Larry Langford on Trial
By Weekly Staff
Everyone knew this would happen. Larry Langford’s day in court has arrived. No one knows for sure what will happen next.
Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford
Much of this site has been built to cover this trial, and much of our work for the last six months has been a rehearsal for what happens this week.
Monday morning Madison Underwood and Kyle Whitmire will be traveling to Tuscaloosa. There, they will live-blog through Twitter (more on that further down), shoot video outside the courthouse when possible, and file article-length recaps at noon and 5 p.m.
We expect the court to spend all of Monday and most of Tuesday selecting a jury and handing pretrial motions. During that time, our coverage will be a trickle. Mostly we will be testing of our new tools and toys (Coveritlive, Qik, Tweetie2, an “enhanced” iPhone that would make AT&T very unhappy). However, when opening statements begin, hang on to your butts.
We are informed that the judge will likely prohibit the use of laptops in the courtroom. Unfortunately, this means the live blog we intended will be somewhat diminished, but don’t worry — it will still be here. We are also told that the judge will allow smart phones to be used (text only of course) in the courtroom. We’re going to cover this story 140 characters at a time. As we Twitter the trial, those tweets will populate our live blog with content. When possible, we will respond to direct messages and followers’ tweets.
Because we will be live blogging through Twitter, we will have to disable comments in Coveritlive, our blogging webware. If you followed our live blogs in the past, this means the trial blog will not be as interactive as before. You will, however, be able to submit comments at the bottom of the page, as you would with any other story.
If you would like to receive recaps by email, you can subscribe to Birmingham Weekly Direct on the righthand side of this page. Also, we have an RSS feed and we will link to our coverage from Facebook.
This will serve as our Langford Trial Landing Page. From here you will can find links to our recaps and other trial coverage.
Thanks for reading.
