I want to extend a special welcome to readers who found this post via The Volokh Conspiracy. I also publish a blog on Baltimore news issues called Inside Charm City if you’d like to take a look.

Justin Fenton of the Baltimore Sun recently posted this on Twitter:

Live tweeting going on from inside Dixon courtroom: Follow @whelananddealin, @wbaltv_court, @FOXBaltimore until deputies snatch their phones

A query from Robbie Whelan of the Daily Record to Fenton after the above post:

why is everyone from The Sun so worked up about us losing our tweeters in the courtroom? Was there some sort of reprimand?

Fenton’s response to the question:

i’m not there, all i know is that i’ve been yelled at when i’ve had my phone out, and the deputies threaten to take it away

The above exchange and the subject of this post relate to the usage of Twitter by reporters in the Courthouse this week for the trial of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon.

According to a reporter covering the trial, there are signs banning cell phones from being used in the courtroom but apparently it’s not being applied to reporters who are using their silenced PDAs or smartphones to tweet from the trial.

There has been a lot of attention on the Twitter feeds listed above in Fenton’s tweet (Robbie Whelan of the Daily Record, WBAL-TV, and WBFF-TV) as well as the hashtag #dixontrial that has been promoted by people tweeting from inside and outside the courthouse. This has been going on since jury selection started. Additionally, WBAL-TV and WBAL-AM have been doing live updates via Live Wire.

Apparently, some internecine conflict is possibly brewing among reporters from the Baltimore Sun who aren’t tweeting and those from other media sources who are. The Fenton-Whelan exchange may be evidence of it [something Fenton strongly denies to us - his full reply is below.] Other evidence of some friction is the fact that Sun staffers have told reporters who are tweeting from the trial that Judge Sweeney is “pissed” about all the Twitter usage in the courtroom. One reporter even mentioned the Judge staring when reporters pull out their Blackberries.

I’ve heard the reason that staffers at the Sun aren’t getting in on the attention all of the Twitter updates at the trial under the impression that they aren’t allowed to tweet from the courtroom. In fact, I’ve heard Sun staffers even told people asking why they weren’t tweeting that there was a ban on the use of Twitter in the courtroom. The Sun staffers either believe there really is a ban [information that has since come to light indicates this to be the truth] or the Sun itself has some sort of restriction on its reporters from tweeting inside the courtroom. The lack of tweets from Sun reporters covering the trial has shown one of those two things to be the case. Their tweets mostly consist of updates from outside during breaks or before/after proceedings along with retweets of the people who are actually posting updates inside.

[An update at the bottom of this post indicates that there is indeed a rule against usage of PDAs in the courtroom but that it and other rules are not being enforced.]

I have talked to no one who has heard an admonition from the bench at any point about the use of Twitter. While nobody can be in the courtroom for every single second of the proceedings, you would think at least one of the people tweeting would have been there to hear it or the Judge would have notified their bosses in a more direct manner.

More than one person I’ve discussed this with has mentioned that the Sun is really dropping the ball on trial coverage. I would tend to agree. If everyone else is indeed doing it and not being stopped, there is going to be the perception that the Sun just didn’t use all their online resources for some unknown reason. As the trial moves forward, we may see something happen on the Twitter front or we may have to wait until the Mayor’s next trial on perjury charges later this year.

It is a new frontier for courtroom reporting with modern technology. Cellphones have been an issue for years now, with most jurisdictions cracking down heavily on people whose phones ring in the courtroom. I was considering hanging around Courthouse East for at least one day of the trial but figured that I wouldn’t be allowed to tweet via my Blackberry in the courtroom and I prefer liveblogging to tweeting from live events anyway. With those expectations, I decided to not even try to go.

I remember when tweeting started last week there was even an impression by some of a ban on tweeting and everyone assumed all of the tweeting was going to take place in the hallways or outside. As it became evident updates were being posted from inside the courtroom, there was never an update about any restrictions or regulations on the practice. If I were covering the trial as a member of the media under the circumstances detailed above, I would probably be tweeting. Until someone gets told not to, I expect the tweeting to continue and I also expect everyone to stop pretty quickly if the Judge gives the order.

If you want to follow the updates from Twitter feeds covering the trial (including those who aren’t using the #dixontrial hashtag), I have a post up at Inside Charm City with the updates.

IMPORTANT UPDATE
Since posting this I received a link to the media protocol put out for this trial. Item 13 relates to the use of phones in the courthouse and it is reportedly being ignored completely in the press aisles. I’ve also heard that Item 17 on the rules bans food and drink but that people who can’t do without their Starbucks have it with them in the courtroom every morning. I’m trying to get the link to work or get a copy of the file that loads faster.

As far as this goes, the Baltimore Sun is indeed following proper protocol. It just seems odd that the Judge has so little control over his courtroom that he hasn’t cracked down on it yet. Maybe he doesn’t want negative media attention.

Update 2: One thing I didn’t think about. The protocols specifically refer to 100 feet of Courtroom 230. Is that where the trial is still ongoing? The jury selection was moved to another courtroom due to heat issues in the original courtroom that resulted in the collapse of an alternate juror. This means little or nothing in my opinion, but some legal person might look at it with a little more scrutiny.

Update 3
I received the following email from Justin Fenton of the Sun:

Just dropping a friendly note; kinda bewildered how my exchange with Rob Whelan was taken out of context as evidence of some sort of Twitter feud. I am not covering the trial but was enjoying Whelan’s tweets and decided to point some of my followers to them. With our social networking push, we routinely link to other news sources and blogs, so there’s nothing new there. Because I’ve had deputies threaten me over phone use in a courtroom, I made a joke about “follow them till their phones are snatched.” But at the end of the day, I’ve got nothing to do with coverage of this news event, so please don’t tie what I said into any evidence of a “feud” or “internecine conflict.”

I’ve gone back and added content inside brackets in the original post that indicates Fenton denies our original sentence that the exchange between him and Whelan “may be evidence” of some sort of feud over Twitter among reporters at the Courthouse. As Fenton says above, he isn’t covering the trial. I went back and bolded the word “may” that was originally in there to emphasize I didn’t say that it was definite proof. The exchange of tweets happened at the time I was writing this post originally and was going back through a lot of other stuff related to this topic on Twitter Search and other places so I may not have quite gotten the context Fenton meant for his tweets.

Fenton’s original tweet posted above didn’t raise much of an alarm to me, but Whelan’s response asking about everyone from the Sun being worked up over the matter did catch my eye. This information matched everything else I’d been told from other sources today about the reaction inside the courtroom from reporters with the Sun. Fenton hasn’t been there and that definitely rules him out. Taking him at his word that he was just joking around removes his tweets from from evidence of an internecine feud, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t any animosity between reporters from different media outlets over the Twitter issue at trial.

One last update: The Baltimore Sun has now created a Twitter list with people who are in the courtroom tweeting on it.

Related posts:

1. Twitter Narcissism
2. Murder conviction thrown out over juror’s Wikipedia query