I was present at the downtown Los Angeles courthouse on the morning the not-guilty verdicts were read, observing the hurried activities of newsworkers. The Simpson case was clearly the news story to end all news stories. Two-hundred and fifty phone lines had been installed in the court's twelfth-floor pressroom to accommodate the day-to-day communications needs of the 1,159 credentialed newsworkers who covered the case (Coffey 1995). In addition to the suffocating presence of US media, news operations from more than a dozen foreign nations had also sent newsworkers to cover the latest developments. Of the fifty-eight highly coveted seats in Judge Ito's courtroom, twenty-four had been set aside for this corps of newsworkers (Elias and Schatzman 1996). Seven of these seats had been permanently assigned to the Los Angeles Times (see chapter 5), two book authors, and four other mainstream news operations. The remaining seventeen seats were rotated between two other book authors and thirty-nine other news operations. One of these less-favored news operations was the largest black-owned newspaper in the West, the Los Angeles Sentinel (see chapter 6).