Published June 16, 2010

WBUR has won a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant for “Order in the Court 2.0,” a project that aims to bring transparency to the judicial branch through new media.

My boss, John Davidow, the executive editor of wbur.org, wants to turn a local courtroom into a digital laboratory, with the goal of modernizing the standards for electronic newsgathering in courts.

The Nieman Journalism Lab wrote up the idea:

Davidow said the court system has, by and large, continued to operate under the same video and audio recording standards it adopted in the 1970s and 1980s.

“The courts have sort of gone further and further (away) from the public and public access. In the old days, they were built in the center of town,” he told me. “The community was able to walk into the courts and see what was going on. Modern life has done away with that. The bridge that was going in between the courts and the public was the media. The media has just less resources.”

[…]

The test kitchen is the Quincy District Court here in Massachusetts, a courthouse Davidow described as ideal: Its chief judge is open to the idea, and the courthouse has a tradition of dabbling in new technologies. It’s also one of the busiest courthouses in the state, so it should also serve as a good model for even large courthouses.

Knight awarded the prize today at MIT as part of its News Challenge, which is an incubator for new ideas in journalism.