Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse covered the Supreme Court beat for The New York Times for nearly three decades. Previously she covered the New York State legislature at the paper’s Albany bureau. In 2005, Greenhouse published Becoming Justice Blackmun, a biography of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. Last year she accepted a buyout from The New York Times and went to work at Yale Law School where she serves as the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law. During her visit to campus yesterday, she spoke with The Sun about media, the Supreme Court, politics and how they interact.

Sun: What’s your take on the future of journalism?

Linda Greenhouse: I’m not presumptuous enough to have a definitive answer. Obviously, it’s a scramble for some kind of business model … The challenge is finding some way for the consumers of journalism to provide financial support for the journalism they consume.

There is a lot of creative thought going into this. We’re having a conference next month at Yale Law School, convening a lot of stakeholders in this issue. The title of the conference is “Who will pay the messenger?”

I think another challenge is finding a way not only so that content-providing companies can have a bottom line that’s positive but also so that they can provide a livelihood for people who can plan a career that will enable them to support a family and a middle-class lifestyle. It’s great that there are a lot of 20-something bloggers and people running around willing to work for fun and almost for free. But you can’t build a profession on that model. That really concerns me. It’s very worrisome that there will be a brain drain out of the profession if people can’t make a living on it. That’s often overlooked because people are looking at it from the corporate side, but you have to think about who is going to be doing this work.

Sun: How well or how poorly do you think the media is covering the Supreme Court?

L.G.: Those who cover the court do quite a good job. The problem is that a lot of news organizations have ceased to cover the court or don’t put the resources into covering the court. A number of the Washington bureaus of the newspaper chains — chains that either have sold themselves off in pieces or don’t exist — used to cover the Court and provide the member newspapers with pretty good ring-side seat coverage aren’t there anymore. It’s definitely a problem that the press corps has shrunk at the court.

Sun: How has the press coverage of the Supreme Court changed in your more than 30 years in journalism?

L.G.: In my time there, the TV networks diminished their coverage substantially. To the extent that most people get their news from television, they’re getting less of it. The rise of the internet has changed things so that there are very good online sources of information about the court. There are some blogs that are must-reads. The court itself has a website that posts briefs, and opinions and transcripts of arguments and is quite user-friendly and quite complete that really lets anybody sit at their computer and know what’s going on at the court. That’s a major change. Posting the transcripts on the same day started about two years and that’s a major change. You used to not be able to get the transcripts for weeks and you used to have to pay for them. There’s been some loss and some gain.

Sun: What role do you think the Supreme Court occupies in our society right now?

L.G.: I just saw the results of a survey yesterday that said something like 1 percent of the people questioned could identify Justice Stephen Breyer as a member of the court, which is pretty strange because of all the justices he’s [been] out and about on television, promoting a book and so on.

I don’t think the court looms very large in the day-to-day lives of most people, except when there is some special issue. Even last term, when the court was dealing with some very important issues involving race in the United States – the New Haven firefighters case, the big voting rights case that ended in kind of a bust. These were major cases, and I’m not sure you could honestly say the country was galvanized by them. On the other hand, the court, for all of its ups and downs and Bush v. Gore and everything else, retains a very high level of popular support in surveys that [ask]: “Do you think such-and-such an institution in our government is doing a good job?” The court always comes out on top. Whether that reflects a deep understanding [of the court], or simply a felt need that everything else may be falling apart and we need to believe in the Supreme Court, I don’t know, but that is a consistent result of social science polling.

Sun: To what extent do think there is value in covering the Supreme Court justices’ personalities versus their ideologies or opinions?

L.G.: Personalities are certainly part of the mix. Despite the fact that the confirmation hearings this summer tried to portray the role of a Supreme Court justice as kind of a robot – just announcing what the law obviously is, is clearly not true. It’s true that people do bring their backgrounds and their understanding of how the world works and how law works [to the court]. It’s important to keep your eye on substance while recognizing that these are human beings that have human beings that are reflected in the way they do their job.

I didn’t waste a lot of time pursuing sort of court gossip. When I thought [personality] was germane to the work of the court to reflect for readers how members of the court seemed to be handling their job or reacting to their job. For instance, a couple of terms ago when [Justice] Ruth Bader Ginsberg took, for her, what was the unusual step of feeling so strongly about certain cases that she read her dissenting opinions from the bench. I wrote a page one story about the emergence of [Ginsberg] after quite a few years on the court as a passionate dissenter from the way things seemed to be going under the new Roberts court.

That was a mix of the personal and the substantive that I thought added value to readers’ understanding of what was going on.

Sun: What do you think of the recent highly politicized Supreme Court nomination hearings?

L.G: I thought that the [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor hearings were very unsatisfying because it was such a political atmosphere. She’s obviously a very lively, engaging person, she was under such constrain not to say the wrong thing that she was kind of robotic. I thought it was pretty interesting that despite all that effort to not say anything that could possibly get a rise against anybody, there were still 30 Republicans that voted against her.

I think in retrospect she should have been herself. She’s a very winning and engaging person outside of the confirmation hearings. Obviously there are a bunch of Republicans who were going to vote “no” if President [Barack] Obama had sent up John Marshall as his nominee. If that’s what it’s come to, I think the president and his nominees ought to just go for it, and show the world who they are.

Sun: You wrote in a retrospective piece about your career covering the Supreme Court at The New York Times that “We have, most likely, the Supreme Court we deserve,” rather than the one we may want or need. What did you mean by that?

L.G.: I’ve been asked a lot about that. What I really meant was that if we really care about the court, and people look at it and say that’s not the court we want, then the way to do something about that is to put it on the screen in presidential campaigns and make it an issue. Don’t just assume nature will take care of it no matter who the president is. For instance, pro-choice voters are upset about the prospects of retaining the right to abortion and so on. It’s been the case for many years that the pro-choice majority doesn’t vote on the basis of a candidate’s position on abortion, whereas the right-to-life minority will vote on that basis. So there’s this kind of disequilibrium there, and if people really feel strongly about the fate of their issue, no matter what their issue may be, they should keep the court in mind when they vote.

Sun: What areas of law or legal themes do you think will be the “hot-button” issues at the Supreme Court in the coming years?

L.G.: I think what we’ve been dealing with in these Guantanamo cases for the last five years are very fundamental questions about the separation of powers and the balance of power in the country. We had a president who had a very unilateral approach to these policies. We had a Congress that was basically asleep and a court that was obliged to step in and exert some judicial authority. I think these are cases that will define the country’s approach to the rule of law in this very tough period we are in. In fact, I don’t think there’s anything that even comes close to that on the court’s agenda right now.

Sun: You will begin writing for The New York Times again later this fall in the form of an opinion column? What will be the focus of that column?

L.G.: I’ve been asked to write a column that will be mostly online, but sometimes on paper also, every two weeks. They haven’t had a law focus column since Anthony Lewis retired about six or seven years ago. So I really have a broad mandate to make whatever observations I have, and I’m working hard to keep up with the docket of the court; but it’s not a Supreme Court column as such. But I think the court’s cases can frame a lot of think about law, so I’ll be writing a fair amount about the court, but other things, too.