Logan’s complaint did, however, spark action. Swenson, in his capacity as union president, immediately informed News Editor Peterson and Web Editor McHenry that 10-minute updates were unreasonable. He wrote :

As someone who has covered trials, that just can’t be done effectively. The reality of covering a trial is you have to listen to all the foundation questions to get the nuances of the critical facts. Constant distractions in a case with a gag order (so you can’t ask the attorneys for clarifications) would lessen the reliability and accuracy of our coverage.

Swenson noted that the story was “getting high readership” but “updates every break—unless something momentous happens… seems reasonable.” He reassured Logan that she would not be expected to send updates every 10 minutes and advised her to be cooperative and do her best work. “That might include every so often writing in ‘nothing new’ if that’s the case,” he said. ^[17] In early March, Peterson gave the rest of the courts beat to another reporter, leaving Logan to report full-time on the Brothers case. ^[18] For the next two weeks, she filed from her handheld device.

Blogging direct . On Monday, March 19, Logan found waiting at her desk a wireless card she had requested for her laptop computer. This eliminated the need for the handheld and meant she could now communicate more effectively with the newsroom. ^[19] That first day, she sent her notes to the editorial desk, where editors rewrote them into a blog entry. McHenry, however, told Logan the rewrite had taken too much time. He directed that, while she should continue to send news updates to editors (who put them on the Bakersfield.com and Brothers Trial webpages), she should post blog entries directly to the website. She should then notify editors via email to let them know she had posted.

Logan assumed the email alert was to allow editors to make a quick check for errors and accuracy. She was not sure who would edit her blog postings, but she complied. Her post did not carry her byline but was instead credited to “Brothers Trial blog.” In addition, McHenry had asked her to insert a blank videotape in the courtroom pool reporter’s camera each day when she arrived in the morning, and again after lunch. On March 19, he added an additional request: As Logan took notes during the trial, she was to mark the exact time of interesting courtroom exchanges so that at day’s end a Californian editor could immediately find the spot on the video and quickly post it on the website. The task seemed simple but proved tricky. In emails, McHenry peppered Logan with questions asking why her times did not match up with taped events.

In light of juggling these tasks, Logan says she saw no option but to send off portions of her notes as her blog entries. She did not feel she had time to work the notes into short blog features as Swenson had been doing. “I thought I would make it as much of a story as I could, and I would make it as accurate as possible given the time constraint. But they were just notes,” she says of her posts. Jenner, says Logan, reassured her that her notes would be fine as blog postings, and added that she should not worry about spelling errors. For a few days, Logan was too busy even to look at the website to read her own work.

Listen to Logan’s expectations for her blog.
Length: 43 sec

When she did, what she saw dismayed her. Her blog entries contained a number of typos and grammatical errors. For example, in a posting made March 20 at 10:26 a.m. , Logan had written: “Laskowski observed the kitchen has not been cleaned with the breakfast items were still in the kitchen and possible a light lunch was prepared.” It was the first time she realized her postings had not been edited. Poor grammar was one thing, but what about mistakes? As she emailed Swenson on March 21:

I think it’s dangerous to put what are essentially my notes straight onto the web without anyone reading them. I fear something libelous will slip into the copy if it hasn’t already.

Swenson tried to reassure her: “We’ll let you know if you write anything libelous; but as a court reporter, I’m sure you know how to keep that out… You are doing what your editors asked you to do.” But Logan was only partially mollified. She felt she should observe the same standards for accuracy and fairness whether her work appeared in the newspaper or online. She says:

Journalism is important. It’s important to have standards. And it’s important to give the best quality of information to the readers that we possibly can. And the editors trust us with that.

However, McHenry continued to ask for frequent contributions. On March 20, Logan filed nine blog posts between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. On March 21 and 22, she filed 10 entries each day (See blog posts March 20-22: part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , and part 4 ). On March 22, for example, she posted the following at 11:48 a.m.:

A woman says she had sexual relationship with Brothers
Lupe Hernandez works at Fremont School. She is a clerk.
She says she had a sexual relationship with Brothers in 2003 in the beginning of the year or maybe 2002. The relationship ended at the end of the school year at 2003. They would have sex at his home, a house. She also went to an apartment on Real Road in an upstairs apartment.
She had sex with him at the house and at the apartment.
Did Brothers’ discuss his personal life? Not really.
She asked him about his family and he said he was not married and had never been married in 2003. She said she did not want to go out with a married person. She believed him.
He didn’t have any children as far as he knew, but in 2003 she knew he had a son who went to preschool.
She doesn’t remember asking about the child. She doesn’t remember how she discovered he had a son. She shows her some photos of houses.
Charles Pilley was the principal of the school in 2003.
She doesn’t recall if it was at the end of 2002 of in 2003.
Did she tell the prosecutor she did not have a sexual relationship? She said she wanted to protect her family.
Did Mr. Brothers have photographs of children at his office? There was one picture of his son with somebody else. She may have said Brothers had a picture of an older girl and a smaller boy in his office.
Green questions her further.

Readers did notice that posting. A few objected to its style. “Who at the Californian wrote this story/blog entry? It is awful. Check your work before you post,” wrote one angry reader. Another said: “Pretty poorly written.... maybe the Californian has a 6th grader on staff now.” But a third reader noted that the same style had been used in reporting the high-profile trial of a prominent member of the Bush Administration. ^[20] McHenry explained in an online response that “[t]hese are basically notes from the reporter in the courtroom. In this day and age it doesn't take too much to post them on the web almost immediately. We figured it was better to offer this info up to our readers in a rough version, rather than sitting on it until we can polish it up.”

Later that day, in a posting at 3:17 p.m. , Logan made the blogging mistake which was both the easiest to fix (indeed, it was corrected within minutes of her finding out about it) and the simplest to make. In the post, titled “Prosecutor calls witness ‘a liar,’” Logan wrote about the testimony of a woman who had had an affair with the defendant. Inadvertently, Logan typed “she” instead of “he,” making it appear that the woman was on trial, not the defendant. She said a number of fellow reporters pointed it out almost immediately. “The other reporters had a good laugh, especially my competitors at the television stations,” she says. But it was precisely this type of mistake—one caught by someone other than an editor—that bothered her most. “It was just a keystroke difference, but it made all the difference” in being right or wrong, she says. The next day’s newspaper story was correct.