Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The Record is live-tweeting its first murder trial

There is big news in the city of Troy this week with the start of a double murder trial built on a 9-year-old case that was built for years against two men and nearly went to trial in 2010 before a third suspect was named and linked to DNA evidence at the murder scene, causing the original charges to be dropped against the two former suspects and Michael Mosley to be indicted for both murders.

Opening statements began in the case Monday, May 9 and The Record is providing as much coverage as possible throughout the proceedings.

In addition to a installing a widget listing prior articles on the case going back several years on our TroyRecord.com homepage, we also decided to take a lesson from our sister paper The Daily Freeman and attempt to live-tweet the courtroom proceedings complete with witness testimony.


Audio/visual recording of these parts of the trial is normally forbidden in New York, but after making a request to the judge handling the case, our court reporter Dave Canfield (@Canfield_Record) was granted permission to use his laptop in the courtroom as long as he did not disturb anyone and was out of view of the jury.

The tweets began around 9:30 a.m. this morning as the trial began using the hashtag #MosleyTrial. As of 4:24 p.m., a total of 40 tweets about the trial had reached 4,065 people according to Tweet Reach.

Watching the live coverage pour in through the embedded HootSuite feed on TroyRecord.com has been exciting to watch for our staff members and hopefully our readers as well. As the trial continues we'll continue to ask them how they are consuming our coverage and how we can do it better.

Check out the feed of tweets below:

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