University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository
Abstract
Several years ago, I was a guest speaker for a media and law class at San Jose State University, volunteering my expertise as a legal journalist with a couple decades under my belt of covering courts and law. As I went through my usual dialogue, describing some of the newfound challenges of being a journalist in this brave new digital world, one of the students piped in about Twitter, which at the time was an emerging phenomenon that I frankly considered a mind-numbing threat to intelligent reporting with the shelf life of the Pet Rock (an obsolete cultural reference that can easily be Googled). This young student assured me that I needed to get plugged into Twitter, that it would help sell my “brand” of legal journalism and, as I recall vividly, that I would regret failing to jump on this Twitterverse bandwagon. I brushed off the idea, giving my reasons for moving in a different direction and assuring this group of young, aspiring journalists that this hired gun had no good use for Twitter. I finished up my speech, heading back to my office confident that I owned the proper, time-tested recipe for how to cover the very important institutions of the judiciary and justice system at large. Without Twitter, or its il
