Word: porterfields
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...through the prolonged process that Farber did, both my newspaper and I would be belly-up and out of business," Robert M. Porterfield, who earlier this month won a court fight in Alaska very similar to the Farber case, said yesterday. The 33-year-old Porterfield is a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter for the Anchorage Daily News spending a year at Harvard in the Nieman Foundation's program for professional journalists...
...Porterfield went back to Anchorage in early November in response to a subpoena requiring him to turn over notes and phone records on a series of stories published starting in March 1977. Porterfield's discovery of a complex financial fraud that the stories recounted led to the indictment of three people, two of whom have since pleaded guilty...
...third defendant, Harry Neil Kelly, stood trial. But when Porterfield was asked during trial testimony to reveal confidential sources he used in his stories, he invoked the Alaska "Shield Law" 68 times. The 1967 law, never before tested, permits reporters to refuse to reveal their sources unless a judge orders them to after a special hearing. Kelly's defense lawyers won the right to a special hearing, but Porterfield won the right to hold on to the notes...
...case was more typical of shield law conflicts because, unlike Farber's case, I at least got a hearing," said Porterfield, who termed himself "a purist who still believes that the first amendment gives blanket coverage to reporters...
...winning such a case does not always result in a happy ending, said Porterfield, who added that he still has $5000 to $8000 in outstanding legal fees. "And the management of my paper, I am told, is already backing off of other controversial stories that could result in other subpoenas," he said...