More than three years ago, in North Idaho, three bodies were discovered in a home. The subsequent search for two other children missing from the house ended a couple weeks later, on July 2, 2005, when Shasta Groene, then 8 years old, was found at a restaurant in Coeur D’Alene in the company of a convicted sex offender named Joseph Edward Duncan III. Shasta’s brother, Dylan, was found dead soon after at a remote campsite in Montana.

While news of Duncan’s trial, which is just underway, isn’t grabbing national attention, the proceedings are of intense interest to those who live in the region, which covers not only Idaho but parts of Eastern Washington, including Spokane. The local newspapers—the Spokesman Review in Spokane and the Idaho Statesman, have reporters in the courtroom. Nothing unusual there, except that the papers also have staff members covering the trial via Twitter.

The appeal of Twitter for such coverage isn’t hard to understand. If you can’t be glued to your TV during courtroom hours (assuming the trial is being televised gavel-to-gavel), but your interest in the case can’t be satisfied with brief top-of-the-hour radio news reports and waiting for the detailed account on the newspaper website is just too excruciating, moment-by-moment updates on Twitter can provide you with the information you want.

The two newspapers are taking dramatically different approaches to their coverage. The Idaho daily is tweeting whenever there is new content on the newspaper’s website, with a typical tweet looking like this:

These are jumbled up with all the other Statesman coverage, nearly all of which feature links to the full newspaper reports.

The Spokesman Review, on the other hand, is tweeting directly from the courtroom with no other coverage to interrupt the flow. Refreshing the view on the Review’s Twitter page almost always reveals new information. Today’s coverage so far (it’s still mid-morning in Idaho) looks like this:

Access to the Spokesman Review’s Twitter feed is highlighted on a page on the newspaper’s website that provides an overview of the case, including a timeline, background, and an archive of coverage, multimedia, information on how to help the surviving victim, and PDFs of official legal documents. In addition to Twitter, the paper has also launched a blog “featuring longer updates,” according to the paper.

So far, only 41 people are following the coverage on Twitter, not surprising since it only began yesterday and Spokane-Idaho aren’t generally perceived as hotbeds of early-adopter social media behavior. But as buzz builds, I’m sure more locals will discover Twitter simply because it allows them to stay right on top of courtroom proceedings and the ranks of followers will swell.

It’s also interesting to note that a couple of other news outlets—the Quad City Times (in Washington State), the Oregonian, and the Knoxville News Sentinel—are among those following the Spokesman Review’s Twitter coverage. Presumably, they’re developing their own reports based on the Spokesman’s tweets, which are fulfilling the role of a pool reporter.

The Spokesman’s efforts raise several thoughts, in no particular order:

• Journalism isn’t dead, but it will evolve. The continuum from tweets to satisfy the need for timely updates to blogs for more detailed observation to the full-blown report on the newspaper website provides readers with a range of coverage that is particularly useful in emotional cases like this that capture attention. And the print version remains viable for those who want to read the detailed version while one hand clasps the strap on the bus on the way to work.
• Aggregation—such as the Spokesman Reviews “Duncan Investigation Ongoing Coverage” page—afford mainstream media additional opportunities to be relevant.
• Anybody in the courtroom could send tweets on the proceedings, but professional journalists bring experience and understanding of what’s important to the table. There is value in paying attention to somebody who has spent a lot of time covering trials, and who strives for objectivity, as opposed to someone who just happens to have managed to snag a seat in the courtroom. (Besides, the reporter will be on site every day, but casual courtroom visitors’ ability to get a seat will be hit-and-miss at this kind of highly visible trial.)
• I’ll be surprised if this account isn’t followed by thousands of people as awareness of its availability increases. Word of Twitter limits deal with the number of people you’re following, not how many are following you (and even that is being disputed by Twitter), so accessibility to this information shouldn’t be an issue. But any thought of limits should be weighed against the fact that Twitter has moved well beyond personal updates to become a full-blown news resource.
• Mainstream media isn’t the only sector that can take a lesson from the Statesman Review’s coverage. What issues does your business (or client) face? Can you set up a page that aggregates all information about that topic, a blog that provides ongoing reports, and a Twitter stream that keeps your most interested publics up to date moment by moment?