New York Times

Getting the Coverage Out

June 30, 2016

by Adam Liptak

Times Insider shares insights into how we work at The New York Times. In this article, Adam Liptak, The Times’s Supreme Court correspondent, describes taking preparation to an extreme.

The Supreme Court’s term starts in October, and for the nine months that follow it proceeds at a stately pace. But its end, in late June, always feels like an anxiety dream in which you have forgotten to turn in the college thesis that stands between you and graduation.

The justices are to blame. For reasons that have long puzzled scholars, they routinely save their biggest decisions for the last days of the term, creating a news pileup that was demanding enough in the print era, and creates fresh and scary challenges given the insistent needs of the digital age.

The key, then and now, is preparation. I mean this in two senses. First of all, reporters who cover the court spend the entire term preparing for its end by reading briefs, attending arguments, consulting law professors, going to conferences and interviewing lawyers and litigants. We know the cases intimately, understand the dynamics among the justices and have a good sense of the likely outcomes and consequences.

These days I also prepare in a more pedestrian way: writing up advance versions of articles that can be posted immediately after big decisions land. For the four blockbusters that arrived on Thursday and Monday — onaffirmative action, immigration, public corruption and abortion — we had a total of 12 versions ready to go.

That was partly a consequence of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. His absence meant we had to be ready for 4-4 deadlocks in several cases in addition to wins and losses. In the abortion case, I also prepared a version in which the court sent the case back to the lower courts for more proceedings, a prospect raised during oral arguments in March by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Starting just before 10 o’clock both mornings, perhaps 30 reporters crammed into the court’s public information office. We were handed paper copies of decisions as soon as the justice who wrote the majority opinion started to summarize it from the bench in the courtroom upstairs. I raced to my cubicle in the press room, satisfied myself that I understood the basic message of the decision, and called Jill Agostino, an editor and my indispensable collaborator at The Times’s Washington bureau.

I told her which version to use and tweaked the occasional verb. Minutes later, we delivered the news to our readers, news that had been written weeks before.

This is no great innovation. Wire services have long prepared multiple versions of their news alerts. And I can’t say this is the way I would choose to do the job. My predecessors went to the courtroom to hear the decisions announced, and they did not write a word until they had read the written decisions with care. Their deadlines were in the early evening, and they wrote for the next day’s paper.

But we are a news organization and we have an obligation to deliver the news. After the first version of each article was posted, I promptly added a vote count, a telling quotation or two and a link to the decision. My colleagues Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who had been in the courtroom, soon added a sense of what had happened there, focusing especially on the rare oral dissents delivered by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Then I spent perhaps an hour reading and another 90 minutes writing a full article that was posted in the early afternoon. These were more satisfying to write and added, I hope, the analysis that readers of The Times expect. A second editor, Bill Hamilton, helped me sharpen and expand these middle-game versions of the articles into what aspired to be the authoritative ones for our legacy product, the printed newspaper.

The justices did us one small favor this term: Their decisions were clear and conclusive, and they lacked the overlapping partial concurrences and dissents that can make discerning the governing principle elusive. That meant reality turned out to match one of the versions of it I had written ahead of time.