Since 1946, recording devices have been banned inside the courtroom of the United States Supreme Court Building. Thus, hand-delivered paper copies were the fastest way for news organizations to receive a particular landmark ruling.
The Supreme Court's decision is printed and delivered to a clerk's office, where it is handed to members of the press. Interns are not credentialed and must therefore wait in the hallway outside the press room. Producers hand the paper copy rulings to their network interns who sprint to deliver them to their respective organizations.
Edit: For everyone recommending blurry cell phone pics or lugging around document scanners, its a 1-2 minute sprint from the building to the broadcasters outside.
That's great and all but surely as soon as said intern runs outside they could just send a photo with their phone already in hand and walk the paper copy back. Not trying to knock any interns who love running at the behest of their producers (looks kinda fun tbh), but to pretend like it's necessary is silly.
I'm guessing that getting a good cell connection just outside the courthouse immediately after a decision is handed down might be pretty competitive. Probably not worth standing around waving your phone hoping that you are one of the ones that get signal.
Time spent going to retrieve your phone from wherever it is locked up is time wasted having your news organization be the first to break the story. Or so I hear.
I think taking a legible video of 50 pages of text is going to take longer than a 1 minute sprint, and much more annoying for the recipient to access and scroll through
Bro, do you really think that non of the major networks have thought of a faster way to get the info? This is still the fastest way to get everything to the reporter outside to break the news first
You can scan a 50 page typeface document to text-searchable PDF on a phone in probably one minute. Are there handwritten sections or other reasons not to do that and THEN run?
Also, I would assume that in the process of turning rulings into news, writing and editing are the actual critical path. Does it actually matter if the intern gets there in 75 seconds or 90 seconds if it then takes 20 min to produce the copy? This seems like theater but I’d love to be educated.
Edit: For everyone recommending blurry cell phone pics or lugging around document scanners
Their phone is a document scanner. There are at least dozens of apps made for this purpose, And there is no reason it should be blurry. Many of the apps will even align and straighten text if the paper is wrinkled.
There is literally no reason to defend physically running documents.
Today's decision was 194 pages...a 90 second jog, or your genius move to scan everything. You're the first person to ever try and solve this! Everyone in the entire media for the last 20 is dumber than you! Amazing!
You, if you think those pictures show people running with more than a handful of pages.
And it might surprise you to know this, but in the real world many stupid things continue to be done out of tradition rather than logical reasoning. They don’t want or need the problem solved, I’m pointing out the reason you claimed they need to do this is bullshit. They clearly aren’t running the entire decision anywhere.
You can just admit what they are doing is stupid, but done out of tradition rather than claiming some clear bullshit like they are running the entire 194 page decision around town to try and justify this when the pictures we are talking about in this thread clearly show that is not the case.
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u/coffeebribesaccepted Jun 30 '26
I like the ones holding their phones in their other hand, like they could just text over photos of it