Mary Flood of the Houston Chronicle has been a journalist for 25 years, covering many major stories as an investigative and legal reporter. She says reporting on the recent Enron trial was "more exciting and more exhausting" than anything she has done over the years.

A newspaper reporter by instinct and experience, Flood has become a multi-dimensional, multimedia journalist, reporting the Enron case for online, radio and TV in addition to the Chronicle's daily paper.

She was well prepared to cover the many dimensions of the Enron case, from the original allegations of wrongdoing by corporate executives, to the implosion of the company, to the saga of the courtroom.

In addition to the Chronicle, Flood has reported for the Wall Street Journal, the Houston Post and the Lansing (Mich.) State Journal. Along the way, she earned a law degree from Harvard Law School, practicing media and plaintiffs law for three years. She has taught media law and ethics courses at The University of Houston and was a Poynter Ethics Fellow in 2002.

Poynter Online asked Flood to recount her experiences in multiple platform reporting. The following is an edited e-mail Q&A, conducted by Bob Steele and Bill Mitchell.

Mary, give us a sense of the range of journalism you practiced in your coverage of the Enron case and trials. Tell us about the reporting and writing you did for your paper as well as for your Web site and for other news organizations.

RELATED RESOURCES

Enron main page at the Houston Chronicle The Three Blogs: Blow-by-blow trial watch (now updated after Ken Lay's death) Legal commentary Columnist Loren Steffy The EXTRA newspaper the Chronicle put out on the streets the day of the verdict Ask Mary Q&A Podcasts on the trial Background with documents, photos and transcripts, links to those who pleaded guilty Example of coverage from prior Enron trials also linked

In the four years I covered Enron, I met secretly with sources, sat through some dull trials, waited outside grand juries for days on end, supped with lawyers and even attended the Sundance film festival to watch an Enron documentary. All the while I worked with others to build up a library of information on the case on our Web site.

Carlos Antonio Rios/Houston Chronicle Houston Chronicle reporter Mary Flood

Though I'd written multiple daily updates for our Web site through much of the coverage, the pace greatly accelerated with the Ken Lay-Jeff Skilling trial this year. All the prior efforts culminated in a Houston Chronicle decision to go all out -- team reporting, three blogs, daily photos, podcasts, a Q&A column, interactive graphics, pretty much anything we could think up. We covered the waterfront and well inland, especially with a real-time blog written from an overflow courtroom, and got a lot of attention for doing so.
 
I started each trial day at home answering e-mails from readers who were wildly engaged in this story. The Chronicle's real-time blogs and the extensive nature of what was available on our Web site transformed many readers into responders.

Once at the courthouse, some days I did a radio interview for NPR or Marketplace "I suspect the Internet just changed the way big trials will be covered and the amount of energy it will take to do it well." and I often wrote several blog items from inside the main courtroom where I was stationed. I did a television interview after court each day with our local CBS-affiliate, often worked with other Chronicle reporters on a daily graphic and then sat down to the only part I'd consistently done for years before this trial -- write a story for the next day's newspaper. That story would go up on the Web site right after editing and sometimes go out on wires.

I also moderated three podcasts on the trial and answered questions regularly in a Q&A column within the reporter's blog.

I may have experienced an unusually high variety of methods of reporting, but there were others on the Houston Chronicle team and working for other media who were constantly changing hats and hustling too.  
 
How was covering the Enron trial different from other experiences you've had in your journalism career?


Reporting on this trial was more exciting and more exhausting than anything I've done in my 25 or so years in the business.

I think our deep Web coverage on such a high-profile case made for team effort that had the intense feel of covering a hurricane. But this storm kept up for more than four months.

We expanded our fare, offered information in a number of ways and simultaneously gave readers more depth and more light reading. Readers asked about everything from document production under the Jencks Act to the type of cologne worn by an attorney.

Friends of mine who yawned and changed the subject for the first 3 1/2 years I covered Enron were now reading the indictment off the Houston Chronicle Web site.

I suspect the Internet just changed the way big trials will be covered and the amount of energy it will take to do it well. I hope it allows us to provide enough solid background information along with the daily drama that we can leave people smarter about their courts than we can with even cameras in the courtroom.

Say more about the use of the Chronicle's Web site to report this story and about your blogging.  What surprised you about that element of the reporting and storytelling? Is there anything that scares you about the Internet side of the journalism?


What surprised me was how much our readers cared about minutiae and how they became addicted to the real-time blog. Happily, this led them deeper into the four years of background we'd up built online.

It was also a surprise to see the team and teamwork we needed to do all this.

We started the trial with me doing the real-time blog from an overflow courtroom with [closed-circuit] sound and a video of the witness stand. I was also supposed to do the full story for the paper. We realized quickly that you can't file a dozen updates during the day and still pay full attention to testimony.

So reporters John Roper, Tom Fowler and Mark Babineck wrote most of the real-time blog and I chimed in on breaks with color from the actual courtroom where I could see the jurors, defendants and lawyers.

What scared me was the speed and voice of the real time blog. We were working without a net, though an editor speed-read everything [before posting].

That meant more errors -- maybe something misheard, maybe a false assumption, sometimes a stretch to be able to use a link.

There is also a looser, more colloquial voice in blogging. Sometimes I had concerns about tone as we tried to be entertaining or clever in a case about the freedom of two accused citizens.


Can you elaborate on your observation that the multimedia dimensions of the Chronicle's coverage "transformed many readers into responders?" From what you can tell, what aspects of the coverage did that? How did they respond?

What seemed to engage the readers the most was the real time blow-by-blow from the courtroom. But once there were hooked on the instant gratification of the trial blog, they started to explore the Web site and look at documents, stories, podcasts, other blogs etc.

Readers responded in many ways. I had probably two dozen or more emails most trial days, some writing off my full story that ran in the paper with my email at the bottom and some writing on blog entries or writing to my Q&A column.

How much time in your 14 hour days did you spend responding to reader questions? Did you do so by individual e-mail messages or your own comments posted to the Chronicle blogs?

I bet I spent 30 minutes most days and up to an hour some days responding to reader questions. I answered a lot on weekends.

Readers sent more comments than questions. There was also a reader forum for comments. In the forum and in the blog responses, readers of course got into conversations with each other. There were some regular readers who wrote nearly every week. I don't have specific numbers but on hot days I bet we got 100 comments or more on the main trial blog alone.

How did/do you handle reader comments on blogs? Do you screen them first or are they posted live?


We screened them first. We needed to. Sometimes we were bombarded with charming "comments" from porn sites.


It's clear from your comments that the multimedia approach resulted in much deeper and broader coverage across many more platforms and publishing cycles. What downsides did you encounter? How might you address such challenges differently the next time around?

Reporters get weary and overworked with this many balls in the air. Also when you are going as fast as we do on the blog there is more chance for inaccuracy.

The best way I can think to address these problems is through awareness. Editors need to realize how much time this all takes and not kill their reporters. And reporters need to realize they must be extra careful when writing in real time. Most of the errors our crew made were from people working hard and fast and making assumptions that they knew what something meant when they did not have enough background to get that correct. I don't think real time blogging or writing is a place for beginners. It's a place for people who know their limitations and weaknesses and can guard against them.

How did you handle corrections in this coverage? If you spotted a mistake a few minutes after posting to a blog and fixed it, did you also post a correction?


We had no set policy but it would be a good idea for the future. For minor errors or problems caught quickly we did not note the correction. But for something major or an error caught or questioned by a reader, we usually did note in the same blog entry that something above had been corrected.

You say that your final task with Enron trial coverage -- on many days -- was to write your story for the paper. What was that like given that you had already told pieces of the story in so many ways in the previous hours? And weren't you mighty worn out by the time you sat down to your computer to write that newspaper story?


The daily stories became hybrids of breaking news, feature and analysis.

The main paper story had to be a kind of second-day take because we'd already reported so much. But I had also collected more feature information to do the courtroom scene blogs and analyzed it all more to do the daily TV updates.

The stories had more texture, more dialogue, more feature-type dimensions and more analytical touches than dailies I've written in the dozens and dozens of trials I'd covered before.

And yes, I was tired as were my colleagues and other journalists on this story. My average day was about 14 hours. That adds up in a 17-week trial.

Can you imagine another story you'd like to cover that would bring your multimedia reporting skills into play? What might that be?
 

I think technology will require us all to report big breaking stories in multimedia in the future. All of these components are already common at some papers. Doing them all at once on anything big seems inevitable.

I think this will apply to other big trials, to big storms like Katrina and big sports events like the World Series. It will also likely be used more often in long-running stories from the White House to local city councils and police forces.

There were a couple things unique about the last Enron trial.

One, we'd built up four years of experience documenting the cases and were well prepared to provide extensive background and keep updating it during the trial.

And two, it was a federal case. No cameras were allowed in the courtroom.

People can watch the shuttle launch, weather forecasts and baseball games on TV. But our Web site took them into the courtroom, into the court documents and into the history of the story.

As our online editor has analogized, we highlighted all that with a Monday Night Football approach to our three blogs -- the play-by-play, the color commentator (columnist Loren Steffy often also doing real-time blogging) and "jocks" (six lawyers writing in their own blog on the trial).

I think that all-cylinders approach will translate to all sorts of big, breaking stories be they in courts or in sports.

P.S. As for what I'd like to cover, maybe another World Series for the Houston Astros.