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People get excited about things like this and say things like "this is REAL investigative journalism". Or "I wish mainstream journalists would start doing this"

People get excited about things like this and say things like "this is REAL investigative journalism". Or "I wish mainstream journalists would start doing this". Look, I read documents like this all day long. So do investigative journalists. It's just that very few people care about the stuff we find until it turns into an international spy thriller. Just because you don't care about it on the state/local level doesn't mean we don't put in the work. Edit: You can look at some of the great investigative journalism you're probably not paying attention to here: http://www.ire.org/blog/extra-extra/ http://www.ire.org/blog/extra-extra/

rhizome 13y ago
I'm not sure what your point is, is someone saying that you're lazy?
- patdennis 13y ago
  I was just trying to preempt the inevitable "investigative journalism is dead" comments.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    Judging from the comments so far, it may not be so inevitable. However, there is still the law of averages, I guess.
deleted 13y ago
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morisy 13y ago
"I wish mainstream journalists would start doing this". Spin it however you want, fewer and fewer mainstream journalists are able to focus on this. I work with a dozen or so newsrooms a year on FOIA, CAR, and other investigative reporting training, and in most newsrooms only 1 or 2 hands go up when I ask who has filed a public records request in the past year. MuckRock was built to change that: To make it easier to add document-requesting and analysis to the daily news cycle, to help non-journalists get interested, excited, and able to request and share documents, and to enable large scale-FOIA projects like request BAH files from dozens of agencies. And we've found that lots of people do care about it at the state/local level, but news organizations are a) terrible about marketing their work. b) assume readers aren't interested in the nuts and bolts. c) let that work die in obscurity, content to try to win awards with it rather than to truly engage the public. So yes, this is a flashy dump of documents, but we've helped hundreds of others do meaningful, smaller scale stories, and whatever way you cut it, I don't think there's enough groups doing that. I also keep my own list of interesting, public-records driven stories: http://pinboard.in/u:morisy/t:to_foi/ http://pinboard.in/u:morisy/t:to_foi/ Encourage anyone who is interested to reverse engineer them and try those requests in their city, state, and country.
- patdennis 13y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I love Muckrock! Wasn't trying to say you guys aren't necessary. I file FOI requests for a living, and I'd love to be in touch with you guys about a number of things - best practices for turning government records into structured data, the importance of reforming records retention on the government side to reduce the burden on public records officers, fixing FOI on the local level, etc. Feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter: twitter.com/patdennis

rhizome 13y ago

I'm not sure what your point is, is someone saying that you're lazy?

patdennis 13y ago
I was just trying to preempt the inevitable "investigative journalism is dead" comments.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Judging from the comments so far, it may not be so inevitable. However, there is still the law of averages, I guess.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

morisy 13y ago

"I wish mainstream journalists would start doing this". Spin it however you want, fewer and fewer mainstream journalists are able to focus on this. I work with a dozen or so newsrooms a year on FOIA, CAR, and other investigative reporting training, and in most newsrooms only 1 or 2 hands go up when I ask who has filed a public records request in the past year. MuckRock was built to change that: To make it easier to add document-requesting and analysis to the daily news cycle, to help non-journalists get interested, excited, and able to request and share documents, and to enable large scale-FOIA projects like request BAH files from dozens of agencies. And we've found that lots of people do care about it at the state/local level, but news organizations are a) terrible about marketing their work. b) assume readers aren't interested in the nuts and bolts. c) let that work die in obscurity, content to try to win awards with it rather than to truly engage the public. So yes, this is a flashy dump of documents, but we've helped hundreds of others do meaningful, smaller scale stories, and whatever way you cut it, I don't think there's enough groups doing that. I also keep my own list of interesting, public-records driven stories: http://pinboard.in/u:morisy/t:to_foi/ http://pinboard.in/u:morisy/t:to_foi/ Encourage anyone who is interested to reverse engineer them and try those requests in their city, state, and country.

patdennis 13y ago
Don't get me wrong, I love Muckrock! Wasn't trying to say you guys aren't necessary. I file FOI requests for a living, and I'd love to be in touch with you guys about a number of things - best practices for turning government records into structured data, the importance of reforming records retention on the government side to reduce the burden on public records officers, fixing FOI on the local level, etc. Feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter: twitter.com/patdennis