Victorian supreme court to submit to blogging to keep public informed
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Version 0 of 1. It is a journalistic discipline as old as the newspaper itself. But while court reporting has been a basic tenet of public life for as long as there have been broadsheets, the industry continues to shrink, and with it the number of court reporters. Luckily for the citizens of Victoria, the state supreme court has a plan to keep the public informed of judicial goings on, by revamping its website and hiring a retired judge to blog the courts’ proceedings. In a forward-looking speech, examining the way courts can embrace the power of the internet and citizen journalism, the Victorian chief justice, Marilyn Warren, outlined an ambitious plan to bring the courthouse into the digital age. At Monday night’s Redmond Barry lecture at the State Library of Victoria, Warren said: “With the rise of new media technologies the traditional methods of guaranteeing open justice for the community are rapidly changing. Open justice now increasingly means the ability of the community to access information about the courts is through the internet and social media.” Warren said the court’s new interactive website would become a hub for the court’s communication with the public, who would be able to comment on the website, watch video on demand, debate in online forums, and download judgments and summaries. She said employing a retired judge to blog the courts represented a “historic shift away from traditional judicial reluctance to explain or defend judicial decisions that are made in accordance with the rule of law”. Warren added that other experts, including academics and journalists, would also be invited to blog for the court. She predicted that the public would “lose some, if not eventually all of, the expertise of dedicated newspaper court reporters”, saying that the ABC had only one court reporter at the supreme court since the beginning of 2012. “There are now very limited numbers of specialist legal affairs reporters.” While Warren embraced certain aspects of social media and the reporting of legal affairs – namely that journalists were allowed to tweet during court hearings – she added a cautionary note: “It is extremely difficult for journalists, whether they are professional or untrained, whether or not they are subject to editorial and ethical constraints, to reduce complex legal issues into a fair and accurate report of 140 characters. “The space constraints also mean that Twitter contributors tend to focus selectively on the most sensational aspects of the story without providing any context to the sensational and sometimes inflammatory tweet.” Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |