A blogger has raised £6,000 via indiegogo to live tweet during the phone-hacking trial.
Peter Jukes overshot his crowdfunding target by £2,000 with two days left to run, and the current amount means he will be able to continue tweeting from the Old Bailey until after Christmas.
The trial involves former News of the World editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, and centres around whether key figures in Rupert Murdoch’s news empire had knowledge of the phone hacking.
Jukes, who is the author of a book called The Fall of the House of Murdoch, had been covering the unfolding scandal for two years for online publication The Daily Beast before he began live tweeting.
He had been planning to seek other work when the trial began, admitting that he was broke but decided to seek crowdfunding after many requests to continue his coverage.
He had written on his Indiegogo page: "I am unable to continue to cover the current Old Bailey trial for financial reasons. However, there have been a large number of people urging me to crowd fund the money to cover my basic costs.
"Despite a bit of embarrassment, I’m going to put pride to the side and see if I can do that."
After he received the cash he needed in just one day he posted an update, saying: "The response to this has been phenomenal. It was funded in one day which, as Rupert Murdoch once said (a tad ungrammatically) is ‘the most humble day of my life’.
"Just so contributors know, I won’t be spending the overshoot on wine and Cayman Beach holidays: every extra thousand pounds should buy me a couple of more weeks at the trial."
