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Original Post:
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| What the SCOTUS beat needs, Part II |
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| Slate |
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| Sat, April 12, 2008 |
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Jack Shafer's and Dahlia Lithwick's recent musings on the future of Supreme Court reporting prompt me to think more about the opportunities that exist with the changing of the guard at the Times.
It all started with Shafer's characteristically over-the-top call to abolish "the ugly stranglehold the boomers have over the press," which he evidently sees possible with the replacement of 61-year-old boomer Linda Greenhouse with 47-year-old boomer Adam Liptak. Actually, Shafer makes some worthy points about the value of injecting new blood into our newsrooms, amid the wave of buyouts that will lower the average age of the reporting ranks. He asks these useful questions:
In the Web era, is the best use of the Times' column inches the traditional day-after-oral-arguments story and the day-after-decisions dispatches? Is there a more creative way to report on the court? Should Liptak cover the court with more argument and greater point of view, the way he covers the law in his current Sidebar column?
He takes the issues far beyond what one reporter, poor Mr. Liptak, should be expected to do. Which goads Lithwick into offering her own theories on how the SCOTUS beat will, or should, evolve. It's hard to argue with her -- expert sources now just blog their own thoughts; it doesn't take a seat at the Court, but it does take a faster metabolism, to succeed these days; the old neutrality of Court journalism should give way to more analytical voices -- but I have a different take on what journalists can do to compete with new media forms and serve the changing demands of our readers. Like Lithwick, I present my list as a rough first draft:
More on-the-scene reporting. Go to where the cases percolate up from, reporting on the real people and places at issue in the briefs. When today's cadre of reporters on the SCOTUS beat take the road warrior tack -- those who've done it lately include Jess Bravin of the Journal, Warren Richey of the Monitor, Bob Barnes of the Post, the AP's Mark Sherman -- the results serve readers well. Is it possible to cover as many cases at the cert-grant, argument, and decision stages if you're also jetting off to Guantanamo or Des Moines? No, and the bosses will have to accept that, throw more reporters at the beat (as if), or learn to team up with the expert bloggers who do a fine job of covering every nuance of every case (so long as coverage is defined as reading and interpreting decisions and briefs).
More behind-the-scenes reporting. If books on the Court like Jeff Toobin's The Nine can dig into the real politicking and strategizing that made cases turn out as they did, then beat reporters can do it, too. They're so busy looking forward or looking at today's breaking news, they don't get (or take) the time to cast a look back a term or two or three. That's the material that inside sources are more willing to dish on. Bosses need to unleash the Mauros and Savages and Biskupics on these perspective pieces. Again, we'll have to compromise and innovate. We can't do new things plus all the old things in the old ways with the same or diminishing resources.
More personality-based reporting. Tony Mauro's longstanding Courtside column in Legal Times is one model. Lithwick's oral arguments reports are another. Still others abound in the aforementioned books of journalism on the Court. This is one big advantage reporters have over bloggers who report on and analyze cases from afar. Reporters add value by observing the justices up close, and taking the initiative to talk to others who have even more intimate access to the justices (clerks, advocates, colleagues). We need to know more about these important public officials. And knowing more will make their work more interesting to more people.
More storytelling innovation. The elites are relatively well served already with deep, specialized resources. Journalists must focus on the mass audience, which needs clear reasons to care about Court news. Asking these folks to wade into a dense, technical discussion, or even to care enough to read a well-crafted but traditional 20-inch USA Today story, doesn't cut it. And we can't leave them to the default options: meaningless 100-word bulletins or cable-TV shoutfests. There are more than enough opinionators already. We have to experiment in multimedia storytelling that draws in the casual reader/viewer with engaging stories; takes an inclusive approach, giving them backgrounders on the cases and controversies so that they begin to appreciate the real substantive issues; and makes them hungry to learn more.
We need professional journalists to produce such coverage. And journalists need it, too, as an antidote to those increasingly alarming reports of the steep decline in traditional news media. At the very least, it may get Shafer to stop calling us forty-somethings -- OK, really late-forties-somethings -- deadwood.
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Posted at 10:44 AM
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