Each March news outlets do their best to stir up interest in government transparency. Usually the focus is on federal FOIA, but locally some newspapers and outlets look at state laws.
Some state laws, like Maryland’s, are pretty good and include a mechanism for prying documents from officials. Most of my experience has been with that state’s Open Meetings Act, which allows anyone to file a complaint about possible violations of public meeting requirements. Maryland also has its Public Information Act with a review board. No court cases necessarily necessary.
Other states, like Delaware, are relatively bad places to foray into FOIA. In general, this state seems content to dare the public to sue, at their own expense, of course, knowing that the one big FOIA case from the 80s went against the News-Journal newspaper.
More about suing a state later, courtesy of Sam Stecklow of the Invisible Institute.
It seems dead-tree media is more concerned about the annual Sunshine Week than, say your local TV and cable. If not, do post links and such to whatever’s in your area.
The central repository for free-to-use Sunshine Week material is sunshineweek.org/ and this series of posts will draw from their materials.
To begin, the Washington Post supplies a step-by-step graphic. UNfortunately it is in a blog-hostile large PDF file format that seems to assume publication in a paper news form.
There’s a jpg image at the top of the story, but it’s not legible. I would chop this into sequential panels that fit the Kos (and blog, generally) format, but they don’t want that.
To see, read and maybe use this free guide, here’s the link: sunshineweek.org/...