With apologies to the late Tip O'Neill, it serves us well to remember that all news is local. This is particularly true when it comes to reporting on open government issues and the impact these stories have on your community.Although it's important to cover these issues whenever they occur, Sunshine Week, marked this year for March 16-22, is a particularly good time to remind readers, viewers and listeners of how access to information has led to positive change.
The school board, city council, zoning commission, health department, public works, police and fire — these are all places to look not just for breaking news, but also to start to track patterns in the release of information. There also are great human interest stories in the people who are fighting for access to records and meetings.
And in an election year, looking at where candidates and the government offices they run — or hope to run — stand on open government is crucial not only to developing a portrait of the candidate, but also to understanding what could happen to information in the term ahead.
Some examples of how newspapers highlighted FOI news from previous Sunshine Week packages include:
The Connecticut Post in Bridgeport found that federal court clerks were routinely refusing to release the names of sitting jurors, despite the fact that the individuals had stated their names and other personal information in open court during jury selection. This news came as a surprise to some of the judges. An opinion column by the Post's editor called such secrecy "a wholesale miscarriage of American justice."
"Personally," wrote Kansas City Star Editorial Page Editor Miriam Pepper referring to stories the paper broke using government records, "I want to know if my tax dollars are wasted on the wrong cell phone plans, if government holds property it can't even categorize and doesn't need, that a firefighter died after lax equipment repairs, or that my parent might be at risk in a nursing home with a bad record of care."
One of the most ambitious — certainly one of the most visible — demonstrations of how important open government is to newsgathering has been undertaken by The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. Each Sunshine Week, the paper runs the Sunshine Week icon next to every item, from briefs to features, which came from public access to government information. In 2006, it estimated that the icon appeared next to roughly 7 in 10 stories during Sunshine Week.
It's important to remember, however, that access to government meetings and information is not a special privilege of the news media, but a right of the public. Educating people about what kind of information is available and how to get it is another way to engage them in your content, and provides particularly creative opportunities for your Web site with links, interactive request generators, story archives and more.
For more examples, see the Bright Ideas books and online gallery on the Sunshine Week Web site, http://www.sunshineweek.org/. You'll also find an online Tool Kit with materials to help you engage in Sunshine Week 2008 and the Sunshine Campaign through the elections.
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