This is an important topic, so I'll try not be dstriacted by the invidious comparison with the world's best, and best resourced, newspapers.You could fit the entire Mail & Guardian newsroom into the legal desk at the New York Times. And we probably wouldn't look as bad in comparison to the British press which is probably a more fair comparison in terms of the relative similarity of the legal tradition.But those are defensive and unhelpful responses.It is trite that we need broad, deep and rigorous coverage of the judicial system, from the ConCourt down to the woefully ignored Magistracy, and I don't think I need to rehearse the reasons here.I would like to have a full time correspondent at the constitutional court who would also handle the JSC and related stories about judicial legislation. It would be a good idea to have someone in Bloemfontein too. Then in each major metro we should have a reporter who spends part of their time at the local high court, and knows it well. I'd like to assign someone to spend a year traveling the country and writing the mind-boggling stories that play out in our magistrates courts.Budgetary reality means that level of resource commitment is not going to happen in my lifetime. Newsrooms are more stretched than they have ever been (count the bylines in your favourite rag if you don't believe me).Clearly news budgets reflect priorities and editors make hard brutally hard choices about whom they assign where.The weakness of our legal journalism, and the excessive focus on the clash of arms around Hlophe and Motata reflects how those choices are distorted when we have very limited capacity, and are driven by the most urgent stories of the day (or week).It is not just coverage of the legal system that suffers as a result, but reflective, careful, in depth journalism of all kinds (think of parliament, land affairs, poverty, the environment, really good company reporting).This is an explanation, however, not an excuse.Fixing the situation requires commitment from editors, but it also requires a partnership with the legal community. The Webber Wentzel prize for legal journalism is one sort of incentive, but we also need more lawyers and judges to take up the space that is available, to talk to us, and to help us drive the conversation forward.We are working on new, non-profit funding models that enable us to direct resources to the kind of journalism that we believe is at the core of our social mission, but that struggles to find commercial support. That may help a bit.We also need to think hard about how to keep talented legal journalists committed to the beat at a time when they are strongly drawn to hard politics, or to the profession itself.I'm committed to getting this right at the Mail & Guardian, but it is not going to happen over night.Keep hassling us, but also, keep helping us to do the reporting. I can't promise to employ South Africa's Dalia Lithwick tomorrow, but I do want to feel like we are addressing the crucial issues on an ongoing basis in the news pages, the opinion pages, and the feature pages.
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Akash