Old media on the run at Old Bailey phone-hacking trial as Peter Jukes leads the new media way
It is not a coincidence that the traditional home of the London press, Fleet Street, is literally around the corner from the Old Bailey. News about crime, along with scandal and disaster, has always sold papers, and just like their predecessors today's journalists regularly attend London's central criminal court.
Reporter: Peter Jukes
The current phone-hacking case is no different in that sense, but what is different is that old media has been facing a constant challenge from a new media using the reach and immediacy of the internet to provide a different way of covering big trials. At one of the biggest trials in the country, bloggers and live tweeters have been given the access and facilities to report on events.
I meet one of the leading members of this new journalism, Peter Jukes, around the corner from the Old Bailey where we have both been covering the phone-hacking trial. Since the trial began, Jukes has been live tweeting events and publishing updates as soon as they happen.
Because of his lack of formal journalistic training, industry eyes were on Jukes as the trial kicked off, with a sense of expectation that he was bound to eventually break the rules on contempt of court or reporting restrictions, but half way through the trial even the most dismissive of critics have been silenced.
What many didn’t know was that Jukes has been working on this story for two years. He attended the pre-trial hearings and even wrote a book on the subject, The Fall of the House of Murdoch.
"I'm learning on the job," he admits. "All journalism is the first draft of history and subject to correction. I've made errors with names but there are people who correct me in a friendly manner, there have been no huge mistakes."
Despite the risks, Jukes staunchly defends live tweeting as a valuable way to report court proceedings. “People like the immediacy, it's like being there,” he explains. “You see the ebb and flow of the argument, like in a drama." Jukes also believes in live tweeting as a preferable alternative to any proposals for television coverage of court cases. "The focus is on evidence, not demeanour or spectacle," he argues, adding that the meticulous detail also informs the reader on court procedure. "It's a difference service that from other journalists," he says.
He has written over 200,000 words and made over a million keystrokes, despite not being a trained journalist. So what motivated him to throw himself head first into such a major story?
"Ever since I was 16 I wanted to be a journalist, or a lawyer," he says, "but when I went to university I became interested in drama."
Jukes went on to a successful career as a screenwriter for radio and TV, winning a Scottish BAFTA in 2006 for his screenplay for paranormal TV drama "Sea of Souls". However, he became unhappy with the standard of UK Television drama compared to American channels such as HBO and in 2009 wrote a highly critical article about UK TV in Prospect magazine. In terms of his TV career, Jukes jokes that it was "the longest suicide note in history".
After the phone-hacking trial started, Jukes hit the headlines after launching a crowdfunding campaign in response to the positive reaction from Twitter to his coverage. The premise was simple: if followers wanted him to carry on with his coverage for the duration of a trial set to last months, they had to pay him a wage.
That ultimatum worked and he has now raised over £20,000. When I asked Jules if that was how he’d always planned to do it, he laughed and told me he was originally going to be covering the case for an American website, the Daily Beast, but they only commissioned one article per week. "It wasn't planned, necessity was the mother of invention," he says.
His tweets are being archived and tagged in order to create an open source and searchable database of everything that happened in the case, and he suggests that his experience could inform a possible model for the future of journalism.
"Say a reporter wants to investigate X, he sets up a site and tells people what he is going to deliver, they choose whether or not to fund it,” he says. “Theoretically people become producers not just consumers of culture, the internet revolutionises distribution for online advocacy and citizen journalism."
One senior journalist once said to me that he "looked on the prospect of amateur court reporters with the same horror as the idea of amateur brain surgeons". Whatever the outcome of the phone-hacking trial, it is already clear that live reporting through twitter has not caused the disasters its critics predicted. It also appears there is a demand for the level of minute by minute detail Jukes provides, at least in a high profile case such as this. Whatever the future holds the advocates of more openness in reporting, the legal system should be grateful the first live tweeter was as articulate, diligent and passionate as Peter Jukes.