After the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court approached the judiciary-media committee a few years ago requesting recommendations for updates to Rule 1:19, the Rule 1:19 subcommittee focused in on two fundamental points, said Neil Ungerleider, who co-chaired the subcommittee with Justice John Curran, now retired from Leominster District Court.

“One is that the nature of who is a journalist has changed, and secondly, the change in technology has allowed the use of electronic equipment in a way that was never before possible, and how if at all were we going to accommodate that,” Ungerleider said in a March 12 interview. “The second part was actually a little easier to deal with than the first part, the question of electronic access … The larger issue became deciding who is a journalist, and how was some order going to be brought to that process so that the people who claimed to be journalists actually were, as opposed to people just showing up off the street saying they were a journalist.”

Ungerleider, the general judiciary-media committee co-chair and the manager for WCVB-TV Digital, said it was important to extend access to citizen journalists. He sees professional and citizen journalists as the same.

“There really shouldn’t be a difference,” he said. “They [professional journalists] may reach more people, but why is a reporter for the Boston Globe more important than someone writing a weekly community blog or column or runs a community website in Winchester? Why should that person be less important? It’s kind of contrary to the First Amendment, if you will. Freedom of the press applies to everybody.”

Massachusetts has historically been progressive when it comes to cameras in the courts, having the original Rule 1:19 on the books since the 1980s, Ungerleider said. The subcommittee therefore tried to make the language in the rule as inclusive as possible, to define “even the smallest journalist,” he said.

Ultimately, the SJC approved a rule defining the “news media” as “organizations that regularly gather, prepare, photograph, record, write, edit, report or publish news or information about matters of public interest for dissemination to the public in any medium, whether print or electronic, and to individuals who regularly perform a similar function.”

Taking that view, the Rule 1:19 subcommittee then debated how to accommodate journalists of all kinds, Ungerleider said. Some subcommittee members favored a credentialing process, especially expressing fears that gang members could intimidate witnesses, he said. The subcommittee eventually chose a registration approach instead, requiring news organizations and citizen journalists to fill out a form and submit it to the Public Information Office.

“There is that safeguard, if you will, that the registration process was designed to put in place so that a gang member can’t bring an iPhone into the courtroom,” he said. “A reporter can because they’ve showed the registration when they go in if they’re asked for it.”

Since the updates went into effect in September 2012, Ungerleider has said he’s seen a positive reception from WCVB-TV readers and viewers who can get live updates from the courtroom. Since reporters can use electronic devices such as laptops, cell phones and tablets in reporting from the courtroom, live blogging and Tweeting a trial as it is in progress can put news consumers in the middle of the judicial proceedings as they happen.

“The ability of our reporters to do that is very much welcomed and appreciated on our website because [readers] come … in pretty significant numbers,” Ungerleider said. “The expectation on the part of people who are looking for news has changed. They expect it in real time. They expect it with immediacy. They expect it when it’s happening. And the rule change has allowed us to do that.”

The ability to live blog judicial proceedings is somewhat unique to Massachusetts, Ungerleider said. Blogging, citizen journalism of proceedings and other new reporting ventures possible thanks to technology have transformed Massachusetts reporters’ expectations of covering the courts.

Additionally, the updates to Rule 1:19 coincidentally lined up with the emergence of Twitter and live blogging in reporting, coming at “just the right time,” he said

“It’s easy for reporters who work in this state to forget that the access that they have is really unique and that while some states have cameras, this may be one of the few of only states that allow the use of the electronic devices,” Ungerleider said. “That’s something that’s not happening anywhere else in the country. So this is a very unique set of circumstances that exist in this state.”