The Evolving Newsroom

So many half-written blogposts, so little time. Here are a few Twitter-related things that have been kicking around.

US journalist Ron Sylvester has been tweeting reports from court for the Wichita Eagle in Kansas for some time. Now, according to law.com, there are more federal judges allowing trusted journalists to tweet from their courts too.

[Judge Tom Marten of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas] and [Judge Mark Bennett of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa] both allowed the coverage after the individual reporters approached them and asked about doing it.

Marten said he has known Ron Sylvester, the Wichita Eagle reporter Twittering from his courtroom, for years and respects his reporting, but would likely extend the same privilege to other reporters too. The judge said he was quickly able to overcome one defense lawyer’s concerns that jurors might breach court rules to view the reporting and be inappropriately swayed.

“You either trust jurors to honor the admonishment or not,” Marten said. “This was pretty much a nonissue. I don’t see any difference between this and a journalist sitting in there taking notes.”

Sylvester has also been allowed to send such messages during coverage of cases in Kansas state court trials. State courts also have a patchwork of policies with some, including Illinois, barring communication such as Twitter from a courtroom, and others, including New York, leaving such decisions up to individual judges.

Meanwhile, Twitter hit a tipping point in the past month or so as stories about it appeared in newspapers and TV bulletins around the world and brought the microblogging service onto the wider public’s radar.

Twitter’s traffic doubled last month, according to Silicon Alley Insider, and is likely to go supernova with the arrival of Oprah and people actors like Ashton Kutcher who is working his way towards the Guinness Book of Records with a  whopping 1 million+ followers.

Not far behind Ashton is an account called @cnnbrk which CNN has just bought for an undisclosed sum. Here’s Silicon Alley Insider again:

CNN confirms that it has has taken control of the @cnnbrk account — and its 944,000 followers. CNN didn’t disclose any financial details, but said it’s been working with previous owner James Cox on the account for more than two years.

This is no-brainer for CNN, and we hope they paid Cox a lot of money for the account he’s nurtured. By adding more stories to the feed — and links to CNN’s site — CNN.com could generate hundreds of thousands of extra pageviews per day. (CNN isn’t sure if it’s going to add links in the near-term.)

This spike in activity is no doubt great news for Twitter as it gears up to finally start monetising itas operation. But all the extra noise is starting to grate on early adopters who, anecdotally at least, are starting to look around for somewhere a little quieter to carry on their conversations.