Blogging the Enron trial: Week one (updated)
The Chronicle has several staffers blogging the Enron trial, and early in the week, Dwight Silverman posted on the logistics of the blog coverage:
In addition to posting in the Enron: Trial Watch blog, [reporter Mary] Flood also is writing the main story for each morning's paper. Her blog posts are the starting point for what she crafts for the print edition.
Helping out are John Roper, who's physically sitting in the courtroom, and business writer Tom Fowler and state desk writer Mark Babineck working on additional stories. Any one of them could contribute to the trial blog as well.
The staffers are posting directly into our Movable Type blog software via WiFi, and when they're done, they flag editors here at the Chronicle. Online News Editor Dean Betz and Online Local News Editor Sylvia Wood are editing and approving the trial blog posts; I've been working Steffy's entries.
Judging from the spelling and other errors making it into the blog posts, the editing is not heavy-handed. And in this instance, that's good. Getting the information out in a timely manner is of greater value to news consumers than waiting for the cleaner, more sanitized, styleguide-perfect copy to come out in the next day's newspaper (or not to come out at all, in the case of much interesting information that might otherwise be struck for reasons of space or even the whims of print-version editors).
Another interesting aspect of the Enron blogging by Chronicle staffers is the difference in the blog posts of the straight news reporters and the opinion columnists. For example, both Mary Flood and Loren Steffy tend to report facts. But Steffy, an opinion columnist on the business pages, mixes in both facts and opinion/analysis in his blog posts.
Here's one example:
As testimony resumes this afternoon from Enron's former investor relations head Mark Koenig, it's clear what Koenig does and doesn't do for the prosecution's case. He is basically the beginning of the chain. To prove that Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling lied to investors, prosecutors first have to establish what investors were told.
Koenig's testimony doesn't show that Lay and Skilling were directly involved in created distorted numbers, merely that they were aware of the financial situation of the company and told investors something different. Koenig wasn't in the kitchen when the books were being cooked. He was more like the waiter, serving up the numbers for investors who had no idea what they were getting.
From here, I'd expect the prosecution to move back up the chain, showing how those numbers were compiled and baked, until they put the head chef, former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, on the stand.
And this example:
I've been a little surprised at how thin the defense arguments seem to be in these opening statements, but you have to hand it to Lay attorney Mike Ramsey. His folksy style seems to resonate with jurors. He has a delivery that's a little like being told stories by your grandfather. He uses phrases like "the cattle were restless" and "the odor of the wolf." Prosecutors seem to have the evidence on their side, but they don't have the style points.
And one more for good measure:
I don't know what Rebecca Smith did or didn't do, but I don't think Kenny Boy is going to beat this rap by trashing the press, revered tactic though it may be.
Both the straight-news trialblogging at Chron.com's Enron: Trialwatch blog and the news-opinion trialblogging at Loren Steffy's Full Disclosure blog represent interesting, evolutionary experiments in journalism. Here's hoping they can keep up the pace over the next few months, especially as national media lose interest and move on. The Chronicle really should own this story.
UPDATE (02-06-2006): "Cantankerous" Chron.com blogger Loren Steffy calls attention to this New York Times snippet on the Enron trialblogging.
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