It's a classic Hollywood scene straight out of a black and white court room drama: A gaggle of reporters rushing to the phone booths to dial into their newsroom and dictate a story over the line.

In an era of instant communication, I'm finding this scenario still occurs - at least in our newsroom.

Yesterday provided two examples: The first occurred when a robber struck the Saratoga National Bank & Trust Company branch on West Avenue in Saratoga Springs.

The report came over the police scanner and immediately caught the ear of both myself and reporter Emily Donohue, who quickly assembled her gear and was out the door while I typed up early details to get onto our site and then tweet and post to Facebook. 

Almost immediately after she left, the scanner reports indicated that the suspect had been apprehended. I updated the story online. Only a short time later, Emily called in with her first reports from the scene, which I took down and used to update the story a third time. She called in more details from the scene a short time after that, and the story was updated again, as well as sent out via e-mail blast.

This was the exact method we employed in late May, when the very same bank was robbed. Reporter Paul Post was on the scene soon after the May 24 robbery occurred and phoning in a series of several updates, which he dictated to me. We generated the most thorough coverage of the robbery after it happened, including a Google map that showed the area around the bank police had initially searched for the suspect, and later that day a video of the bank president describing the incident. (The suspect in that incident initially got away, but turned himself in to city police the following day.)

The second example yesterday happened around 7 p.m. Emily was on her way to a meeting in Malta when she came across an accident on Route 9 near Cherry Choke Road (near the Northway Exit 13 interchange). She phoned in to alert us to the accident and informed us she would get the details on it but miss her meeting as a result.

I wrote a quick sentence or two, added a Google map, and by the time that was set Emily had called in with first details, and the story was updated. Another phone call provided more info, and then I received a text message that she had e-mailed some photos. I downloaded one, cropped it, and published it with the story.

Phone booths are extinct, but even if armed with laptops or the latest mobile gadgets, I think there's room for this method of news gathering/dissemination in the modern news ecosystem. The reporter can phone in information to an editor back in the office and put the onus on them to type something coherent and publish it to the web (and blast out via social networking tools). This frees the reporter up to gather more details for another phone update.