Help or hindrance? An exploration of how criminal trials and legal professionals are depicted in live blogs published on news websites

Live blogging from criminal trials enables journalists to publish immediate depictions of interactions and individuals in intimate detail on news websites, thus opening up legal proceedings to a wider audience beyond the courtroom walls. Whilst this form of reporting may enable a higher degree of insight into the legal sphere thereby promoting the promise of open justice - meaning that legal procedures and documents are accessible and transparent as is central to our democracy - this contemporary digital practice entails currently unexplored risks.

As our understanding of society is shaped by mediated portrayals (Strömbäck 2008; Schulz 2004), what is portrayed, who is portrayed, and how trials and their participants are portrayed impact on how we make sense of criminal trials and its actors. A study exploring live blogging from courtrooms is thus an important gap in the research to be filled as the novelty, immediacy and intimacy of live blogging has important consequences for those being depicted as well as how we understand the criminal courts. For instance, there is a risk that live blogs shine a spotlight on certain types of crime and legal professionals along with certain types of interactions that do not give a representative picture of criminal trials. Rather than increasing understanding of legal proceedings, these live reports thus risk instead leaning towards entertaining the readers, rather than educating. Furthermore, the risk of journalistic errors may be higher when publication occurs in the blink of an eye. The combination of immediacy, intimate detail and the quest for readership warrants exploration. In short, do live blogs help or hinder our understanding of criminal trials and the legal professionals working within?