Apparently both Jayne Miller of WBAL TV and Rob Lang of WBAL AM beat Marc Steiner to the punch on the Sheila Dixon resignation story. David Zurawik originally gave Steiner the credit. Baltimore Brew has more (via DCRTV.)

Zurawik also blogged about the “social media” aspect of the breaking story yesterday and goes on to mention reporters tweeting about the resignation. He points out a tidbit from Julie Bykowicz – that courtroom staff kept reporters from leaving the hearing after the judge reminded them of no tweeting or texting from the courtroom.

Zurawik left out any mention of the @insidecharmcity tweets about the breaking story and he also has no mention of Google Wave for discussions of events as they happened. We seem to be the only media outlet in town that has been using Wave in groundbreaking ways for the past couple of months – including yesterday and on the day Dixon was found guilty.

In Monday’s News Wave, we had a reader mention that at the rate the jury deliberations were going in the Sheila Dixon trial, that the jury would be ruining some Thanksgiving plans. We asked what might happen with that in our morning news roundup today and in our Tuesday News Wave.

Later in the day we were looking at reports from Baltimore Sun reporters tweeting about the trial and noticed that Annie Linskey (@annie_linskey) was wondering about the possibility of no verdict today. So, we asked her about what the judge might about sending jurors home for Thanksgiving.

Linskey’s reply:

… no idea what judge will do. Baltimore circuit court is open Wednesday.

A few minutes later, Linskey replied again:

… conventional wisdom is judge will want verdict before thanksgiving.

Thanks to Annie Linskey of the Sun for helping shed some light on this question for us.

WBAL.com reports on a Daily Record report

Reporters covering Mayor Sheila Dixon’s theft trial have been twittering away from the courtroom all week long.

But no more.

The Daily Record reports Judge Dennis Sweeney is threatening to eject any reporter who lets his fingers do the talking while court is in session.

I’ve posted a lengthy piece at OnQ Social Media discussing most of the issues going this week regarding Twitter and the trial of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon. There seems to be some factionalism going on among some of the media people there who are using Twitter and ones who aren’t (mainly the Baltimore Sun.)

It will be interesting to see what repercussions this has for the rest of the current trial and for Dixon’s next trial on perjury charges. The impact of the Twitter usage in this trial could be far-reaching across the U.S. as it relates to restrictions on trial coverage and new technology.

The post I wrote at the link above is one I went out of my way to be fair on to all sides involved. If anyone involved has any further comments you can leave a comment below, on the linked post, or send an email to mail@insidecharmcity.com or jeff@onqsm.com and we will make sure your unfiltered position is heard.

Update: It does appear that there was a protocol banning the use of phones by the media prior to the trial. The original post I made has more.

Update 2: I also got a reply from Justin Fenton of the Sun about the post and ran his reply unedited on the link above.

Update 3 This issue has also been mentioned at The Volokh Conspiracy.

The Baltimore Sun has also made a Twitter list of people tweeting from the courtroom.

Today’s session of the Sheila Dixon trial starts at 9 a.m. WBAL TV has live updates here.

You can also follow the trial on Twitter via the #dixontrial hashtag. Be sure to include the hashtag if you’re tweeting about the trial whether you’re in the courtroom or not. We have included updates from that hashtag below. These updates are from others tweeting about this hashtag.

Update: WBAL TV has the @wbaltv_court account on Twitter now. We are seeing anecdotal reports of a possible Twitter ban however, anyone with details please provide them. (There were rumors of a ban last week. At least one reporter tweeting last week said that is not true. It looks like things are just slow getting started today – hence the lack of tweets so far.)

Since @wbaltv_court is not playing nice with hashtags (there are no known two way conversations with any of the stations Twitter streams), I’ve added a separate box below to track it.