Ron Smith is an old man. I sat in the room of his tidy one-bedroom flat in Surrey a couple of months ago, flicking through albums of photo taken in animation studios now long gone. The young man perched on a stool at his drawing board, pipe clenched between his teeth, still bore a remarkable resemblance to the man sat across from me, the hair has lost its colour and the pipe is long gone but it's still Ron. The former Spitfire pilot and veteran of decades in comic book illustration was, and remains, a charming host. The results of the interview, and hopefully a little insight into Ron's fascinating life, will appear in the Judge Dredd Megazine soon.

But afterwards, something quite terrible happened. Ron's name made it into the media for all the wrong reasons.

Thankfully, he was found not guilty by a unanimous decision. Both rape and false allegations of rape cause misery and destroy lives, I'm not going to talk about the merits of the case - I wasn't in court, didn't hear the evidence, and found out the verdict only by phoning the court myself. His daughter, Sue, responded to the verdict with understandable relief here.

This post isn't about Ron Smith, or the case itself. It's about the reporting of it, how people can misunderstand court reporting, and how journalists bend the rules to suit their headlines.

When the story hit the internet forums, the Sun was accused of conducting a "trial by media" that was "reprehensible" and "irresponsible". It was unanimously agreed that the reporter was scum and a low down dirty rat. I'm sorry. But they were none of those things. The reaction to the story was just as knee-jerk as someone who automatically assumed the allegations were true.

As a good friend and fellow journo succinctly put it: "A court is a public forum, which is why names are used in court case reports. With certain exceptions, courtrooms are open to the public, and a report in a newspaper is a reflection of what the public would see". Idealistically, reporters attend court and report what happens for two reasons: 1) to prove that justice isn't just done but is seen to be done; 2) so that the public doesn't have to be there itself.

Fewer and fewer people buy or even read a newspaper nowadays. That's not just a problem for newspapers, it's a problem for us - we are slowly becoming more and more unused to waiting for our news. I spent more years than I care to remember in a newsroom, and many listless hours sat on uncomfortable court benches watching the wheels of justice grind slowly, slowly, then maddeningly quickly. Yet the reactions to court reports have led me to believe that while we have more news than we know what to do with, we are losing the ability to understand it properly. Conventions that have lasted for decades are fading from our consciousness as we are exposed to outlets that either ignore them or never knew they existed.

Take the humble inverted comma. The Sun's headline when it reported the case was " ... Girl of 13 'abused by artist' ...". Note the use of inverted commas - they tell you that it's reporting a claim, not a fact. They're a sub-editor's best friends because they can leave words out such as 'a court heard' or 'the prosecution claimed', clarifying words that would make any sub's head ache if he had to include them. Then there's "a court heard yesterday". That nicely lets you repeat what the prosecution said, before making it clear that it's an individual saying it rather than a judgement of the court. You could do the same with the defence and the verdict.

And that's where we run into trouble. Because some people do not read the "a court heard" bit. They read the sentence before it. And they tend to either accept it as fact or rail against it as "trial by media" and "bad reporting". But it's not bad reporting, it's following the conventions of the medium. Stick in the words "denies all charges" and, at the end "The trial continues" and you've done enough to satisfy the law. But the law was formulated in the days when people read their daily newspapers and you could reasonably expect that roughly the same number read the report of the verdict as had read the report of the first day. That's just not the case anymore. And it's not helped when newspapers, and I'm looking at you red-tops, report the often-sensational prosecution claims and evidence from the first day and then don't follow it up with reports of the defence or the verdict. Take issue with your average hack or news editor about this and they'll tell you what I used to tell people - they operate within the law and make it 'clear' that it's an ongoing case. But it's hard to read it like that and newspaper are under no obligation to report the verdict, there's no law that insists that the verdict be reported. And even if there is, what news editor worth their salt will waste space on reporting a  verdict that ultimately doesn't back up that earlier, juicier detail? Those conventions I've mentioned protect a way of court reporting that has existed for decades, allowing reporters to use the least amount of space to put across the maximum amount of effort.

Internet news has accelerated this. Many readers look for instant facts, instantly presented. They don't read the internet like they used to read a paper. It's an old newspaper maxim that you have the first four paragraphs, at most, to get your story across or the reader will stop reading. Internet news is even quicker - you literally have milliseconds. When you can no longer hold onto your readers for anything longer than a few seconds, you haven't got the liberty of taking your time.

So what do you do? Wait till the end of the trial to report all the facts in a reasoned manner? That's fine if you can spare a reporter for a week or two to make sure you get everything (and then don't resent a full page court report), or if you don't mind being trumped by your competitors who happily take daily copy from a freelancer sat in court. Then there's the problem that if a red-top followed evert trial it reported on from beginning to end your daily copy of the Sun would be court reporting from start to finish (literally!). There are plenty of good papers out there who report court stories responsibly, but these tend to be in the local press.

So it's the conventions, not the fact, of court reporting that needs to change. Journalism needs to drop these old slights-of-hand, because the way people read news isn't the same anymore.

I didn't like what the Sun had to say - I'd met Ron and found him to be a decent and extremely likeable man. I was relieved when the court's listings officer told me the result. But, as frustrating as it was, the report about Ron Smith's trial wasn't misreporting or assuming guilt, it wasn't even biased - it was a report of the first day of a court trial. Yet in the age of multi-platform, international news, the norms of news consumption that reporters once took for granted are evaporating. The way such news is reported must change with it.