Class 5
Public records. Thousands of government, state, and local agencies across the country keep records: expense reports, contracts for development projects, banned license plates, registered dog names... the list goes on and on.
What are public records?
In its simplest form, public records are any information or documents made by a government agency or officer.
As ProPublica Illinois reporter Sandhya Kambhampati writes:
If you want to know how much money the city of Chicago spends on holiday parade security in a given year, you can file an open records request with the city for the details.
If you want to know how a college president spends his or her time, you can ask for his or her official calendar through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
A brief history of FOIA
The Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, gives the American people the tools to peer into the workings of the government. The government works for the people, so it’s only reasonable that non-confidential documents and information created by federal agencies be public. Though FOIA seems an essential tenet of American freedom and transparency, it was only signed into law relatively recently in American history.
In the 1950s, California Congressmember John Moss, a huge advocate for government transparency, proposed FOIA. It took more than 10 years, but in 1966 Moss got FOIA signed into law by a reluctant Lyndon B. Johnson.
In-class exercise 1: browse FOIA requests
Search filed requests on
MuckRock and find an interesting one. Try filtering on
Status >
Completed. We’ll go over some interesting ones people found as a class.
In-class exercise 2: brief data journalism reflection
Form groups of 3-4. Reflect on the following questions (without a laptop or computer) and write out some bullet points as a group.
- What are some ways to find or obtain data?
- How can you verify data is reputable?
- How can you incorporate data in the reporting process?
- How can you discover news stories from data?
