Blogger for a Day

The public radio station where I work–its call letters begin with a K and end with D and also include an E and a Q, though not necessarily in that order–is blogging. Our Sacramento bureau chief has a blog. We have a project called Climate Watch that has a blog. Over the summer, we started a daily general news blog. As part of a nationwide NPR effort called Project Argo, we’ve launched a blog on education technology. I’ve written occasionally for most of them; in fact, on a day I was standing in for our regular news blogger, I got a chance to post something on odd developments in California’s high-speed rail project (“High-Speed Rail’s Central Valley Section: Build It and Who Will Come?“).

Yesterday, I was the designated blogger for another project: producing a “live” (i.e., continuously updated) account of the proceedings in the federal appeals court hearing on California’s Proposition 8 (that’s the 2008 initiative that essentially overrode an earlier state Supreme Court decision and banned same-sex marriage).

I live-blogged a couple of baseball games (here, here, and here) during the Giants playoff run. It’s fun, a way to play sportscaster and mine one’s rich store of deeply internalized sports idioms. Live-blogging a court hearing during a case that rests on some highly technical issues and lots of people care about? It’s not exactly second nature.

But here’s the result: Proposition 8 Appeals Hearing: Live Blog. The hearing was two and a half hours, and it went by in a blur. While it was going on, I felt like I was battling to keep up. Reading it now–not bad. I did better than the lawyer for the deputy clerk of Imperial County, anyway (see the top part of this post).