Reporting on Covid-19: How cities and states make decisions about the virus

Session 13: Reporting on Covid-19: How cities and states make decisions about the virus

So you want some public records — think government audits, memoranda, internal emails or data — for your journalism project. But how do you start? And once you get what you want — after waiting weeks or months and sometimes paying fees — how do you structure and present what you found? We’ll show you how to think about local, state and federal open-records laws and the Freedom of Information Act from a journalists’ perspective, starting from when you file the request, negotiate for records and then ultimately obtain the documents. In this edition of At Home with the Brown Institute, we’ll walk through some best practices from newsroom and FOIA experts across the country, from classified national security records all the way to local government budgets and all documents in between.

You can find the presentation slides here.