Got an old fashioned email message from one of the folks in our newsroom yesterday.

"Long delay in court, we were told it's because of twittering."

Grover Tadlock and Randy Yohe are out in Carter County, Kentucky covering an attempted food poisoning trial this week.  I asked Randy to twitter the trial.  Personally, I think court coverage is one of the best applications for twitter in news purposes. 

One problem -- we didn't tell the judge.

Twitter is kind of "out there" so I didn't think twice about telling the judge.  I spend about 60% of my day searching and studying new technology, so I think I had some tunnel vision on this one.  I truly look at twittering as the equivalent of the newspaper reporter running to a pay phone to update his or her editor on the other end of the line.

So, the trial was delayed.  The judge heard from someone who heard from someone that twittering was underway in her courtroom.  She wanted to see what was going on and make sure no jurors were receiving tweets.

And then the newspaper wrote about it Thursday morning.

I sent that article out on Twitter to some of my tweeps and got some positive reaction for us, as you can imagine.  They are a bit of a skewed audience.

To the judge's credit, Randy tells me she was fine with the twittering.  She just wanted a heads up.

So, we're back today, twittering and trying to make sure the testimony is the story.