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All hail SCOTUSblog. Now, attack it.

By Mark Obbie

I've been pondering since yesterday what to say about SCOTUSblog and its impact on legal reporting. Comment is called for because of the great service that the site provides on crunch days like the past two days, when multiple newsworthy decisions came down. SCOTUSblog's "live-blogging" of the decisions' announcements -- the start each day of a flood of journalism by the great Lyle Denniston and analysis by Akin Gump lawyers (at the blog's home base) or other experts -- was simply astonishing. Not that it's rocket science -- it's merely news of what's been decided, who wrote the majority and dissenting opinions, and links to those opinions and background material -- but because it's so blindingly fast. Take a look at the time stamps on the posts from yesterday's and today's live blogs. That makes the fastest wire service reporter on the beat look like a slug. But here's the thing. In touting the site's heavy traffic today, at around 100,000 unique visitors, the site's head honcho, Supreme Court advocate and master analyst Tom Goldstein, made me focus on what a niche product this is. The writing is crisp and plain, but it's for a legal audience, and isn't storytelling so much as wonky analytical insider stuff. That's a good thing, but a narrow thing. And for a relatively small audience, even on its best day. Broadly focused journalism, from the everyman's AP to the elite reader's New York Times and Wall Street Journal, serves far more readers, in a far more accessible way. Better? Not always. But different in a most meaningful way, for those who care about informing the great unwashed. That said, why do the major newspapers consider their Web coverage of major decision days to be adequate? They simply run a wire story that's spit out in 30-40 minutes -- a previously written bottom, topped with the news, and progressively updated with react throughout the day, plus a link to the decision -- with the only real innovation in the form of staff produced stories rather than the wires. True, the WSJ Law Blog goes a step or two further, putting an interesting spin on what the paper's reporters (and other papers' reporters) are finding out. But why shouldn't the major papers own an event like the Court's climactic decision days? Why is the Drudge Report linking to little old SCOTUSblog rather than to a brand name news organization? Until there are cameras in the room, we need real-time Internet reporting by journalists at such organizations, putting facts and links into the hands of news-hungry readers.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on June 26, 2008 (boomark / email).