When the decision came down, that commitment came through. While some traditional outlets, including CNN, Fox News and even NPR’s Diane Rehm, went with an instant — wrong — read of an intricate opinion, the blog founded by attorneys Howe and her husband Tom Goldstein, who handle cases that go to the Supreme Court, held steady. But this isn’t your typical bloggers-over-journalists story: the not-so-secret sauce at SCOTUSblog is Lyle Denniston, the dean of the Supreme Court press corp who meshes 50-plus years of traditional journalism experience and sensibilities with a 24/7, real-time platform. (Howe describes him as “full time and then some.”)

When we spoke a couple of days before the decision, Denniston talked about his own careful reporting style and how that fits with his desire to show that online journalism can be trusted:

“We do like to think we are competitive and we love it when we are out in front of other media but basically being first is not the most important thing for us. It’s being first AND accurate at the same time. … Unfortunately, a lot of the internet has a reputation of not being accurate.”

So the team at SCOTUSblog took three long minutes from getting the ruling to reporting that Chief Justice John Roberts led the 5-4 majority declaring the Obama administration had a mandate, then another two minutes to declare the whole ACA was upheld with the exception of narrow reading on Medicare. Howe almost instantly mentioned the part about the mandate being judged a tax but held off on the rest. The screengrab from the CoveritLive replay below covers that three minutes:

They used Twitter to get the word out a few seconds ahead of the live blog. If that’s all someone wanted, they didn’t have to add to the server traffic.

#SCOTUS upholds #ACA individual mandate.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

Overnight sensation but not an overnight success

Fueled by interest in high-profile, politically polarizing cases, SCOTUSblog may be an overnight sensation but it isn’t an overnight success — and health care didn’t make it a go-to site. But visits have snowballed, aided by links from Matt Drudge and Instapundit for people following the health care or immigration cases. On one recent “decision day” they had about 97,000 people logged in concurrently on the live blog, most of them issue shopping. “When I typed the words ‘no health care today’ the numbers just dropped,” Howe recalled during an interview between immigration and health care decision days.

The influx means the user mix has changed considerably. Where once it was primarily those with some knowledge about how the often-byzantine Supreme Court operates, now the questions they get during a live session run the gamut. “We do have ways of chronicling or monitoring,” said Denniston, “but the only way we know about what kind of people is to read their questions, see if whether sophisticated or naive.” The high-traffic days bring more queries, too, ranging from questions about how decisions are drafted (by law clerks with varying degrees of involvement by the justices) and delivered to points of law. The immigration live blog drew roughly 3,400 comments and questions.

Howe says trying to balance those needs has been a challenge lately. If she explains “what it means to be pre-empted without having indicated that I was responding to questions then I get people who say don’t insult our intelligence. You just can’t win.”

But it also gives them a better chance to bring in new users for their Plain English section, where cases are explained primarily for people without a legal background or without enough of one to pull out the finer points from the usual legalese.

Howe added, “It’s helpful for us, we’re used to operating on the assumption that there’s a basic knowledge about the court.” The polarizing cases also bring a change in tone. “We see a change in tenor in the comments certainly, but I don’t think it’s changed the tenor of the blog.”

For Denniston, it hearkens back to the days when he was covering the court for the Boston Globe — writing for the average newspaper reader as well as court observers. “We want to have more and more people who are not judges and lawyers reading our blog,” Denniston said. They also want to bring readers back between cases and between sessions by “constantly trying to enlarge the fascination factor of our audience.”

It’s all part of the changing mission of a niche blog closing in on its tenth anniversary.

Probably more traffic today than in SB’s first 5 years, combined. So grateful; a little scared. #teamlyle #dontcrash

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

‘Useless business development tool’

Asked when SCOTUSblog was founded, Howe thought back to another family milestone in late 2002: “I was about 7 months pregnant with our first child when we started the blog and she will be 10 in January.” It was Goldstein’s idea, founded for promotion to encourage business development for their own firm Goldstein & Howe, P.C.. Howe thought it was a terrible idea at first but agreed it was worth trying.

She explained, “We thought these were things we should be doing anyway as part of our practice. It turns out it didn’t work that way at all,” Howe said. “It was a useless business development tool. Eventually we switched from being a business development tool to regarding ourselves as a tool for public information.” It wasn’t designed to make money on its own.

That realization came around the same time that newsrooms started cutting back, she said, devoting fewer resources to places like the Supreme Court. It fit in with the couple’s interests in teaching law; they teach appellate courses at Stanford and Harvard. Denniston started writing for them in late 2004, adding a new dimension to the site.

They’re transparent about clients and cases they take to the Supreme Court but anything promotional goes on the firm’s site. They also decided not to get into politics and do as much as they can to keep political views out of the blog. They even make sure that posts by experts arguing one side of a case only run paired with one in favor of the other side.

When Goldstein moved to Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP. in 2006 to establish a Supreme Court practice there, the larger firm became the blog’s sponsor. The sponsorship stayed in place when Goldstein rejoined Howe and her partner Kevin Russell at Howe & Russell 18 months ago. The firm’s name changed to Goldstein & Russell — and the sponsorship changed late last year.

Instead of a law firm, SCOTUSblog is sponsored by Bloomberg Law as a way to expose law students to legal information products competing with WestLaw and Lexis.

While Howe wouldn’t talk specific numbers, she said, “The Bloomberg sponsorship has been tremendous. We’re still not paying Lyle what he deserves to be paid but it’s more in line.” They’ve also been able to hire a full-time blog manager and other staff plus invest in technology. Goldstein told live blog users Thursday that it would cost about $25,000 to handle the traffic “for the 20 minutes between 10:15 and 10:35am, and mostly for the first 30 seconds or so.” Poynter and the Nieman Journalism Lab have written about the tech back flips and expenses it took to keep SCOTUSblog up and running over the past few weeks.)

Appx 1M simultaneous readers. 3.4M hits so far. Survived one major hacking attack. Got it right. So grateful to all.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 28, 2012

In the past, Howe said, they linked to the court or to publicly available copies of decisions. Now SCOTUSblog uses “gazillions of document links” to Bloomberg Law. It’s easier and faster. Bloomberg links to the blog, too.

Always a reader out there

The shift hasn’t helped them in one area: credentialing. No one from SCOTUSblog has a hard pass, the golden ticket to the Supreme Court press room, as a correspondent for the site. Early on, Howe says they were told the site didn’t qualify under Congressional Gallery rules that ban lobbying.

Denniston came with his own hard pass, credentialed through Boston radio station WBUR. The lawyers are all members of the Supreme Court bar so have some access that way. It’s not an ideal situation but Howe said, “Lyle’s not going to retire ever.”

Technically Denniston has retired from journalism before. He just hasn’t stopped doing it. Howe says she often edits two posts late at night, then wakes up to find he posted yet another one before he logged off. When I mentioned that, Denniston told me he likes knowing “no matter what time you put something on the internet there’s always a reader out there, at least one.”

The biggest difference between newspapers and now, he told me, isn’t the screen; it’s the way he works. “I have no assignments, no editors and no deadlines so I work all the time.” He’s still a phone-and-shoe-leather reporter but says he couldn’t survive without the internet for research.

While some of his contemporaries — heck, even a lot of younger journalists — are still crotchety about online journalism, Denniston skipped that stage. He’s not into social media, even though the Twitter #teamlyle because a trending hashtag over the last couple of weeks. (Howe doubts he could write in 140 character chunks.)

He likes the cooperative spirit online and the ability to move between the conversational live blog, which he compares to an old live-radio show, and the more formal pieces he writes. “Basically I’m still writing stories for an electronic display the same way I did for a print display,” Denniston said. “The same kind of professional disciplines are at work.”

He knows there are some who have had trouble making a similar transition. His message to them: “If some in print are intimidated by the prospect of communicating via the internet, they should get over it.”

What next?

With the formal end of the session in sight, it’s back to business mostly as usual for SCOTUSblog, There are posts to write, a site to update and a new session to get ready for. Denniston is already looking ahead to affirmative action case about college students and gay marriage as two of the high-profile cases when the court resumes on the first Monday of October, around the time the blog officially turns 10.

A decade is a lot of time in internet years. Is the passion still there? Howe says yes, they have a lot more left to do:

The longer we do it the more we realize … I feel like we have helped to create this sort of institution and I think it would be very hard to give up.

Perry, who recently left Conde Nast as VP of planning and development, has a remit to take an aggressive approach for the group built around the National Journal politics and policy brand.

It’s a new role at Atlantic Media, where until now National Journal’s digital strategy was run by Scott Havens as Atlantic’s VP for digital operations; Havens was promoted to SVP of Finance and Digital Operations in January. Perry will focus only on National Journal, which relaunched NationalJournal.comin late 2010 and last year announced an enterprise-level membership model that includes access to all of its digital and print publications (NationalJournal.com, National Journal Daily, the weekly National Journal magazine and National Journal Hotline) along with with members-only events.

Perry’s subscription experience with the Wall Street Journal‘s online operations at Dow Jones (NSDQ: NWS), where she was SVP of marketing & business development , should be helpful when it comes to that. She has plenty of work to do. The site currently suggests people interested in subscriptions send e-mail or call, while its membership brochure is a pdf although there is also a handy contact form buried on a contact page. Release.

Users who unlock the Time-Foursquare badge get “access to a curated list of must-attend venues and events,” plus convention tips from Time reporters — like historical facts from past conventions and 2012 campaign tips about the nominees and delegates.

Time already uses Foursquare to tie the covers of back issues to historical sites around the country. Other magazine brands have also experimented with Foursquare — Lucky offers mobile shopping deals, for instance — and magazines like New York and Time (NYSE: TWX) Out allow users to save web content to their Foursquare accounts.

The app provides election news both from the Times and its political blogs and from sources around the Web (which, for now, just seems to mean links to various news outlets’ political sections), as well as a collection of campaign data. The app itself is free to download, and includes free access to the top six news stories.

The app’s full content, however, is available only to subscribers. Non-print subscribers have two options: A subscription to NYTimes.com plus smartphone apps for $14.99 per month, or “All Digital Access,” including NYTimes.com, smartphone apps and tablet apps for $34.99 per month. All Digital Access is included with home delivery subscriptions.

Last month the New York Times released an iPad app, “The Collection,” which collects the paper’s fashion and style coverage, that is entirely free now but will require a subscription for most content starting March 15, 2012.

Politico is not selling the books directly–this is more of a storefront than a store. Users can browse for titles and then click through to buy them from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) or independent bookstore Politics and Prose. 2,743 titles are currently available, from a wide variety of publishers. Update: Random House is staffing the store, handling the merchandising, and providing the bookstore technology, as well as doing marketing for the store to drive traffic. Politico receives the affiliate fees when someone buys a book via a link in the store.

Politico’s announcement promises a “prominent opportunity” for shoppers to pre-order Random House and Politico’s first instant e-book, Playbook 2012: The Right Fights Back, due out on November 30. I couldn’t find that title featured anywhere on the bookstore’s front page, however, and had to specifically search for it to find it. The ad blocker on my browser blocked the Playbook graphic, apparently considering it an ad though it did not block other content on the site.

I liked the mix of books on the site–not just presidential candidate autobiographies (Michele Bachmann, Core of Conviction!!) but also political fiction (John Grisham) and humor (Stuff White People Like). On the jacket of his Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games, it looks as though Mitt Romney has a snake wrapped around his neck.

Publishers have been talking about selling directly to customers for awhile, and this is a chance for Random House to test the concept: “By partnering with an organization as popular and trusted in the political arena as Politico, we’re able to deliver book publishing’s best politically relevant content directly to interested readers and consumers,” RH president of digital Madeline McIntosh said in a statement.

The first installment in the series, to be published as an e-book on November 4, 2011, is Election 2012: The Battle Begins, by RCP co-founder Tom Bevan and Washington editor Carl Cannon. It will cost $1.99 and, judging by the Amazon product page, was previously titled The Conservative Comeback.

Politico and Random House Publishing Group announced a similar venture this summer; they will also publish four instant e-books about the 2012 campaign. The first of those, Playbook: The Right Fights Back, will be available November 30 as a $2.99 e-book.

At first glance, it is difficult to tell how these series from separate divisions within the same house will differ from each other. RealClearPolitics is considered to be slightly more conservative than Politico, though both sites would say they aim to be unbiased. Crown Publishing is home to the conservative imprint Crown Forum–but then again, Crown is also the publisher of the Obamas’ books. Success for one series over another could ultimately hinge on the ways that Politico and RealClearPolitics market their respective books–and RealClearPolitics’ first title being a dollar cheaper than Politico’s first title can’t hurt.

If the election were held today, Rick Perry would win — on YouTube Politics, anyway. The site ranks 2012 candidates’ popularity by the number of times their videos have been viewed. This morning, Perry’s video “Proven Leadership” has the most views (821,029 today), trailed by Herman Cain’s “God Bless America: A 9-11 Tribute from Herman Cain” (161,696 views).

What else are we going to get from the site? YouTube Politics will post not only official campaign videos but also “parodies, gotchas, and speeches, offering you a 360-view of the election,” the official YouTube blog says. The site also compares candidates’ video views and YouTube subscribers and shares and lets users subscribe to their official YouTube channels.

So far, though, clicking on the videos for “Meet the Candidates” reveals on-message official campaign videos, not parodies or gaffes. The videos in which, for example, Herman Cain says that being gay is a choice, or Rick Perry calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme, are not currently to be found on the site. I also could not find clips from, say, the Fox (NSDQ: NWS) News-Google Republican debate on September 22.

Ramya Raghavan, YouTube news and politics manager, told Politico, “We wanted to paint a really holistic view for what politics looks like on YouTube…We’re seeing that citizens have an enormous appetite for getting political information online.” So far, the site is less holistic than simply being a campaign video roundup.

It’s not immediately clear from the site or the blog post how the video-posting process works — that is, whether YouTube alone has the power to add videos or if users can too. In poking around the site, I didn’t see any obvious way for someone like me to submit a video, though.

I’ve asked YouTube whether clicking on a candidate on the site would ever bring up negative videos about that candidate, or videos that reveal a candidate making a gaffe. (In such a case, more views could bring up the candidate’s number of video views, and therefore YouTube Politics ranking, but may not have nothing to do with whether a candidate is performing well). Also, what officially qualifies as a “gaffe”?

I’ve also asked how curated the site is going to be. What are the qualifications for a video to be included? Can videos include any editorializing–could Jon Stewart’s comments surrounding a video be shown, for instance–or must they be primary materials, with no editorializing or even a news anchor’s mild comment?

No word back from YouTube yet. If YouTube Politics is able to strike a balance between showing candidates’ official messages and their less-rehearsed moments, it could be a useful resource this campaign season. If not, it’s unlikely to provide much insight–or to change anybody’s mind.

Update: A YouTube spokeswoman tells us:

The Hot Political Videos tab which you can see at the top of the page takes you to that week’s top videos that could be from right across the spectrum — citizen-created, gotcha moments, news footage, etc. That section is curated by Storyful.

The ranking on the 2012 Candidates tab is determined by the views during that time period of videos from their official channel.

While a citizen can’t add a video directly to youtube.com/politics, if someone uploads a video and it starts to take off, it would possibly be included in the Hot Political Videos list.

Schultz went public three weeks ago with his decision not to donate money to any campaigns and his appeal to fellow business leaders to follow suit. AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong was among the 100 or so CEOs who quickly agreed. Since then, Schultz has gone into full campaign mode in his campaign against political business as usual, making TV appearances and launching a “take the pledge” effort at http://www.upwardspiral2011.org and aimed at getting both CEOs and other donors to take the pledge.

Today’s e-mail blast touts the next step: “a national call-in conversation on Tuesday September 6th hosted by ‘No Labels.’ a nonpartisan organization dedicated to fostering cooperative and more effective government.”

Click on the Upward Spiral link and you can either RSVP or “take the pledge.” That takes you to a Facebook page describing the “platform for action” where you can pledge not to donate and/or to hire. So far it stands at 2,047 promising not to donate — which may sound like a small number but can reflect a lot of money that usually goes to candidates — and 308 pledging to hire.

I wanted to know more but when I clicked on the “tell me more” button I rebelled at all the Facebook permissions it took to get there. I should be able to find out more about an effort like this without giving up privacy.

That brings me back in a way to the beginning. I’m not offended by today’s e-mail from Howard Schultz. He has a powerful consumer pulpit and a message he thinks is important enough to use all of his resources to get across. It’s in keeping with the emphasis Starbucks has had on responsible giving for many years and other efforts.

But I probably wouldn’t feel ok if it were the head of another public company — or any company — using my permission for a consumer relationship to send messages about, say, a proposition to ban gay marriage or to back a specific candidate. How about an opt in for any info that isn’t directly related to the company’s goods and services?