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Norway's Drammens Tidende wins live court reporting appeal

Posted: 23/06/09 By: Laura Oliver

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An appeal by Norwegian newspaper Drammens Tidende and broadcaster NRK has overturned an earlier ruling by a Norwegian court to ban the use of reader comments on live court reporting, it was confirmed yesterday.

The media organisations objected to a regional court's ruling in May on coverage of a trial using CoveritLive (CiL).

Drammens Tidende was experimenting with allowing reader comments and questions on a liveblog of a criminal case.

But one day into the trial of a man accused of burning down five kindergartens in the local area, the paper's reporter was ordered to stop reporting using the tool with the dialogue function. The paper continued to file online and print reports, however.

The court was concerned the journalist could mislead readers or the information could be used by witnesses appearing in the trial going against a Norwegian legal principle of 'respect' in court, Geir Arne Bore, editor-in-chief of Drammens Tidende, told Journalism.co.uk.

But while it is in the court's power to decide if a trial is public or not, it is not up to the judge to decide how it is covered, he explained.

"The important thing with this decision is that the court can't reduce the use of social media. It's an editorial decision and not the court's decision," he said.

The paper did not show any disrespect in court and yesterday a higher court ruled that the principle of 'respect' could not be used to limit how the paper covered the story, explained Bore.

The appeal judges agreed that while there are rules in place to govern the use of photography in court and live radio broadcasting, the issue of live interaction with readers is not covered by the law.

According to Drammens Tidende's own reporting on the case [in Norwegian], the broadcaster and paper's owner, Edda Media, must cover the costs of the appeal case.

While Bore said the appeal victory sets an important precedent, he stressed that news organisations must find the right tool for covering each story.

Local interest in the story had prompted the paper to use CiL in this way and open it up to questions, having previously used the software to cover local council and political meetings.

"It's not certain that we will use CiL in every court case, because it's not always necessary. We have to see if this is the right way to give information to the public. In the most cases we will use more traditional storytelling forms," he said.

"It can sometimes be extremely boring reading CiL because a journalist's job is finding the most important thing. The liveblog pages don't allow for that, so it's a supplement to how we report.

"But dialogue and social media is vital for how we will develop the future of journalism. We are kind of experimenting and some of it we will laugh about in the future; but some of it we will think, this is better journalism and offers more value for readers."

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