Lance and friends provide the live blow-by-blow here and here, complete with incisive commentary on all the Channel 7 ads and stuff:

If there is one guy who should have got a whoopin' when he was in school, it's Matt Lorch.

Julie Donaldson says she missed work, wore long sleeves to hide the results of the abuse, which she testified included getting punched in the face and thrown against a wall.

Channel 7 general manager now former Channel 7 general manager: Randi Goldklank resigned and agreed to a plea deal in East Boston District Court that will keep her out of jail if she stays away from booze and drugs for a year. She also apologized to state troopers for her behavior at Logan, which included threatening one trooper's job after she was hauled off a plane - and will pay restitution to the trooper whose glasses she broke during the fray.

Last fall, Globe reporter Johnny Diaz profiled Channel 7's new general manager, Randi Goldklank. Now he discusses his discomfort with the way the media is ripping into one of its own:

... My discomfort with the coverage stems from having known Randi in the last year through my TV articles, which led me to write one on her. The person described in the police report doesn't mirror the enthusiastic and sprightly woman I have dealt with for a year. What is not being presented in this week's coverage is that she lives and breathes the news business. It pulses in her blood. She's aggressive but only because she likes to win and she brings an infectious energy (even when I spent time with her at her gym at 5 a.m. for my profile last Sept.) She brings that outlook to work each day to motivate her staff. I wish I had seen more of that in the coverage but all we had to go by was detailed in the police reports and my previous profile on her - something the other media didn't have. ...

OK, maybe I'm not cut out to write headlines for Channel 7. Still, will be interesting to see how they play the case of their general manager, whom the Herald reports was arrested at Logan for "unruly behavior." She says a male passenger on her inbound flight tried to fondle her and that she got upset when the flight attendant told her to "calm down." One thing led to another and State Police wound up cuffing her on the ground.

The Globe paints a slightly different picture, one involving an out-of-control angry drunk threatening a trooper's job.

Globe arts critic Mark Feeney won a Pulitzer for criticism, for ten essays.

Junot Diaz, a creative writing instructor at MIT, won the Pulitzer for fiction for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Channel 7 won two Murrow awards and an Associated Press award for its reporting on the autopsy results of the two dead Tai Ho firefighters (you may recall how every media outlet in town but Channel 7 broke the news, because they had the story first and the firefighters union got an injunction, which, of course, made news itself).

Channel 7 is getting rid of health reporter Deanna Lites, the Herald reports.

Jessica Heslam gets a copy of the appellate ruling letting Channel 7 air its story on the two Tai Ho firefighters by overturning a lower court ruling that banned it from doing so (even as every other news outlet in town was doing stories on the subject):

... "Simply put, the inability of the press to require the government to disclose information that is not part of the public record does not support a restraint on speech with respect to information already known to the press," Grainger wrote.

"Indeed and famously," the judge continued, "the presumption against prior restraints on free speech has prevailed even when the materials at issue are stolen and deal with issues of national security." ...

Other Tai Ho notes:

Every other media outlet did, even BostonNow, but WHDH was enjoined by a court ruling in a case brought by the firefighters' union. The Outraged Liberal discusses that:

... I'm no fan of 7News, with its over-the-top emphasis on crime, mayhem and the latest "thing." I find their style to be overly aggressive and their heated pursuit of what I think to be non-stories as annoying.

But, to single then out is wrong. Whether we like it or not, this is a legitimate story. And as we have learned from CSI and the other shows of its genre, evidence doesn't lie. The odds on mixing up the samples, even in a medical examiner's office as screwed up as the one in Suffolk County, are astronomical.

[Judge] Hopkins ruled that one news outlet could not report the kind of news we don't like to hear -- that even heroes are mortal human beings. That ruling is a bigger abomination than reporting the facts.

Dan Kennedy is shocked by the ruling:

By stopping WHDH-TV (Channel 7) from reporting on autopsy reports that allegedly show two Boston firefighters killed in an August restaurant blaze had abused drugs and alcohol, Hopkins violated the most basic of First Amendment protections — the protection against prior restraint. ...

The courts - right up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court - have consistently ruled that when a confidential document ends up in the hands of the media, there's nothing that can be done about it. The legal responsibility is on the keepers of those documents not to release them; the media, by contrast, have no legal obligation not to report on them. ...

Earlier:
Oh, my: Were Tai Ho firefighters drunk, on coke?

OK, so somebody at Wal-Mart (or maybe the camcorder factory) wanted to recreate that SNL skit with Justin Timberlake, only a bit more graphically. And, sure, it warrants the seven-alarm all-hands-on-deck coverage that only WHDH could provide. Still, Dave Alpert doesn't get Channel 7 referring to the mom and her "teenage child:"

... What is that? Is he a teenager or a child? My feeling is that they threw in the word "child" to make the act seem that much more despicable. When I was a "teenage child", we all took showers after gym in one big shower–and we all had penises. I think the kid can take seeing another one without trauma and a lifetime of therapy. ...