, not surprisingly, the reporting often reflects the views of the particular news outlet or person financing it.

“I’m not saying we’re at this point yet, but I think there is some danger in having the legal system practically ignored by the mainstream media and covered exclusively by organizations that have a vested interest in the system and the result,” says Mark Obbie, director of the Carnegie Legal Reporting Program at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “For the most part, newspapers and television stations don’t have that vested interest, and so the hope was their coverage would be unbiased. If law schools and courts and law firms and lawyers are going to fill in the gap, then someone needs to ask whether this will work and provide the coverage the public needs.”

What does the public need? The jury is out, so to speak, on legal news. The public is demanding news that is increasingly more applicable to their daily lives and easier to access than the traditional news delivered once a day by way of the newspaper, radio, or television. Immediacy counts with today’s news junkies, which means the faster you are on the draw, the bigger your audience likely will be.

Some argue that the growing segmentation of the legal news market is a reflection of more than just changes in the news media or technological developments on the Web. This division also may reflect the public’s fading interest in the law and courts. Is legal news really relevant to daily life? Save its unending curiosity about lurid televised trials and celebrity run-ins with the police, which count as more entertainment than news, the public’s tolerance for pithy stories about the court system, or what justices have to say about patent law, has likely hit its limit. The average American seems unwilling to follow the flotsam and jetsam of the legal system beyond the occasional story about state attorneys going after polygamists or Supreme Court rulings on abortion. Ultimately, though, it is hard to determine whether the public’s lack of interest in more comprehensive legal coverage is its own idea or a reaction to the dwindling number of stories coming from mainstream media outlets.

This uncertainty presents a unique opportunity today for ambitious legal news publications and gateways on the Web. Since legal news reporting isn’t thriving in the mainstream news media, this leaves the door open for individuals and organizations that want to test the public’s interest and push their own ideas about what constitutes legal news and how to present it.

Trouble With Tradition
If legal journalism is losing ground, blame it on its mainstream parent. Traditional reporting is struggling to stay ahead of its creditors and competitors. The Internet has proved both boon and bust for newspapers and television stations, providing a new avenue to reach readers and viewers, and introducing competitors such as Craigslist (classified advertising) and Google (everything else) to siphon corporate advertisers.

“It’s an exciting time in terms of our ability to do journalism,” says Butch Ward, a distinguished fellow at The Poynter Institute, a journalism school and think tank in St. Petersburg, Florida. “It’s a scary time in terms of the business of journalism. If newspaper newsrooms do not find the way to bridge the declining print revenues with some other source of revenue—presumably the Web—to do good journalism, I don’t know who is going to do it. That’s a scary prospect.”

Meanwhile, sites such as Yahoo! News and AOL News are proving tough competitors when it comes to content, successfully repurposing wire copy from The Associated Press and other services to fit the needs of their individual online readers. And blogs—the equivalent of Internet bunnies, breeding daily by the hundreds—are providing an eclectic, if uneven, substitute.

“Audiences are moving toward information on demand, to media platforms and outlets that can tell them what they want to know, when they want to know it,” according to The State of the News Media 2008, a report published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“This is more nuanced than the audience simply fragmenting with new technology,” the report offers. “Consumers are changing their expectations and their behavior. For legacy media, however, this is not translating into an ever-accelerating exodus of audience, but rather, a steady, fairly modest yet still inexorable drip, drip, drip.”

Ironically, readership is growing for newspapers, according to the report.

While overall readership is increasing for newspapers, thanks largely to the Internet, circulation continues to decline. Since 2001, newspapers have lost 8.4 percent in daily circulation and 11.4 percent in Sunday circulation. Between 2006 and 2007, circulation was down 2.5 percent for daily and 3.3 percent for Sunday.

For network television news, the numbers are even worse. In 2007 the nightly newscasts lost 4.9 percent, or 1.2 million viewers. That continues a long-term trend, where network newscasts have steadily lost about 1 million viewers annually for the past 25 years. About 23.1 million viewers, on average, watch evening news broadcasts.

“For all the innovation we’re seeing in journalism responding to this crisis, there’s still no getting around that the institutions we’ve known for decades are changing, structurally and permanently,” Ward says. “It may be too early to know what the final result of those changes will be for the media companies, their employees, and their readers and viewers.”

Treading Water
Try looking for legal journalism today, and you’ll definitely find it. Many local, regional, and national newspapers are providing distinguished court coverage, exposing injustices, following corruption trials, and covering constitutional cases as they proceed through the appellate system. It is not that those commendable works have disappeared, especially in national newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, but rather these journalism institutions are not the norm anymore as papers burdened with layoffs and a shrinking news hole have pared their staffs and coverage of everything, not just the legal system.

It is worth noting that even as the mainstream media falters, the legal press is thriving. Designed to serve the needs of lawyers, law firms, law libraries, and academia, publishers and information gateways such as Thomson Reuters’ FindLaw, Reed Elsevier Inc.’s LexisNexis, or American Lawyer Media, Inc.’s Law.com provide volumes of legal coverage every day, including more access to tailored information than ever before. It is unclear whether this reflects society’s overall move toward specialization, although it may be a major contributing factor, some say. Respected and well read, these products provide an astonishingly broad array of legal information aimed at the experts in the field.

Still, there are increasingly fewer media outlets providing the public with legal news and information. Instead, general legal news is limited to celebrity arrests, occasional political scandals in Washington or statehouses, and explicit details of nasty homicides. The emphasis is on the crime, not as much on what happens after the criminal has been arrested.

The closest thing to regular coverage is the “legal” news on cable networks, from trial coverage on Court TV (now known as truTV, and the name alone shows where the trend is heading) to cable news shows that blast the sensational “legal” news of the day with the staccato delivery of a machine gun.

In fact, the public is more likely to find the mysteries of the legal system publicly plumbed every week on long-running, dramatic television shows such as Law & Order than in the mainstream media. The neatly told stories from crime to verdict—all in less than an hour—provide the average viewer with a burnished image of the legal system and inject legal terminology into the public consciousness. Much like medical shows, viewers have become glossary experts, able to rattle off words such as bench conference, arraignment, and admissible evidence like a pro.

For all its Nielsen ratings points, Law & Order hasn’t translated into more mainstream news coverage of the law, according to The State of the News Media 2008 report. The least-covered domestic issues, determined by the percentage of space dedicated to them in mainline newspapers, were education (1.0 percent), transportation (0.8 percent), religion (0.7 percent), court/legal system (0.4 percent), and development or sprawl (0.2 percent).

The report suggests that legal news “bends” rather than “breaks,” and is not as vital to everyday lives. This bendable news also requires continuous, long-term attention to grasp its meaning and explain its complex incremental changes. Breaking news such as automobile crashes, homicides, and explosions has more immediate appeal than a complicated product liability case because it allows for “strong visuals or attention-grabbing headlines.”

Dedicating resources to legal coverage is a losing battle for the average newspaper, television station, or radio station since the high-profile cases are few and far between in most communities, and the public shows little curiosity about the day-to-day events in their local courthouse. Save for periodic jury duty, there are few avenues for individual citizens to learn how the courts work.

“Honestly, we’re in a better situation than most stations, and we still have problems fielding a large reporting staff,” says Jim Asendio, news director for WAMU, American University’s public radio station. “I’m covering southern Maryland, Northern Virginia, and the District with three full-time reporters.

“For broadcast stations like ours, when it comes to the courts, we tend to be reactionary,” Asendio continues. “You’re not covering the courts; you’re covering something that’s happening at the courthouse. We’d be more likely to do a news feature story on how the courts react with immigrants than to provide weekly or daily coverage because it’s a better use of our resources.”

At times, legal reporting has been a backwater of sorts for journalists themselves. It never had the cache of sports, lifestyle, or political reporting, so it was destined to remain a stepchild in the newsroom to the sexier or more widely read beats. Still, it was a place where hardworking journalists—backed up by their editors or producers in television and radio—could find and tell stories about the important issues of the day or reveal hard truths about the nature of the individual and our society.

That doesn’t mean the likes of truTV won’t take a dip into serious legal waters for cases involving government corruption or White House scandals. It covered the Lewis I. “Scooter” Libby trial in federal court, as did much of the political blogosphere, tracking the daily legal machinations of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff who eventually was convicted of perjury and obstruction tied to a leak investigation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But the Libby trial was more exception than rule—a rare time when the facts of the case and the legal implications dovetailed with the political celebrity factor. It is hard to know for sure whether it would have received all the attention it did if not for Libby’s position as Dick Cheney’s top aide.

That’s why it concerns journalism professionals such as Syracuse’s Obbie that the only brush the public has with the legal system is often tabloid headlines about a brutish murder case or a political scandal. “The courts play an integral role in our government,” Obbie says. “And yet, the public knows little of that role and the value it brings to their daily lives.

“We just don’t see the same presence today that we did in the past when newspapers could afford to have a person stationed at the local courthouse every day, or at the minimum, covering the courts and city hall,” he adds. “Newspapers and television stations cannot afford to have an expert on the courts. There just isn’t enough staff, resources, or time to dedicate to the courts and the legal system.”

Yet just as the traditional media is reducing its legal coverage, along comes the Internet, both slayer and savior of legal journalism. While the Web may be contributing to problems in the journalism business, some believe it is providing an opportunity to fill the legal news vacuum.

A Web of Possibilities
The Web is woven so deeply into the fabric of the American information and business marketplace that it is hard to imagine a world without the Internet—even for those individuals over the age of 30 who didn’t grow up with laptops, personal digital assistants or PDAs, and mobile phones that allow instantaneous access to news and information anywhere, anytime.

Seventy-five percent of adult Americans use the Internet, according to survey information gathered in the fall of 2007 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey is an ongoing project supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts to explore the impact of the Web. When asked whether they went online “yesterday,” 72 percent of Internet users surveyed said they had, up from 65 percent in 2006. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, Center for the Digital Future reports that Americans age 17 and older spent 15.3 hours a week online in 2007.

“I think this new technology doesn’t make the traditional media irrelevant, but it does make it less immediate,” says Tom Mighell, an attorney at Cowles & Thompson, P.C. in Texas and a nationally renowned legal technology expert. “Web sites and blogs are able to deliver news so much quicker than a traditional journalist covering a trial and writing a story for the next day’s newspaper. There are going to be a lot of people who want to read that story, but there are also going to be a lot of people who found out all they needed to know about that trial the day before on the Web.”

Nonetheless, going online and going online for news are two very different things. Still, the data seem to bear out the potential for online news providers to hit their marks. Seventy-one percent of Americans said they went online for news in late 2007, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report. Of those surveyed, 37 percent went online “yesterday” for news, up from 30 percent in 2005 and 26 percent in 2002.

Another winner is video. An Online Publishers Association study found that news reading online is holding steady while video viewing is growing. About 44 percent of online video users tune in on a weekly basis, compared to 24 percent in 2006. For high-speed Internet users, the percentages may be even higher. A study from Horowitz Associates, Inc., a market research and consulting company, pegs video viewing at 61 percent for high-speed Internet users, a dramatic boost from 36 percent in 2006.

Despite all the sports, movies, and comedy video programs on the Web, news remains the most popular video genre for users, according to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Thirty-seven percent of adult Internet users said they had watched online news videos, and 10 percent said they had done it “yesterday.”

A good sign for news producers is that recent studies show there is increasing public interest in content on the Web as users have greater access to broadband connections, increase their video viewing online, and as search engines allow them to quickly hunt for their exact content.

“It seems to me that with content being king, the legal news arena, like a lot of other specialty subject areas, is waiting to be put front and center on the Web,” Mighell says. “The possibilities really seem endless.”

Doing It for Themselves
An unlikely player has lined up to take advantage of those endless possibilities—the federal court system. While its motivations may be slightly more parochial than the news media’s, viewing the Web more as an administrative opportunity to publicly post briefs or motions than as a supplementary news source, many courts and judges have warmed to the Internet and its potential.

“We leave it completely up to the courts, but I see a lot of interest,” says Karen Redmond, spokeswoman for the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. “If they’re doing anything, it’s being done on an individual basis. The courts are really looking to the future. When they get involved in wikis and RSS feeds, the tendency is toward more openness, not less.”

For example, Redmond said the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has a wiki, a Web site that allows users to add or edit content, for its practitioner’s handbook. The court also uses RSS feeds, a messaging technology that notifies users when a blog or Web site has been updated, for audio postings of court arguments.

Additionally, five federal courts—two United States district courts (Nebraska and Pennsylvania) and three United States bankruptcy courts (Alabama, Maine, and North Carolina)—are part of a pilot project to make digital audio recordings of court hearings available to the public. Started in the summer of 2007, the project posts digital audio recordings on a public Web site. While most bankruptcy courts and about one-third of the 94 district courts record in digital audio, these courts charge $26 for the recording and require individuals to pick up discs at the court. Recordings released through the pilot project are free of charge and can be accessed on the Web.

The pilot project is the brainchild of Judge J. Richard Leonard, a United States bankruptcy court judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina. Leonard said it was a way to level the playing field for individuals involved in bankruptcy cases, many of whom do not live in the area but still want access to the records. “I think there’s an openness to this technology,” says Redmond, adding that the District of Columbia is the only jurisdiction to prohibit video or audio coverage of trial and appellate courts.

Even the Supreme Court has loosened its tight grip on the information that passes through its doors. The Court is frequently using its Web site as a place to alert interested parties and the public to its decisions to grant or deny certiorari and to the release of the Court’s decisions. The Supreme Court also is posting more regularly audio recordings of oral arguments in cases of great merit or controversy on the same day they occur.

“I think the Court is becoming much more open to providing information,” says Jerry Goldman, a Northwestern University political science professor who founded and oversees Oyez.org, a news site that tracks the activities of the Supreme Court. “We’ve had a good relationship with people there, and I think they see the value of using their own Web site and working with sites like ours.”

And while none of these legal postings by the courts would qualify as traditional news for public consumption, they are providing the building blocks of any news operation or citizen who wants to access them.

A Web-Savvy Mainstream
For the nation’s top newspapers and television networks, the transparency of the federal courts makes their jobs easier, but it doesn’t change the fact they have traditionally committed substantial resources and staff to the federal legal beat. What it does affect is how they do their jobs, relying less on traditional reporting methods and more on new media opportunities to flesh out breaking news stories, illuminate profiles, and broaden features.

An innovative example of a mainstream media outlet that has utilized the Web to its advantage is National Public Radio (NPR), which made a commitment in 2004 to produce a Web news package that examines the accumulated papers of the late Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. NPR’s Nina Totenberg, the network’s legal affairs correspondent, was the only broadcast journalist given access to the papers. Housed in the Library of Congress, the papers and 38 hours of audio and video recordings of Blackmun were the basis for a series of reports from Totenberg, examining how the justices got along and the secretive deliberations of the nation’s highest court. Totenberg’s series also teased out the details behind the Roe v. Wade decision, which was written by Justice Blackmun.

As with NPR, the nation’s major television networks inject millions into their legal coverage, but they also are in a position to provide a showier illustration of their commitment to legal news. For example, MSNBC airs the Verdict with Dan Abrams, the NBC chief legal correspondent’s hour-long look at the day’s legal events. CNN’s legal czar, Jeffrey Toobin, could be called the hardest-working legal reporter in the news business. He has created a cottage industry in covering the law with his long list of books, magazine articles, and television interviews. CBS and ABC have their own legal correspondents as well, even if they arrive with a bit less flair. CBS’ court coverage is handled by Andrew Cohen, who writes regularly for his CourtWatch blog. ABC News employs Jan Crawford Greenburg, who works the television news side as well as writes the ABC blog, Legalities.

A host of national newspapers and magazines provide extensive coverage of the courts. To no one’s surprise, the country’s national newspapers—The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today—all have full-time correspondents following the Supreme Court, along with pages or blogs dedicated to that coverage on their Web sites. Additionally, all of them supplement that reporting with additional staff, as needed, especially during major trials, criminal investigations, or confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices.

Web 2.0 and the “Netizens”
As technology gurus contemplated what Web 2.0 would look like, it became clear that it was meant to be more than a giant search engine, or the world’s largest repository of classified advertising or a ragingly successful flea market. The focus of the Web’s next iteration would be content—and the people and organizations that would create, find, and repackage it. The new philosophy of the Web took on such momentum that it opened doors to content production not just for major corporations but also for the citizen, or “netizen.”

Content distributors such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are central players in Web 2.0, just as citizen news creators who have discovered their own niches. Jan Schaffer, executive director of the University of Maryland’s J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, believes the current trend toward “citizen” media projects is more about building community than covering a specific community. “They don’t write news from a conflict frame that journalists are taught,” Schaffer says. “They really want to highlight who is saying or doing what. They really value the act of conveying information and finding consensus.”

In that sense, the collection of legal sites and law blogs, or blawgs, that have grown up in recent years reflects both the desire to report information and the wish to build a greater community beyond the next block. Early on, a handful of law firms and law schools proposed a melding of legal reporting and the latest technology, hoping to fill in the gap left by shrinking news coverage of the legal system and to use the Web to tell their stories and their clients’ stories.

One of those early innovators was SCOTUSblog. The blog was near revolutionary when it debuted, providing timely insights into the Supreme Court’s decision-making process and churning out a detailed analysis of the finer legal points of rulings in the time it took a traditional reporter to read the opinion. Today, SCOTUSblog is not just a popular site with a large following, it also has been underwritten by one of the legal world’s heavy hitters, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, increasing its heft on the Web and in the marketplace.

“We are succeeding in covering the Court because we’ve thrown more resources at it than a newspaper can,” says Amy Howe, partner at Howe & Russell, P.C. and the cofounder, with Akin Gump partner Tom Goldstein, of SCOTUSblog. “Most newspapers have one reporter covering the Court. We have a lot of Court watchers. We’re able to react quickly and put a decision into context. We cover cases, from affirmative action to abortion, that the public would care about, but we also cover the cases that the legal world cares about.”

A first cousin to SCOTUSblog is Appellate.net, a Web site that presents a breadth of information about the federal appellate system as seen through the perspective of Mayer Brown LLP’s appellate practice. David Gossett, Mayer Brown’s partner overseeing the site, says Appellate.net is not considered a news site by those inside the firm, although he knows many outside the firm keep tabs on the site because it is timely and authoritative.

“A lot of cases won’t ever get the attention from the mainstream media even though attorneys or specific businesses see those cases as critically important,” Gossett says. “That’s not to denigrate the media, it’s just to acknowledge that there are niche markets for news. One of the things the Internet allows is an organization like Mayer Brown, or any blogger, to easily and quickly fill that niche.”

One of the most popular niche sites is the aptly named Oyez.org, a soup-to-nuts, multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court and created by Northwestern’s Goldman. The site’s goal is to be the go-to source on the Court’s past and present. The content features everything from the justices’ voting record on cases dating to 1953 to audio recordings of oral arguments (with accompanying written transcripts) as far back as the ’70s, although Oyez.org plans to eventually go back to 1955. The site isn’t written for lawyers, although they use it, but designed more for the average citizen looking for information about the nation’s highest court.

“We wanted to keep this record and be a source for the public,” Goldman says. “If the Supreme Court decided tomorrow that it was going to post these materials, I still think we’d do a better job of it. We’ve been doing it for so long that we really do know best. We’ve tried to make sense of the Court and the law, so families, students, and children could use the site to learn more about a current decision or a historic figure.”

A Cautionary Note
With the boundaries of legal reporting shifting, the rules of the legal news game are evolving as well. While many dispute the effectiveness, the mainstream media has at least had a handbook in place designed to protect the accuracy and objectivity of its work. Not so in the Wild West of the Web. There are few constraints or checks and balances on the Web, except for the complaints by the public. The potential abuses are myriad within the Web-based legal news and information community.

“What the new media giveth, the new media can taketh away,” says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at The Brookings Institution and a former deputy director at the Federal Judicial Center, the federal courts’ research and education arm. “More information is available. More access to information is available for people to use for good or ill.”

First on the list of abuses is inaccuracy. While accuracy is prized by most, if not all, there is rarely a fact checker working on the Web for smaller outfits to ensure the authenticity of the information they publish. Poorly researched or inadequately written blog posts are an annoyance, but in the legal field more than any other, they could turn into a dispute that requires a court to resolve.

“There are a lot of superficial blogs,” Wheeler says. “A lot of people are getting information about courts from people who frankly are on the fringes. It used to be if you wanted to read an informed commentary about a court decision, you had to wait to read the law reviews months later. Today, you can read it the next day. Sometimes they’re good, but sometimes they’re bad.”

Another example of the Web’s potential for abuse is the crusading juror. Anecdotal evidence has shown that as an increasing number of jurors have access to the Web and the legal information found there, they could put trials at risk by doing their own research on a case or defendant, or by blogging about their jury service during the trial. Both threaten to influence jury deliberations.

A more disturbing Internet phenomenon is a Web site known as Who’s A Rat (whosarat.com), which releases the names of confidential informants and undercover police officers who have helped bring criminals to justice. An investigation of the site revealed the information was being downloaded from plea agreements posted on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. Started four years ago, Who’s A Rat is the brainchild of Sean Bucci, a Massachusetts man who was sentenced to prison for marijuana trafficking.

Court officials have been reluctant to institute an outright ban on public access to some criminal files, and federal officials are considering a proposal to seal information detailing any cooperation between a defendant and authorities in the PACER system for all 94 United States district courts.

What concerns Wheeler and others is that the traditional journalistic principles—integrity, fairness, objectivity, and transparency—are gone. What once seemed like tenets now look like relics of a bygone era, replaced with a technological momentum that is disorienting for some and destructive for others.

Yet for every potential abuse, there is an example of a benefit of this new style of legal journalism that shoots first and asks questions later. In December 2007 the Fox affiliate television station KMPH-TV in Fresno, California, sent reporter Nicole Garcia to cover a murder trial of a local biochemist suspected of killing her husband. Garcia wrote a blog from the courthouse, detailing events. As a result of reading the blog, two witnesses came forward to testify, and the biochemist was ultimately convicted. “Prosecutor Dennis Peterson said at least five people contacted the Fresno County District Attorney’s office wanting to offer their testimony against [the defendant] Larissa Schuster because of what they were reading on the trial blogs,” according to a statement released by KMPH at the time.

Out With the Old
The evolution of legal journalism in the digital age is an ongoing process, influenced by the fortunes of journalism itself, the ever-changing technology, and the ebb and flow of the public’s interest. Many observers believe the future holds even more promise than today’s wealth of legal news sites, blogs, and video podcasts. That these gateways may replace the traditional media is not likely for most people; instead, what concerns the experts is the sluggishness of the progress. Much has been done to open up the legal process to the public, but much more can be done.

“I think a lot of people would say the revolution hasn’t gone far enough,” says Mighell, the legal expert from Texas who edits the weekly law technology blog, Inter Alia. “We don’t have streaming video from the Supreme Court and most of the appellate courts yet. There have been a lot of people pushing for that to happen, but there is still enormous resistance. The purists believe it denigrates the court to the level of truTV, but then that’s a judgment call shaped by an elitist view of the court and the law. Why would transparency be so bad? That’s what the Web and these new media forms give us. Nobody should stand between the public and the courts. The public deserves to be part of the process.”

If the courts and legal system get short shrift in the mainstream media, then ultimately the public suffers, Mighell says. While it’s not news that legal coverage is a back-burner beat for the mainstream media, the acceleration of its decline in importance is, leading many to seek out the Web for cost-effective solutions, and others to stress that some coverage is better than no coverage at all.

What Web 2.0 and the proliferation of legal publishers’ sites may be telling us is that it is time to redefine legal journalism. It is no longer about newsgathering in a vacuum or from an ivory tower. It is evolving into a system where the role of news arbiter can be taken up by any individual or group with the passion, time, or money to do it. Some may have criticized such a trend in the past, yet today users are more forgiving. Many media producers believe the great opportunity of the Web is its enfranchisement, and they believe everyone should have the right to select legal stories, present them, and interact with the people who read them, no matter their politics or profession.

“I think people should have access to the proceedings of their government,” Goldman says. “Why should any citizen have to sit outside the court, or pay for someone else to tell them what happened? Why should it remain mysterious and difficult to understand? Who benefits from that? What the Web provides us finally is an unfiltered openness.”

Sarah Kellogg, a freelance writer who lives in Washington, D.C., wrote most recently on steroids and the law.