Legal affairs reporter Meghann Cuniff was covering the Tory Lanez trial when she had a moment of clarity: legacy media, even some newer outlets, aren’t necessarily giving readers the information they want.
“The LA Superior Court allows people to copy and review evidence,” she says. “You can go into the exhibit room and get all the exhibits. What the YouTubers did, who didn’t have salaried jobs with news organizations, they immediately went and put in the request. The woman who did it, she got all the stuff, all the exhibits and did a YouTube live and put it all online. I have no idea how much she made off it but that had to be huge for her.”
Not only was that a powerful way for that YouTuber to build her brand, it was utilizing a reporter’s access to records and providing the audience with the information they’re interested in learning.
“It underscores how mainstream news organizations are becoming irrelevant,” Cuniff says. “People don’t feel like they can get what they want from us and a lot of the time we can’t give it to them.”
Cuniff also confesses that covering high-profile celebrity trials isn’t the wall-to-wall legal intrigue viewers might expect from watching courtroom dramas on TV.
“The big thing for me was realizing, these are regular people when they get into the courthouse,” says Cuniff, a former courthouse reporter for the Spokesman Review in Spokane, Oregon, before eventually moving to Southern California. She now runs her own website, Legal Affairs and Trials with Meghann Cuniff.
In previous positions, Cuniff covered other high-profile cases, including the federal case against Michael Avenatti, who represented Stormy Daniels in her case against former President Donald Trump. Those cases had more twists and turns than the higher profile cases she’s covered in the past year, including the sexual assault trials of actor Danny Masterson and producer Harvey Weinstein. She also covered the assault trial of rapper Tory Lanez, who was accused of shooting his former girlfriend, Megan Thee Stallion.
“The biggest change is going from covering federal court trials involving insider trading charges to covering sexual assault cases in Los Angeles Superior Court,” she says. “These are not the federal trials you’re used to, the big complex cases. The biggest change for me was realizing that these are pretty simple trials. Legally, there’s not that much to cover here. Prosecutors, when doing direct exams of the victims, the questions are what happened and where were his hands. It’s challenging when it’s a sensitive topic and you have an emotional victim.”
Meghann Cuniff, a legal affairs reporter based in Southern California, has a long history of covering breaking news, conducting investigations and writing long-form narratives from courtrooms about high-profile cases.
