• Nieman Journalism Lab, Sunday, July 12, 2009 9:51 PM

As news organizations roll out their coverage plans for Sonia Sotomayor's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, an interesting innovation is coming from the Associated Press.

AP is promising readers insider access to the toughest ticket in Washington with a Twitter feed, AP_Courtside. Predictably, some tweets link to AP blog coverage on Yahoo News and to the news agency's traditional content. But most noteworthy is AP's promise that readers will "direct our coverage" of the Sotomayor hearings. The Twitter feed started soliciting reader feedback last week.

The approach is a first for the news agency and an experimental departure from its usual coverage. "This all stems back to a larger project that we're working on to engage users," says AP's Jim Kennedy, director of strategic planning. "We are looking to do things beyond writing stories, taking pictures, and shooting video. This big question here is: can a news agency have these kind of interactions[with readers] even as it supplies content to our customers?"

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