XII
COURT REPORTING
Probably few classes of news stories present such a lack of uniformity and such a variety of treatments as the reports of court news. Legal stories belong to one of the few sorts of stories that do not tend to become systematized. But there is a reason for almost everything in a newspaper and there is also a reason for the freedom that reporters are allowed in reporting testimony. The reason in this case is probably in the fact that very rarely do two court stories possess the same sort of interest or the same news value.
We have seen that reports of speeches are printed in the daily press because our readers are interested in the content of the speech or in the man who uttered it. In the same way, our readers are interested in interviews because of the man who was interviewed, because of their content, or because of their bearing on some current event. On the other hand there is an infinite number of reasons why a court story is worth printing or why it may not be worth a line. Sometimes the interest is in the persons involved; sometimes in the significance of the decision. People may also be interested in a case because of its political or legal significance or merely because of the sensational testimony that is given. And again a very trivial case may be worth a large amount of space in the daily paper just because of its human interest—because of the pathos or humor that the reporter can bring into it. Thus the resulting reports are hard to classify. Each one depends on a different factor for its interest and each must be written in a different way so that its individual interest may be most effective. However there are general tendencies in the reporting of court news.
The news itself is comparatively easy to get. In a large city every court is watched every day by a representative of the press, either a reporter for an individual paper or for a city news gathering association. In some cities where there is no independent news gathering agency papers sometimes club together to keep one reporter at each court. The man who is on duty must watch all day long for cases that are of interest for one reason or another. Even with all this safeguarding sometimes an important case slips by the papers; often the reporter on duty considers of little interest a case that is worth columns when some paper digs into it. Every reporter however who is trying to do court reporting should learn the ordinary routine of legal proceedings; for example, the place and purpose of the pleas, the direct and cross examination of witnesses, and other legal business.
As we shall see when we begin to write court reports, it is necessary to exercise every possible trick to put interest into the story. In the actual court room all that relieves the dreary monotony of legal proceedings is an occasional bit of interesting testimony. And when the reporter tries to report a case he sometimes finds that interesting testimony is all that will lighten up the dull monotony of his story. Therefore while he is listening to a case he tries to get down verbatim a large number of the interesting questions and answers. Or if he is unable to be present he tries to get hold of the court stenographer's record to copy out bits of testimony for his account. Beyond this recording of testimony there is really little difficulty in court reporting except the difficulty of separating the interesting from the great mass of uninteresting matter.
As to the actual writing of the report of a legal trial, the one thing that the reporter must remember is that a case is seldom reported for the public's interest in the case itself. There is usually some other reason why the editor wants a half a column of it. That reason is the thing that the reporter must watch for and when he finds it he must make it the feature of his report to be embodied in the first line of the lead.
When we try to play up the most interesting feature of a court report we find that we must fall back upon the same beginnings that we used in reporting speeches and interviews. There are several possible ways of beginning such a story, depending upon the phase of the case or its testimony that is of greatest importance.
1. Name Beginning.—The proper name beginning is very common. It is always used when any one of prominence is involved in the story or when the name, although unknown, can be made interesting in itself—as in a human interest story. The name is usually made the subject of the verb testified, as in this lead: