Reporters Exhaust All Efforts in Coverage of Enron Trial

By Vandana Sinha
March 20, 2006 03:03 PM

The mega-trial of Enron Corp. executives demands one major requirement of the reporters covering it: energy.

As the proceedings drag from days into months, newspaper reporters find themselves competing with local bloggers and national correspondents to cover one of the highest-profile business trials so far this century.

It's nothing short of exhausting, says Mary Flood, a legal reporter for the Houston Chronicle. After filing multiple stories and contributing to the trial blog each day, Flood says a clear head and sharp eye are keys to keeping coverage straight - and ahead of the competition.

In the era of online alerts and 24-7 news tickers, that often means topping the next-day story with a second-day lede, one that summarizes and analyzes rather than simply recaps and paraphrases.

"I'm trying to pick one theme for the day," Flood says. "I'm trying to spend a lot more time synthesizing at the end of the day."

Some of that synthesis takes place with a colleague during the lunch break. Or during Flood's wrap-up interviews for the local television station at the end of the day, forcing her to summarize on her feet. Others can talk through that theme and analysis with an editor.

But the last place to look is in the competition. While that rivalry and variety is healthy - Flood calls 10 different ledes from the same story "fabulous" - concentrate on what you perceive from the trial as most important to your readership.

"Follow your own instinct," Flood says. "What you bring to the table. That's what you owe your readers."

No doubt, that advice is easy to prescribe, and tough to swallow, especially when the courtroom is crowded with more reporters and publications than perhaps any other corporate trial in recent history. But that's what will define your coverage for your readers, giving them no reason to turn to any of those other reporters or publications for their daily Enron intake.

Even at the Houston Chronicle, Flood's lone presence in the courtroom grew to three or four reporters covering the trial day in and day out. Flood sits on a courtroom bench, while some of her colleagues retire to the overflow room, watching the proceedings on monitors.

Their assignment is clear: Cover the news, but find the color. The latter makes them act as more stenographer than reporter at times, as they reveal entire blocks of conversational testimony, or note when Ken Lay made eye contact with the jurors or repeat Sherron Watkins' discovery that others nicknamed her "buzzsaw."

The destination for those stories is a daily blog, updated more than a dozen times a day. It gives readers a near front-bench seat inside the courtroom. But for the reporters, it takes an around-the-clock use of their five senses and a mind-numbing attention to detail.

"Though the rest of the courtroom seems pretty interested in Sherron Watkins' chatty testimony, one member of the jury panel appears to be losing interest," Flood writes in one blog posting a little after noon on March 15. "A young woman who sits near the audience side of the jury, has with increasing frequency looked away from witnesses and documents in the last few days. During both the testimony of Watkins and Vince Kaminski, the woman is often watching the audience and sometimes appears to be talking to another panel member about what she sees."

It's information that rarely finds its way into a regular story, but still has the power to hook readers. It's information that Flood, in past trials, used to scribble down in her notebook and later argue unsuccessfully to editors not to cut from her copy. Now, such colorful descriptions and offbeat observations go to feed the very hungry blog.

"Human things happen in a courtroom. Funny things happen in a courtroom, and I can never get that into a story that's 12 or 15 inches," Flood says. In the blog, "I've written about the binders. I've written about the legal pads. I've written about the jury's wardrobe. I've written about how Jeff Skilling crosses his legs.

"I think about the reader who just obsessively and voraciously wishes he was sitting there too," she adds. "What would they want to know?"

But combine that with covering the actual news from the trial each day, and it's no easy task. "This is taxing my brain. This is hard," says Flood, a Harvard Law School graduate. "My head feels like it's going to explode."

She says she often finds her best fixes for staying focused before she ever enters either courtroom or newsroom. Each morning, she pops in an exercise video and each afternoon, she gets diet-friendly meals delivered. She gets a good night's sleep before each hard day's work.

She can't afford the risks otherwise. She's already seen one reporter faint, hitting her eye on the wall as she fell. She's watched others work until they're out sick for weeks. In a marathon trial such as this, Flood says, reporters must pay just as much attention to their own health and energy as they do to the testimony and verdicts.

"These are very, very long days."

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism