folo

Well, when I scratched-and-whined at the DJournal’s door to see when they might be posting Patsy’s story on bloggers, their online editor Todd Vinyard kindly sent me a copy to post here, since he’s not planning to put it up on their own website. So here’s the whole thing:

Bloggers see boost in hits from bribery case
- None thinks anything they’ve done will imperil an impartial jury pool.
BY PATSY R. BRUMFIELD
Daily Journal

Blog host Lotus says she probably had as big a readership in Pakistan as she did in the U.S., before the judicial bribery case that ensnared famed Oxford lawyer Richard “Dickie” Scruggs.

The reason: Her blog, then at folo.us, was a news-following site, focusing on national and international stories, especially Iraq and Pakistan.

Today, at folo.us, she’s up to her elbows in developments as they occur in the legal issues, documents and developments in the drama surrounding Scruggs, his lawyer-son Zach and their legal associate Sidney Backstrom, who maintain they are innocent of trying bribe Circuit Judge Henry Lackey of Calhoun City.

Lotus, her Web name, is one of many bloggers following or reflecting news and information from the Oxford-based criminal case, set to go to trial March 31.

Overlawyered.com’s editor Walter Olson, headquartered in Chappaqua, N.Y., says he thinks Scruggs “is the most fascinating figure in the law today” and has been the force behind many of the most important lawsuits of the day.

Blogging about Scruggs is part of what he does as he writes about litigation issues. Scruggs has even spoken a few times at Olson’s Manhattan Institute think tank.

West Coast blogger David Rossmiller of insurancecoverageblog.com., whose main focus is on lawsuits and the insurance industry, says he’s written a lot about Scruggs because “it’s tough to ignore Katrina cases without talking about Dickie Scruggs.”

When Scruggs’ attorney, John Keker of San Francisco, asked Senior Judge Neal Biggers Jr. to move the bribery trial out of Mississippi because of “excessive publicity,” he cited blogs as a contributor to a potentially biased jury pool.

Biggers said no, even though he acknowledged that news reports about the case have been extensive. Problem was, Biggers said, Keker and other attorneys hadn’t shown him exactly how a jury pool had been affected.

As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs. Cyberjournalist.net more than two blogs are created every second of every day.

It’s impossible to know how many blogs have written about this case. If you go to www.google.com and search for blogs using the words “Richard Scruggs,” you’ll get nearly 5,000 mentions.

Djournal.com online editor Todd Vinyard says he sees spikes in readership when it carries Scruggs-related stories, and others in the online world report a similar jump.

“I just see myself as an aggregator,” said Alan Lange of Jackson, editor of yallpolitics.com. He got started about three years ago with a blog tracking the controversial Jackson mayor’s race. “The Scruggs issues have driven a lot of traffic to our site.”

Since late November when Scruggs and four others were indicted in the Lackey case, Lange said traffic to Y’all Politics has tripled.

Rossmiller doesn’t pay any attention to how many readers he’s got or what they’re most interested in.

He’s a practicing attorney who put his creativity into writing about insurance, copyrights and lawsuits.

“A lot of it has been about Dickie Scruggs” lately, he said about his blog, which started in January 2006. “He’s a very smart man, very creative with what he does.”

Traffic has been higher since Katrina, but the Scruggs coverage probably has boosted his readership 15-20 times higher, Rossmiller notes.

Lotus said she got interested, as a Mississippi native, when she blogged about then-Sen. Trent Lott’s surprise resignation announcement Nov. 26. The next day the FBI raided Scruggs’ Oxford law office, and the day after that he and four others were indicted, accused of conspiring to bribe Lackey in a legal-fees dispute case over Katrina settlements.

As she continued to add details to her blog, she noticed her traffic jump “like a shuttle launch,” she added.

It was clear many other people were interested, too – New York viewers are close second to Mississippians. Her readers hail from 37 counties.

On her blog, readers contribute, so Lotus frequently gets stories directly from Oxford.

Olson, who has written about litigation about 20 years and has been a blogger since 1999, says he understand the reasons for interest in the case: With huge settlements from asbestos and tobacco litigation, as well as Katrina verdicts, Scruggs has been at the center of perhaps the most massive litigation of all time.

None think that what they do has had a widespread impact upon a potential jury.

Rossmiller says he thinks the story “actually has been underpublicized.”

And the potential jury pool includes a whole host of people who have so much going on in their lives, their possibility for bias is small.

Says Y’all’s Lange, “My goal is not to be the first news on this – I just want to push it out there.”

Contact Patsy R. Brumfield at the Daily Journal at (662) 678-1596 or patsy.brumfield@djournal.com.

The only thing I could wish for is that Patsy had continued my “shuttle-launch” quote a little farther, since the rest of it went: “Within a few days, someone who signed in as “n Miss commenter” (quickly shortened to “NMC”) began to chip in some great Oxford-insider comments. Then other well-informed Mississippians — lawyers and non-lawyers both — piped up, and it’s built steadily from there. Now NMC is my blogging partner and thanks in great part to his efforts, we’re all seriously addicted and have formed a community, whether we live there or not. (And our varying politics don’t matter a whit.)”

But overall, another good read from Patsy — so though I can’t figure out why it won’t hit the DJ’s website, I thank Todd for letting me “folo” it.