We promised at the beginning of Sunshine Week to write about some of our successes with records requests as well as our struggles. In fact, some of our most impactful reporting in recent memory has been fueled by public records. Here are some of the highlights:
You might have read about a house fire at 68 Stewart St. and some of the accompanying drama tied to the property, including a contentious eviction, a gritty foreclosure battle and the eventual arrests of two men for burglary and aggravated arson.
The initial write-up by senior writer Allan Smith covered the estimated cost of the damages caused by the fire and the measures the university took to take care of the displaced students.
After a news tip pointed us toward the behind-the-scenes commotion at the house, Smith went to the courthouse to get documents that might provide more background. Thanks to laws making those records public information, Smith came back to the newsroom with an armload of papers, including copies of court documents, affidavits and heated email exchanges between the tenants and the property manager.
Somewhere in all those pages was the narrative. Smith found it and told the story, which ended up being twice as long as the original article about the fire.
There’s still no apparent link between the arrested men (whose trial is forthcoming) and the legal fight preceding the fire, but that’s beside our point. Smith’s follow-up story, detailing the ins and outs of a messy legal scruffle involving multiple Ohio University students, would have been newsworthy on its own even if the fire had never happened. And that story never would have been found without those public records.
Sometimes the story is in the details, as shown above. Other times, it’s in contextualizing an entire set of data — a task that’s much easier said than done.
Take, for example, some of the work The Post has done in describing Ohio University’s General Fee, which every student pays.
Last February, we printed a full-page analysis of the university’s General Fee. We broke down undergraduates’ 2012-13 General Fee costs ($1,256 per student), which totaled more than $25 million.
The analysis included a “fee checklist” that explained to students how much of their General Fee went to funding, say, the Marching 110, Campus Recreation or Ohio Athletics.
For the record, “The Most Exciting Band in the Land” cost each student less than $6 each last year, Campus Recreation received $230.82 per student, and Athletics claimed the largest allocation at $429.72 a pop.
The story took several weeks to report and can still be found on our website by searching “Your General Fee.” We submitted the articles and accompanying graphics to the Ohio Newspaper Association’s annual Collegiate Newspaper competition, where it won the first-place prize for investigative reporting. (P.S. — We have a similar breakdown on the way for the 2013-14 year, so stay on the lookout.)
Reporting such as this is important because it permits us the opportunity to keep you informed on things readers generally wouldn’t have the time to look up — let alone contextualize — on their own.
But if you have the initiative, time and some extra space on your hard drive, we’ll be back tomorrow with the final installment of our Sunshine Week editorial series to give you a couple pointers about obtaining and combing through public records.
We can practically feel your excitement.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post’s executive editors.
