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Journalists persistently report certain recurring access barriers (secretive police withholding documents, quasi-public nonprofits claiming to be "private" for FOI purposes, government employees gagged from giving interviews, databases hidden behind proprietary trade-secret software or made prohibitively expensive to duplicate, "student privacy" as a blanket excuse for campus opacity), and there are legal responses and strategies to overcome each of these. Mastering the law of access will help journalists tell their best stories and minimize delay and expense in getting the data and documents that make investigations come alive.