A surprisingly enlightened attitude to using Twitter in court has emerged in the far south-west of England.
On a recent visit to West Cornwall magistrates court in Truro with a group of journalism students, I got permission to tweet during proceedings. A significant blow for press freedom? Brave new world? Or just a sign of the times?
It all happened with incredible ease. New chair of the bench, Judith Kerridge, just happened to be in court that day to lead tributes to a retiring magistrate.
Yes, she said, tweeting from Truro Magistrates Court was absolutely fine by her, provided I was a bona fide journalist and didn't disrupt proceedings. We chatted briefly about being fair and accurate and the need for media guidelines. She offered to consider drawing some up.
End of conversation.
As the course leader for the MA in Multimedia Broadcast Journalism at University College Falmouth, I encourage our students to develop an easy familiarity with social media. But how should @UCFJourno live tweet from a routine day at a provincial magistrates court?
The Court 1 list contained just the usual bread-and-butter guilty pleas that still make the pages of local weekly newspapers in these parts: drink-driving, shoplifting, insulting behaviour, drunk and disorderly, minor assault...
It's easy to tweet about the magistrate who's retiring after more than 30 years on the bench. But how do you report individual court cases? Should you try to incorporate the top line, defendant's name, address, court, charge, plea and sentence in 140 characters? Should you tweet all the stories or only the ones that carry a decent top line? The recent West Midlands police tweet-a-thon from Birmingham Magistrates Court is a case in point.
In the end, only two cases saw the light of day during my revolutionary tweet-a-thon from West Cornwall - both involving bans for drink-driving. Police found one driver slumped over the wheel of his car; the other was stopped on the road after having one more drink in a moment of weakness.
Small beer indeed.
Charlotte Barry is a journalist and trainer. She is course leader of the MA in Multimedia Broadcast Journalism at University College Falmouth. Charlotte is particularly interested in how social media can be applied to everyday editorial practice.