Today’s topic: Open government carries price tag

Our View

Tennesseans are beginning to see the fruits of an updated open records law in Tennessee, but there should already be a push for a little more time before government officials can charge for records.

As the state wades through the maze of getting public records into [...]]]> From Tennessean.com
October 22, 2008

Today’s topic: Open government carries price tag

Our View

Tennesseans are beginning to see the fruits of an updated open records law in Tennessee, but there should already be a push for a little more time before government officials can charge for records.

As the state wades through the maze of getting public records into the hands of citizens who request them, each person involved should ask themselves what is in the best interest of all Tennesseans. If that basic principle is followed, the state will have a solid open-records system at all levels of government. There must be a strong push to keep records open and available, but it doesn’t take long to recognize that the system could be abused from different directions. The state should be vigilant of the process and be willing to show flexibility when needed.

The Office of Open Records Counsel recently announced its fee schedule for obtaining open records. The idea is that there should be availability of public records to citizens who seek them, but at some point a request can take up a sizable chunk of an office worker’s time. The challenge is to meet the spirit of providing records yet establish a fair amount of time before there is a charge to fulfill the request. Then it becomes an issue of how much time should be allowed before a charge kicks in and how much to charge when that time period does kick in.

Open records officials have decided there will be only one hour allowed for fulfilling a records request before there will be a charge, based on the salary of the person in the government office working to fulfill the request. An example being given is that the charge would be $20 per hour if the worker makes $39,000 a year. Specific fees include a charge of 15 cents per page of black-and-white documents and 50 cents per page for color copies.

The time frame immediately invites scrutiny. There will always be the possibility that workers could slow-walk the process in order to increase the price to the person making the request. This can carry an intimidating element to making a request. The charge, especially after only one hour, can tend to discourage someone from making a legitimate records request. Of course, it is also possible that some citizens making requests could abuse the process. There may be people who view it as an opportunity to be a pest to the government. People with personal axes to grind threaten to jeopardize sensible open-records policy. Meanwhile, there has to be a healthy dose of reality in making requests. While a large office in a big city might have the staff and resources to accommodate a request, an office in a small town might be hard-pressed to meet a request under even the best of conditions. So citizens need to be sensitive to the people who are trying to help them.

But the state must remind all offices emphatically that requests are to be taken seriously. Records are ultimately the business of the people. It’s the public’s government. Public records must be made available, except when exempted by law. It is important that managers of all government offices send the clear message to workers that records requests are important and will be filled promptly and efficiently.

There will be a balancing act along the way. For the moment, the one-hour limit before charges begin sounds too restrictive. There should be a willingness to expand that time limit. However, citizens should know that if they go overboard or make frivolous requests, they could jeopardize the important gains already made.

Tennessee has made good strides recently in bolstering open-government laws. Responsible behavior by government offices and by those making requests will have a lot to do with how well the system works and how long good, solid open-government is practiced in Tennessee.

~thanks to Steve Crabtree and Michael Grider, WVLT-TV, for bringing this to our attention, ja

More than a dozen reporters at Eastern European media outlets participated in a dialogue with several representatives of East Tennessee newspapers in a forum sponsored by the Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy for the Edgar R. Murrow program guests at UT October 13, [...]]]> Well, reporters from countries in the former Soviet Union, that is.

More than a dozen reporters at Eastern European media outlets participated in a dialogue with several representatives of East Tennessee newspapers in a forum sponsored by the Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy for the Edgar R. Murrow program guests at UT October 13, 2008. Their questions ranged over a wide array of subjects (in the order asked):

• What is the size of your staff, cost of newspaper issues, circulation?
• How much interest is there among your readers in our former Soviet countries and what stories have you written about them recently not including ones about the war in Georgia?
• Is your paper an individual one or group-owned?
• How does your paid paper compete with all the free publications we see in boxes around the campus and city?
• Do you do much investigative reporting?
• Do you have a different focus for your print version vs. your Web version?
• Do you monitor who goes on your Web site?
• How do newspapers know what the readers want; do you do surveys?
• How have your Web versions affected your print version; are they a threat to print?
• As circulation drops, what “tricks have you invented” to get the audience back?

Some comments by the European journalists:

Oleg Manaev of Belarus noted that while everyone was talking about online news, it should be noted that access to the Internet is much less in their countries than in the US. He said penetration of computers ranged from maybe 30% in the Ukraine to 10-15% in Tajikistan or Kyrgyz Republic, so that baseline access to online news is not great.  On the other hand, one of the countries that broke from the Soviet constellation early, Estonia, is a different story.  Aleksandr Hobotov said his country is “totally computerized” and only the “older audience” reads the print version of his paper.

A reporter from St. Petersburg, Anastasia Gavrielova, said her paper was faced with a dilemma of what audience their print and online versions would target. The paper had traditionally paid most attention to seven districts of the second largest city in Russia (population about 4.6 million) but wondered if it should cover more news of the entire city. She said they concluded it would be best and most profitable for the print version to concentrate on news of exclusive primary interest to those districts while the Web version would target city-wide news.

Ekaterina Jecova of Muldova ranked the sources of news in her area as #1- TV; #2 – Radio; #3 – Newspapers.

Aleksey Anishyuk of Moscow said his newspaper did do investigative reporting but not on the personal lives of their “two presidents.”  (Well, he backed off, one (Medvedev) is president and one (Putin) “is prime minister, but it doesn’t matter.”)  He said investigations on corruption are allowed and some are even financed by political opponents of the investigatees.

Agreeing to some political limitations, Azamat Kasybekov of the Kyrgyz Republic said, “it’s all right to investigate companies but the higher it gets toward the president, the more difficult it gets.”

East Tennessee journalists attending included Joel Davis of The Daily Times, John Huotari of The Oak Ridger and Jack McElroy of The News Sentinel.

Other guest reporters represented print and broadcast news media from Georgia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

~Jean Ash

ETSPJ member and UT JEM professor Jim Stovall has recently published a book that those of us who write or enjoy good writing might find interesting.

From the blurb: If you are fascinated by writers and writing, The Writing Wright offers a box of chocolates you [...]]]> The Writing Wright
Ponderings on Writers & the Writing Life

ETSPJ member and UT JEM professor Jim Stovall has recently published a book that those of us who write or enjoy good writing might find interesting.

From the blurb: If you are fascinated by writers and writing, The Writing Wright offers a box of chocolates you can’t refuse. Jim Stovall, a writer and teacher of writing for more than thirty years, has sprinkled quotations and stories from many writers with his own insight, instruction and commentary. Here you’ll find:

• Mark Twain’s critique of the writing for James Fenimore Cooper
• Ernest Hemingway’s attitude toward punctuation
• How expensive a misspelling can be
• Down-to-earth instruction on the glue of writing
• When Tom Clancy learned about submarines
• What Satchel Paige said about braggin’
• What H.L. Mencken thought about being a reporter

And much more.

Richly illustrated by the author, this book is one of those that you plan to pick up for just a moment and then an hour later you find you’re still reading it. And you will do the same thing again the next day. The Writing Wright draws you in and teaches you something about writing – lessons you can learn over and over.

It’s available at amazon.com, of course!