Matt Conigliaro started a blog called AbstractAppeal about Florida appellate law primarily for his fellow lawyers. But then the Terri Schiavo case exploded in the U.S.

He spoke with Staci D. Kramer of Online Journalism Review about the experience of trying to explain the emotionally loaded case to regular people. Here's some excerpts:

Online Journalism Review: You have devoted an enormous amount of personal resources to doing this. Why are you so compelled to do it and what kind of role do you think you're playing?

Matt Conigliaro: It’s, I guess, a fairly easy answer. I started this weblog regarding Florida law. I'm an appellate attorney, so that's what I do, follow case law for a living so it does merge pretty well with what I do for a living. When this case started to become news I had done relatively few postings on it, other than to just sort of comment on what was going on but didn’t really try to be very insightful. What made me try to be more detailed -- I ended up creating that information page; I literally did it overnight -- I was in the middle of a trial … and I happened to catch a radio show as I was traveling from spot to spot that had the host just screaming about what the case was about, and I knew much of what the host was saying just wasn't true. I knew from reading the appellate proceedings in the case that's not what happened. I was somewhat fed up, and I ended up going home that night, didn't sleep and stayed up all night to write that page.

It was really done as a way of trying to give people that were curious some basic explanation of the procedures, because as I first heard it, "Well the husband wants her dead so the Florida courts have just listened to him." That's not what happened at all. "She's not really in a vegetative state; she's talking and walking and thinking and communicating." The court decisions were exactly to the contrary. There had been a whole trial on what she wanted. The decision was not made by the husband; it was made by the court based on what everybody said about her, her life, her wishes. The representations about it being a decision by the husband were just wrong, and they were inflammatory, too. The statements about her not being in a vegetative state, well, you can still debate that and apparently people still are -- there had been a whole trial on the issue. The court had heard from experts on both sides, heard from an independent court-appointed expert and reached a decision. My original goal was just to get that kind of information out there so that if people were curious there'd be somewhere to go. Also, as I started to get e-mails on it I could refer people to the page.

OJR: You started out by doing little posts that would say so-and-so had a column, so-and-so has a story, and then you had this shift and you started to become the explainer.

MC: Because nobody else was. At some point it didn't do much good to just keep referring people to articles because stories didn’t do a good job of explaining what's going on. And stories are written by reporters, who generally aren't lawyers. It's no slight against them; they get their information by usually talking to lawyers, people involved in the case, people who often make for good quotes and certainly give you their client's spin on whatever's going on, but it doesn't necessarily make for an objective look at what's happened.

OJR: It becomes very “he said, she said” and doesn’t get to go very deep, does it?

MC: It's very troubling to people because they end up being very misled. And if a reporter makes a mistake, then everybody who reads the story or hears the report gets misled. What eventually happened is I started to appreciate just how much misinformation was out there and how much people had questions that media never answered. I started trying to answer. ...

OJR: What have you learned about the media? Anything that surprised you?

MC: Generally. I've been unfortunately disappointed. I think there are a lot of well-meaning reporters out there and well-meaning hosts who just don’t have the time to learn what's involved in a case like this or the law that surrounds a case like this. Maybe the people who prepare them are just doing a poor job but, in the end, the country has heard very loudly from a number of people who just didn't know the facts of the case, who just didn’t know the law when they talked about it. They talked about things being true, being factual, that were just incorrect. ...

OJR: Have you been following the discussions about citizen journalists, that certain bloggers -- not all bloggers because not all bloggers want to be in this realm – are providing a journalistic function as citizens? Personally, I think I’m providing one as a citizen – I’m a citizen and a journalist. But, I mean, in the sense that you feel you are reporting and serving a function journalists traditionally serve.

MC: That's a real mixed bag – be careful how strong you hold me to this so it doesn’t sound like the product of great thought -- it is mixed because there are competing priorities, and, I think, competing interests. For instance, the local newspaper is usually in business to make money and does want to follow stories that attract attention and may have an interest in sensationalizing. It needs to speak at a fairly low level because in the end that's the reader base for most publications. It’s not always true. But there’s a set of interests and values that go with that whereas someone sitting in my position, I don't really care to a certain extent about keeping readers or making people happy. I'm writing things that interest me because they interest me, not because I think they’re going to interest the people who might read it. At the same time, I have no financial interest in it. I don’t have ads on the site.