No FOIA request needed: How to dig up good stories
The Freedom of Information Act isn't the only way to get good stories out of government documents. Three accomplished reporters made that clear Wednesday at a program of the National Press Club Journalism Institute.
"In an era when fewer public officials are talking to us, data is your best friend," said Tara Copp, military and veterans affairs reporter with McClatchy Newspapers.
She scours agency reports, which are often ordered by Congress. She gets to know congressional committee staffers, who sometimes tip her off to something deep in a report.
Hang onto those reports, Copp urged. Comparing old and new quarterly reports on naturalization, she saw a decline in non-military service members becoming citizens. That yielded a story revealing that the Pentagon had increased processes and paperwork for the applications of non-citizens.
Jerry Zremski, Washington bureau chief for The Buffalo News and a Club member, shared the tale of how his attention to detail went from noticing a surge in U.S. trading of an obscure Australian stock to producing a string of scoops.
Zremski was covering Chris Collins, then a Republican congressman representing the Buffalo area, and always read Collins's annual financial disclosures closely. He knew Collins owned shares of Innate Immunotherapeutics.W hen the stock soared in U.S. markets while trading was on hold in Australia, then plunged to almost nothing, Zremski found Australian chat rooms where investors suspected someone was dumping the stock ahead of bad news. In fact, Collins had received a phone call that a drug trial had failed, then notified his son and others he had encouraged to invest, and they were able to sell before a big loss when the failure was announced.
Last month, Zremski's coverage got Collins a 26-month prison sentence for insider trading.
A search on GovTrack.us brought Zremski another scoop when he checked Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's voting record during her brief time in the 2020 presidential race. Campaigning had kept her from 38 Senate votes.
Alex Mann, a crime and courts reporter at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., offered a lesson in being persistent when courthouse records are inaccessible.
He began digging into court records when he was assigned to cover the case of the 2018 newsroom shooting that killed five Capital Gazette employees. He found records that he thought were public had been sealed. He learned that a computer program that lawyers used to file motions and other records gave them an option to click "confidential." Many did it routinely, some on every document.
As a result of his coverage, the Maryland legislature is considering a bill to knock down that hurdle to public access.
The program Wednesday focused on getting public information without a Freedom of Information Act request, but the panelists appreciated the law's value, despite the frequent need to appeal denials and delays that can stretch for months or years.
"Most FOIA officers I have worked with are not trying to keep information from you," Copp said. "They've just got five thousand pieces of paperwork that they're buried under."