Kirkendall tracks Skilling appeal (updated)
Local blog readers surely know that area attorney Tom Kirkendall's blog frequently offers an alternative perspective on business risk and the criminalization of business, resisting the easy populist critiques that grace so many newspaper pages.
Although he has recently been on a reduced blogging schedule, Kirkendall over the last week and a half has had some excellent blog posts (here, here, and here) on Jeffrey Skilling's appeal to the Fifth Circuit, even going so far as to obtain and post legal documents from the proceedings.
Indeed, it appears that one Chronicle reporter is even making use of Kirkendall's research (without any attribution or even a thank you, as far as we know):
The Chronicle's Kristen Hays, who is the only mainstream media reporter who I know of following this story, has an article on the Skilling brief here (the Chronicle story links to the copy of the Skilling supplemental brief that I bookmarked in Adobe Acrobat to facilitate ease of review; the Skilling supplemental brief on file with the Fifth Circuit is not bookmarked).
It's good that the Chronicle reporter is reading Kirkendall (and getting an alternative perspective on the matter), but the reporter really should be obtaining these primary documents herself, and not simply downloading and posting the ones that Kirkendall obtains (and modifies for easier reading). Even if they're not as important as party pics!
UPDATE (03-17-2008): Chronicle business editor Laura Goldberg emails that reporter Kristen Hays received the PDF copy of the Skilling brief via email from a defense attorney in another Enron case at 6:58 pm Friday, and that it was later posted online with the accompanying story. Goldberg further asserts that the reporter did not see Kirkendall's posting on the matter until Saturday.
UPDATE 2 (03-17-2008): I thanked Goldberg for her clarification, but also suggested that the Chronicle might want to track down the official Fifth Circuit PDF post-haste, as the bookmarking (which is not as comprehensive in the official PDF available from the Fifth Circuit clerk) suggests the PDF posted by the Chronicle is almost certainly the one modified by Kirkendall. In any case, journalists should obtain and work with official, primary documents whenever possible. Had Kirkendall inadvertently changed the brief substantively with Adobe Acrobat, it could have been embarrassing for the newspaper to be working from that copy and not the official one available from the Fifth Circuit clerk.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 03/16/08 10:44 PM | Print |
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