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Playing catch-up with legal-reporting news

By Mark Obbie

A few brief updates on previously blogged stories that advanced while I was away:

• The New York Sun's Josh Gerstein travels to California to cover the hearing that he wrote about earlier involving a leak investigation and Washington Times reporter William Gertz (here's my earlier post on his reporting, plus a folo he did). Turns out that AG Mukasey isn't journalists' white knight after all, though it's a bit speculative (Gerstein writes that "it would appear" that Mukasey has authorized a grand jury subpoena for Gertz). Kudos to Gerstein and the Sun for covering yet another legal assault on independent legal reporting in the shield-less federal courts.
• One of the nation's most experienced and accomplished legal reporters, the Chicago Tribune's Maurice Possley, took a buyout and left with some depressingly frank talk about the probable fate of enterprising public-service journalism. Romenesko posted Possley's goodbye memo lamenting the gutting of his great paper. And NPR Day to Day's Alex Chadwick interviewed Possley afterward, where he decried the "flow of institutional memory" out the door in successive waves of layoffs. Possley reported and wrote (as part of a team usually) many of the Trib's groundbreaking reports on wrongful convictions and prosecutorial misconduct.
• Steve Fromm is the new National Law Journal editor in chief, replacing Rex Bossert. Good to see a deserving veteran work his way up to the top job at that weekly. The NLJ is owned by Incisive Media, the new and awfully generic-sounding name for American Lawyer Media. Maybe the name sounds better when uttered in a British accent.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).