After Reporting Countless Cases From The Cafeteria, SCOTUSblog Wants A Supreme Court Press Pass

Tom Goldstein, Esq. - proprietor of Scotusblog

Scotusblog won the peabody award for excellence in electronic journalism

Should Scotusblog have a spot in th Supreme Court press gallery like NPR or AP or the Times? Should I? This is a harder question than first appears.  Tom Goldstein is owner and editor in chief of SCOTUS Blog - the essential Supreme Court resource.  But he has no press pass - because his enterprise is not a newspaper or magazine but an adjunct of his law practice.  He has Lyle Denniston a reporter on staff who is credentialed through WBUR.  Goldstein himself is a lawyer who has argued thirty times before the Supreme Court and is looking for business.  Yet the blog is probably the most widely followed source of news on the court.  Should they have a press pass?  I dunno.  What I am persuaded of is that the Court should moot the question by asking C-Span to broadcast its proceedings.  - GWC
After Reporting Countless Cases From The Cafeteria, SCOTUSblog Wants A Supreme Court Press 
Pass:

by MARK SHERMAN – NOVEMBER 9, 2013, 9:04 AM EST2867

WASHINGTON (AP) -- One of the most influential news outlets covering the Supreme Court sets up shop on big decision days not in the pressroom with other reporters, but in the court's cafeteria.The justices themselves read the award-winning SCOTUSblog, but unlike other media it has no official status in the marble courthouse.This curious situation is attributable almost entirely to the unusual, if not unique, circumstances that surround SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein. The 43-year-old lawyer has made a career out of challenging the established way of doing things, first among Supreme Court advocates and more recently in its pressroom.Goldstein is in the position of both making and reporting the news.He is not just the founder, owner and publisher of SCOTUSblog, named for the acronym for the Supreme Court of the United States. He also argues before the court, comments on and analyzes news on MSNBC and is quoted widely in media accounts.SCOTUSblog has gone from a failed marketing ploy designed to attract more business to the law firm Goldstein started with his wife, Amy Howe, to an indispensable aid to Supreme Court reporters and lawyers. The blog's Twitter account has 144,000 followers.The blog is so popular among Supreme Court watchers that it is now helping set the agenda for coverage of the institution.SCOTUSblog tries to steer clear of conflicts by routinely acknowledging when Goldstein's firm is involved in cases the blog writes about. But the court itself is unsure how to deal with this hybrid that Goldstein created, a news outlet that is owned by one of the court's own practitioners

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