My First Byline: Seamus Hughes
Editor, Court Watch
What is your current job?
I am the editor of Court Watch, a news site covering all the most interesting federal court filings, from search warrants to indictments to everything in between. The goal is to report on overlooked court records and give readers direct access to primary source documents. I am also a terrorism scholar at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s NCITE, researching Americans who are drawn to a variety of forms of extremism in the United States. Additionally, for the last six years, I’ve been a research journalist with the New York Times and for the last two years, with Bloomberg Law News. I’ve also freelanced for Rolling Stone and Daily Beast in the past.
Nothing about my career in journalism is traditional. I never went to J-school. I didn’t cut my teeth on a local newspaper. About ten years ago, I had an academic research project looking at terrorism arrests in America. I found that I couldn’t rely on the Department of Justice’s press releases to ensure that I identified all the federal prosecutions. They would try to hide the ball if the case didn’t go the way they wanted or if the person had become an informant. In order to find all the cases, I had to go through all the filings in 94 federal court districts. I quickly understood the weird quirks of how things are filed in the courts in say, Iowa, vs. Florida. Every district is different. As part of that, I found additional terrorism cases, but also things that had nothing to do with terrorism but were newsy.
I broke the story of Julian Assange’s indictment, the L.A. city council bribery case, two sitting Congressmen under investigation – and hundreds of other stories based on federal court records that were filed. I would just tweet out the things I found, and hope people would notice. Some reporters found it interesting, so they helped me pitch news organizations to pick me up as a research journalist at their media organizations.
What was your first byline?
My first byline was at The Daily Beast about an Alabama guy who applied for a random job online and ended up accidently shippingAK-47 magazines to Russia. I had spent the last few years just tweeting out things I found interesting in the courts. I started to get frustrated when things didn’t get picked up. So I cold Twitter DM’ed Noah Shachtman, who was the editor there and said, listen, I’m not a trained journalist but I’d like to try my hand at it. He teamed me up with reporters there and we’d write stories together. I learned through shared google docs and editor cuts how to report the news, who to contact for comments, how to add qualifiers and citations as needed. It was a great learning experience and I’m so appreciative of it.
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What was your first real job in journalism? How did you get it?
I’ve always been a freelancer so nothing actually ever feels real. After the Daily Beast, a group of New York Times reporters, who readily acknowledged they were sick of being scooped by a random academic on Twitter, banded together and pitched the Washington Bureau chief of the Times to hire me as a research journalist for all things federal courts. For the last six years, I batted around the various desks, surging up on stories involving all manners of things from police stops that ended in violence to stolen ancient artifacts. I get pulled into other news organizations depending on their needs for federal court coverage. I did stints at Rolling Stone helping find court cases involving rock stars and rappers who were accused of various crimes. I’ve been with Bloomberg Law News for the last two years helping out on an investigation into how the courts are being used or not used to address social ills and policy failures.
As a terrorism scholar, I spend my days looking at the worst parts of American society, from neo-Nazis to ISIS. Court records are a mental floss for me. I enjoy helping reporters do good reporting. My favorite reporting experience was finding a criminal complaint against a local HUD official in North Carolina. I knew it was too small of a story for national papers, so I searched for any newspaper in the small town of Siler City, North Carolina. I came across the Chatham News + Record. I cold emailed the editor on a Saturday morning with the story. It is a small news shop so I offered to report and write the piece for free and quickly so they wouldn’t get scooped by the larger North Carolina papers. We beat everyone to the story, but more importantly, we were able to inform residents there of something that probably would have flown under the radar.
With the increase of news deserts, it feels incumbent on me to assist where I can. So for the last few years, I’ve trained thousands of journalists on how to use the courts to find stories. Every week, I helped a couple dozen reporters from news organizations big and small find what they needed to advance their stories.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
I’m biased, but I think a cub reporter should focus on being really good at one thing. I focused on court reporting, but it could be good narrative long-form writing, FOIA, having an impressive source bench, or something completely different. The rest will follow. In the age of increasing media firings, it’s good to have one skill that the rich guys in the corner offices can’t lose even if they wanted to. I launched Court Watch three years ago because I didn’t want to be fully beholden to the whims of editors who may be too understandably too busy to notice something of news value. If I find a court case interesting, I’ve assumed that others may too. So far that assumption has borne true. It’s been great to build something that is just my own vision of reporting and to have a community of readers who share my passion for court reporting.