FOI Advocate Blog

From NFOIC:  NFOIC summit continued from New Orleans. Panel discussion, Not a Picayune Problem featured panelists Sherry Alexander, Steve Beatty, James O'Byrne, and Tod Smith. Peter Scheer was the moderator of the panel.

Please see speakers' biography information here.

How is the changing news media environment and the gradual reshaping of the newspaper business affecting the use and effectiveness of freedom of information requests and other journalistic efforts on behalf of open and accountable government?

New Orleans provides a microcosm of the nationwide trends taking place at the intersection of changing public media and open records. The panel was about problems unique to New Orleans. Panelists discussed changing news media environment in New Orleans and how it is reshaping the media industry.

The panelists generally agreed that even though media outlets have reduced their print versions, the future of the news content is still optimistic.

From The New York Times:  WASHINGTON — The Obama administration sought on Wednesday to revive legislation that would provide greater protections to reporters from penalties for refusing to identify confidential sources, and that would enable journalists to ask a federal judge to quash subpoenas for their phone records, a White House official said.

The official said that President Obama’s Senate liaison, Ed Pagano, called Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who is a chief proponent of a so-called media shield law, on Wednesday morning and asked him to reintroduce a bill that he had pushed in 2009. Called the Free Flow of Information Act, the bill was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in a bipartisan 15-to-4 vote in December 2009. But while it was awaiting a floor vote, a furor over leaking arose after WikiLeaks began publishing archives of secret government documents, and the bill never received a vote.

The new push comes as the Obama administration has come under fire from both parties amid the disclosure this week that the Justice Department, as part of a leak investigation, secretly used a subpoena earlier this year to obtain a broad swath of calling records involving Associated Press reporters and editors.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday defended the subpoena but also disclosed that he had recused himself last year from overseeing the investigation, and that his deputy, James M. Cole, was the official who signed off on obtaining the toll records — logs of calls sent and received — for several A.P. bureaus and reporters.

From First Amendment Center:  What The Associated Press calls “a massive and unprecedented intrusion by the Department of Justice”(DOJ) into its news gathering activities is more than an affront to a free press — it’s a direct challenge.

If the seizure of telephone records from offices and personal lines is as broad and unfocused as AP CEO Gary Pruitt describes, the DOJ move to seize records of calls made from offices and personal phones of AP journalists marks a new and threatening move by an administration already facing reports that the IRS has targeted groups simply for educating others about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a record of the most prosecutions ever of government employees over leaks to the press, under the nearly-100 year old Espionage Act.

The nation’s founders provided strong protection for a free press in the form of the First Amendment to guarantee a free flow of news and information from a source not licensed or controlled by the government.

According to Pruitt, records were seized of more than 20 phone lines used mostly in New York and Washington, D.C., and some home phone records for AP staff, for a two-month period early last year. Potentially, as many as 100 AP journalists may have used those lines in newsgathering activities.

From Des Moines Register:  Iowa Public Radio is subject to state open-records laws and likely must adhere to public meetings laws, the state attorney general’s office said in an informal opinion.

The office, however, doesn’t plan to investigate further because IPR has a written policy that requires the station to follow the state’s public meetings laws, according to a May 9 letter to State Sen. David Johnson, R-Ocheyedan.

From North Jersey:  Fair Lawn - Reports by the borough of residents abusing Open Public Records Act (OPRA) requests and businesses using OPRA information for profit have prompted State Sen. Bob Gordon to sponsor a bill that would exempt certain personal information from the state's open public records law.

OPRA is the state statute that governs the public's right to access government records. It was intended to expand the public's right of access to government records as well as create an appeals process if access is denied. There are no restrictions on OPRA requests for commercial use and there are no limitations on the number of requests that can be made, according to the Government Records Council, the agency that oversees compliance with OPRA.