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All week long we've been celebrating Sunshine Week by sharing some of our best tips, tricks and techniques for filing successful Freedom of Information Act requests.
Deborah Nelson, Kirsten Mitchell, Mike Ravnitzky and Kate Willson talked about the importance of using documents and offered ideas for beefing up your records requests.
The crew from FOIA Machine talked about how you can use the tool to streamline your FOIA requests.
We've compiled all of their clips (each under five minutes) in a Soundcloud playlist.
Check out our FOIA Story Pack: Get an in-depth look at the ways journalists have fought for information, the obstacles they encountered along the way, and the ultimate success stories which show the power of the Freedom of Information Act.
Visit IRE's online Freedom of Information Center. Here you'll find IRE resources and external links to help you understand federal or state-level freedom of information law, file requests, overcome obstacles and get the documents and data you need.
Read about successful FOIA battles on our Transparency Watch blog.
By Hannah Schmidt
Journalists Denise Malan, Ben Poston and Tim Wheeler all used data to create stories on hazardous materials and the environment. The three discussed state and national databases that track pollution and hazardous waste at the NICAR Conference in Baltimore.
NICAR offers a hazardous waste database. Malan described how to use it and what kinds of data reporters can find.
She also gave examples of stories that were created from the dataset:
Iowa Watch: Little Information Exists About Hazardous Materials Traveling Across Iowa
MinnPost: Visualizing hazmat incidents in Minnesota
Public Source: PA fifth in the nation in hazardous spills
Interested in additional datasets on hazardous waste? Here are a few of Malan’s favorites from when she was a reporter in Texas.
Poston created a project for the Los Angeles Times on the tracking of hazardous waste in California. As he was creating this piece, he encountered some big problems with the dataset provided by the state.
Poston said, had the dataset been complete, he would have also looked into unlicensed transport facilities, the locations of transfer or disposal facilities in relation to parks, schools or churches and the possibility of waste dumping.
Lastly, Wheeler discussed a different kind of pollution: agricultural waste. He used an EPA dataset to create a story about regulators lagging on permit enforcement in Maryland.
Want to listen to the entire panel? Log in to ire.org, go to the "Danger! Hazardous materials: Using data to uncover pollution" panel page and click "Download here" next to the audio file option. Full-panel audio is only available for IRE members.
Full slides from the panel: Denise Malan | Ben Poston
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From the time NPR corresondent Quil Lawrence spent in Iraq before covering veterans issues, he could tell women in the military were doing more than they ever had. As NPR producer Marisa Penaloza said, women were largely missing from coverage of Iraq, Afghanistan and the issues facing veterans as they returned. They saw an opportunity to change that.
Then, just as they began developing their series "America's Woman Warriors," the Department of Defense lifted its long-standing ban of women in combat roles, adding new timeliness and relevance to the issue. NPR went on to explore an American society that is uneasy with the concept "battle-fatigued female soldiers" and to document a high rate of sexual assault against women soldiers along with a broken military justice system.
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Lawrence and Penaloza shared with IRE how they landed on the series "America's Woman Warriors," how they found their story subjects, and what surprised them along the way. | Download the audio
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