Court Coverage – From “The Front Page” To The Internet

By Ted Gest >>

In the fast-paced media environment of 2025, how has news coverage of the courts evolved since the classic portrayal of “The Front Page”? The Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur drama in the 1920s was set in the press room of Chicago’s criminal courts building, where cigar-chomping, card-playing reporters phoned in sensational stories about local crime cases.

Things had not changed much by the 1970s. As a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter just out of journalism school, I told my editors that I was interested in covering legal issues.

In practice, this meant working as a “rewrite” person, putting together stories called in by two men who covered often-complex cases from the federal and local courts. It was a terrible system in the days before the internet, with much of the nuance lost in the retelling.

One Friday afternoon, I was excited to get an assignment to take over for our federal court reporter and watch the end of that week’s testimony in a major ongoing trial. Peering into the courtroom, I was surprised that he was nowhere in sight.

I made my way to the press room, a smaller version of the one in the “Front Page,” where I found reporters for the Post-Dispatch, the old Globe-Democrat, and several federal marshals partying with drinks from a liquor cabinet.

After joining the festivities for a while, I asked the Post-Dispatch reporter, a grizzled veteran named Ed James, what we should do to cover the big trial? No problem, he said. We’ll ask the judge.

Sure enough, we went down the hall to the chambers of U.S. District Judge Roy Harper, who recounted some of that afternoon’s testimony. That was the basis of the next day’s story.

As poor as our journalism was that day, it was nothing compared to what happened on April 14, 1970.

As happened almost daily, the city editor transferred to me a call from James to hear his version of that day’s events. He said he had a good story. A judge on his beat had been named to the Supreme Court.

I figured that he must be joking. Most of his offerings were barely worth a few paragraphs, a format we called a “five head” for the headline’s type size.

This story turned out to be a shocker. President Richard Nixon that day nominated Judge Harry Blackmun of the St. Louis-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to the high court after the Senate had rejected two Nixon nominees.

Blackmun was based in Minnesota but was in St. Louis that day to hear arguments in cases. James spoke to him but was able to get only a dull statement that Blackmun was pleased to be appointed. We completely failed to produce a good story that we could have had exclusively.

I was only 23 years old, but I approached the city editor and complained about the obvious: this was a terrible way to cover a national story. Could I take over the court beat and do a much better job?

It took two years. James retired and I started covering federal courts and law enforcement on May 1, 1972, coincidentally the day long-time FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died. My first story was to get the reaction of local agents, who could only praise their controversial boss.

To avoid a repetition of the Blackmun debacle, I made it my business to get to know every judge, prosecutor and other major players in the St. Louis justice system.

It paid off, when judges and lawyers tipped me off to good stories that a reporter could get only by prowling the courthouse.

A half century later, media coverage of the courts nationwide is a mixed picture. Many major newspapers still employ reporters like me in the 1970s who spend their days exploring the nooks and crannies of courthouses, coming up with compelling stories about fascinating criminal cases and multimillion dollar civil disputes.

In other areas, local journalism has eroded as newspapers have cut back on their staffs or shut down entirely. (Most court coverage has been rooted in print journalism, as broadcasters typically cover only major cases, in large part because courtroom cameras remain limited.)

Newspapers forced to trim their staffs often have combined the police and court beats, meaning that courts get short shrift, with stories only about the filings of new cases or the verdicts in old ones.

Sean O’Sullivan is president of the Conference of Court Public Information Officers, whose members answer questions from the media.

He says court reporters these days “are not working at the same level they did previously. Years ago, you may have had reporters who covered courts exclusively and exhaustively. They would regularly dig into cases and attend trials from start to finish. They would generally know the law and the court system

“Now it is more typical that courts are just one among many beats a reporter covers, or the reporter is simply general assignment, and they are focused on getting the result rather than the trial process. And many times, when the reporter comes to cover a court event it may be the first time they set foot in the courthouse.”

Another perspective on how things have changed comes from Peter Benitez, a former St. Louisan who served as New York City’s criminal justice coordinator in the 1980s and later as a trial judge. Benitez says that good reporting used to be done “by journalists who were specifically assigned to a courthouse beat. In order to develop contacts and get a story, they sought to be honest and accurate about their reporting.  Also, they wanted to educate their readers about criminal justice matters, notmatters not just write a newspaper story, as they knew that the general public was not particularly knowledgeable about the law or policing.

“Now I think criminal justice reporting has changed.  It is not as accurate or thorough as it used to be.  Often it is simply superficial. The same can be said for reporting on all court related matters.” Because of cutbacks in newsroom staffing, he says, “those who cover the courts are not dedicated to that area of journalism. They are just pulled from the staff of reporters for that story and then go to some other story. Accordingly, they don’t have the contacts that court focused journalists used to have and don’t have the time nor interest in really getting into a particular issue.”

Jesse Rutledge of the National Center for State Courts, which handles media inquiries nationwide, believes that the decline is particularly apparent in “medium-sized” areas, with large newspapers continuing their extensive coverage and small-town media closely tracking local cases.

One partial replacement for vanishing local court reporters is Courthouse News Service, which hires reporters in major cities to report for what it immodestly calls “probably the best news site in the world.”

Editor Bill Girdner says that formerly robust local court reporting ranks have been “decimated” as many economically-strained newspapers have largely eliminated full-time court beats.

This means that the news media miss details of many legal proceedings and fail to give the public much understanding of how the courts are operating in their localities.

The Berkeley Judicial Institute at the University of California offers a wide range of programs, including many on the media, to promote judicial ethics and independence. Its director, former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, believes that a general “lack of understanding of the functions of courts” has helped produce a “decline in public trust and confidence” in the judicial system.

Big cases still get plenty of coverage: the New York Times boasted that it had 10 reporters covering aspects of Donald Trump’s so-called hush money case.)

As a result of the concentration on high-profile cases, Americans get a skewed impression of what happens in courts. Based on what appears on television news programs or newspaper front pages, it might seem that courts handle only grisly murder cases or multi-million dollar verdicts in personal injury cases

In reality, the vast majority of cases are resolved by guilty pleas or settlements, which might be very newsworthy but take some digging by reporters to tell the whole story.

As skimpy as court reporting has become in many U.S. cities, there are several countervailing factors that have helped sustain a steady diet of stories.

The main one is the growth of the internet, which allows reporters to see court decisions at their newsroom desks and rarely enter the court building.

The Missouri court system, for example, offers a website called case.net, where the public can check on the status of individual cases.

The main state court in St. Louis, known as the 22^nd Judicial Circuit, also has its own website, which lists all of the court’s judges and provides information on any common questions, such as how jury service works and how to file a divorce case.

There also is a growth of specialized websites such as Courthouse News Service, Bloomberg Law, Law360 and others, although they cater mainly to lawyers and consumers who do online searches that lead them to these sites.

A new website called State Court Report, sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school, covers “legal news, trends, and cutting-edge scholarship … from a nationwide network of academics, journalists, judges, and practitioners with diverse perspectives and expertise.”

Another development that helps fill the gap in news coverage is that more courts and legal agencies now have public relations employees, who provide reporters with summaries of court cases and tips on stories.

In St. Louis, for example, two former Post-Dispatch court reporters fill such jobs, Joel Currier at the St. Louis Circuit Court and Robert Patrick at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which handles all Justice Department criminal and civil cases.

While the Post-Dispatch still has a full-time court reporter, Katie Kull, holding the equivalent of my old job, she is able to get news of court decisions online and from the public relations representatives, neither of which was possible back in the 1970s and earlier decades. Another reporter tracks courts in St. Louis County.

Kull says she also has some time to do “enterprise” stories that are not based on the daily news flow of cases.

For example, last summer she traveled with a photographer to California to tell the story of Christopher Dunn, a St. Louis man who spent 34 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder.

Learning opportunities for court reporters are available but sporadic. The National Judicial College in Reno, Nev., formerly operated a National Center for Courts and Media, which sponsored periodic programs for legal journalists, but the center closed more than a decade ago when its foundation funding ran out.

Since 2006, Loyola Marymount University Law School in Los Angeles has run a yearly four-day course for about 30 legal journalists, and some local courts and bar associations have similar programs. The Loyola course includes a wide range of legal subjects beyond coverage of courts.

Fogel’s Berkeley Judicial Institute offers online programs on court and media issues, in large part to encourage judges to talk to reporters, which many judges are reluctant to do for fear of violating judicial ethics rules.

While it would be improper for a judge to disclose details of pending cases that are not available to the public in court filings, it is permissible for judges to give journalists off-the-record explanations of how the legal process works, and some local reporters take advantage of that.

Barbara Peck, who teaches judges at the National Judicial College, tells them that “the reporters coming into a courtroom today are likely not a traditional beat reporter covering the courts. Even 20 years ago, judges would see the same reporters, who were well-versed in court procedure and terminology, on a regular basis. But today, it may be a different reporter even through the course of a single trial and the media who is there may not be attached to a major media outlet.”

Peck advises judges in cases covered by the media “slow down, explain what is happening in open court, use decorum orders to set expectations related to coverage, write orders in plain English and use a spokesperson or PIO to help explain the different stages of a court procedure, like the difference in a first-appearance, arraignment and status hearing. Everyone benefits when the media coverage is accurate.”

Some court systems are taking steps to increase public understanding of their operations without depending on the media. Rutledge of the National Center for State Courts cites an Indiana “Appeals on Wheels” program in which judges hear arguments on cases at colleges and schools and later answer questions from the audience about how the judiciary works.

With thorough court reporting at the regional and local levels sparse or nonexistent what is the public missing when journalists rarely set foot in courthouses?

The main thing is personal contact with judges, court officials and lawyers, which can help them explain to their audiences how the legal system really works.

Because they do not usually produce dramatic stories about cases, most journalists do not report on a major development in recent decades, the growth of “problem solving” courts that specialize in hearing cases involving categories of defendants such as drug addicts and veterans.

Even less attention is paid to municipal courts, where the average citizen is most likely to appear to respond to driving and housing violations, among other common infractions.

It took the nationally publicized killing of teenager Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson in 2014 to prompt a U.S. Justice Department report in 2015 that found unconstitutional practices, conflicts of interest, and other illegal conduct involving the city’s court system and police.

Between 2010 and 2014, Ferguson issued 90,000 citations and summonses, only 21,000 involving residents of the city.

While Ferguson ended up with plenty of public attention, the same cannot be said of many local courts around the nation.

Despite the clear decline in news media court coverage overall, there are rare examples of excellent stories. One such effort appeared in CT Insider, a website featuring material from 23 daily and weekly newspapers in the Hearst Connecticut Media Group.

In February, the Insider published an exhaustive look at long delays in the disposition of criminal cases in the state that “traumatize and frustrate many victims and can weaken the prosecution’s case.” The website spent over 20 hours observing court proceedings on six separate occasions, watching case after case being continued to later dates. Several cases had been in court more than 30 times.

People interested in the courts can sometimes find such illuminating coverage, but local journalism exploring the nuts and bolts about how the judiciary really operates remains something of a hit-and-miss enterprise across the nation.

Ted Gest covered federal and state courts in St. Louis for the Post-Dispatch between 1972 and 1977. He later covered legal affairs, including the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts nationwide, for U.S. News and World Report magazine between 1981 and 1996. He now edits a daily news digest, Crime and Justice News.

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