The hollowing-out of local press and news agency court reporting over recent years has meant “hundreds of stories left untold” according to a recent study.
The solution, according to veteran journalist and independent journalism campaigner Mike Leidig, the vice chairman of NAPA (National Association Of Press Agencies), is AI.
He argues that while it shouldn’t be allowed to replace reporters, the AI revolution has the potential to transform journalism for the better if it is allowed into the courts.
In this exclusive article for HTFP, Mike explains why AI and court reporting could prove to be the perfect synergy.
In the British legal system, justice is not only done. It also needs to be seen to be done.
In short, the public needs to know that when a person or organisation does something wrong, they will face both punishment and public exposure before friends, family and colleagues.
Yet as the 2019 Cairncross Review into Journalism showed, coverage of criminal trials in the UK fell dramatically between 2012-16, when court reporting dropped by 30 and 40 percent in the national and regional press respectively.
A University of the West of England study of a single magistrate’s court the same year found “hundreds of potential stories left untold” after observing proceedings for a single month, where researchers saw only one working journalist during all that time.
A few years ago I attended a meeting of industry insiders at the Telegraph offices in London to discuss court reporting. It included John Whittingdale, who as the government’s media minister had come up with a proposal to get the BBC to give some of the licence payers’ money to fund local reporting. I told him it was just a sticking plaster, and as predicted it has done nothing to halt the decline in court coverage, which has continued unabated.
The UK ground network of court reporters was provided by local media and local news agencies, and I worked for both, covering the magistrates’ courts for the Chatham News and the Crown Court in Cardiff for Wales News. In between there were also the coroner’s courts or tribunals on immigration issues or employment matters to be covered.
That experience taught me court reporting is infinitely salvageable and self-financing. A single story I wrote where a judge had decided to free a schoolboy who raped a schoolgirl on the condition, he paid GBP 500 for her to go on a good holiday ran on the front pages of the UK media for a week.
The fees from that alone covered my salary for six months and shows that we need to stop looking for government handouts or miracle cures and embrace the real opportunities to do something about it.
Three key issues need to be tackled: rebuilding the network of reporters, paying them, and allowing access to and automation of many of the mundane parts of the job.
To start off with, you can’t just put anybody in the court and expect them to produce a report, it would be a recipe for disaster. I know one case where a green reporter in a crowded courtroom sparked a mistrial when he sat down on the jury benches.
The internet is awash with news professionals striving to build social media profiles or publish anything of relevance on platforms like Medium, where they will struggle for even a handful of readers. Access to a byline on a story in one of the world’s biggest news organisations would be a massive incentive to put professionals back in courtrooms.
Of course, they need to be paid, but as nobody is stunting up money to fund it, you need to cover the shortfall between starting to build the network and then sharing out the revenue, and this could be managed by a cryptocurrency with a liquidity pool funded by the commercial use of the content including newspaper sales and managed by a not-for-profit NGO.
Revenue at the start, while limited as the market develops, should be enough to pay professional editors in local media and local news agencies that guarantee the accuracy of content from the teams they manage.
The first arrivals could bring others under their wing and carefully monitor what they do in the same way traditional journalism training used to do, and so the network would grow organically without a penny of public funding.
Instead of treating AI with fears over job losses, it should be embraced for allowing court reporting to evolve from its current labour-intensive model.
There were more than a dozen courts at Cardiff’s crown court and I could not cover everything. Some cases demanded a presence on the reporter’s bench all day, which meant other cases passed unseen.
If transcripts from proceedings were made available and could be worked on with AI it would simplify the process enormously, allowing journalists to cover far more cases and more importantly, look at the story behind the cases. Only a human reporter can do the human side of the job, speaking to the people involved as only a person can, and focusing on the public interest stories behind the court reports.
I’m not ignoring AI’s tendency to make up facts and obviously, reporters will need to check the source, yet nevertheless, we only solve these problems by taking the first step. AI outlines can always be cross-checked with original transcripts and comments can be sought for further clarification.
But all of the above will not work without the willingness of publishers to take the content as well. The journalist who spends all day in court needs at the very least to see a story in print as do those who support them by providing information and comments.
There are a lot of things wrong with the world, and putting the spotlight on some of those on trial is a major step in the right direction. As I write this, a story in the Times talks of a record high in the number of drunk driving cases. With few of those caught ever having to really face the consequences through public exposure, its hardly a surprise.
Too many people think it’s money that makes the world go round, but my experience has been money is desired because it gives a reputation. Take away a reputation earned by cheating and deception and all the money in the world will not make a difference.
This is the complete opposite of Europe where no matter what you do, privacy laws mean the guilty are never fully exposed. What the UK has in its justice system is something unique, yet we are not seeing the benefit of it: Justice is happening on inside, but without coverage, we’re losing something very special on the outside and diminishing the real power of the courts to deter crime.
* Mike Leidig is vice-chairman of the National Association of Press Agencies responsible for special projects, and also founder of the not-for-profit community interest company NewsX CIC, working on ways to make independent journalism sustainable and scalable. Starting his career as a reporter for Associated Kent Newspapers (AKN), he has been a freelance journalist since 1995 and founded several news wire agencies, including CEN and Newsflash.