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October 27, 2006BELTWAY BLOGROLL
A Guide To Enterprise Blogging
We editors in the news business are big on "enterprise" stories -- the kind that aren't tied to any particular news event, the kind that require skill at uncovering nuggets buried deep within bureaucracies, the kind that are made easier by the Freedom of Information Act.
The great thing about FOIA is that it's not just for journalists. Any citizen can use it, and that includes bloggers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation knows that, and after having seen some amazingly enterprising citizen journalists break important stories, the group is eager to train more people to do the same. That's why EFF today released a primer on FOIA that it bills as a legal guide for bloggers.
Among other things, the guide points bloggers to the "FOI letter generator" produced by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. The guide also notes the conditions for getting fees waived for FOIA requests and for expediting requests through the bureaucracy.
The guide was published online at the tail end of a week when journalists have been debating the future of investigative reporting in the face of staff cutbacks at newspapers. Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz sparked the discussion with a column that praised the media for breaking "many of the major probes involving members of Congress." But he suggested that cutbacks could undermine such efforts.
Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media made this point in response: "We should worry about the economic implosion that is costing jobs and sapping resources from investigative reporting. But many in the Big Media have been losing their appetite for this for some time. We need to find ways to move ahead on the assumption that the negative trend will continue."
That's where bloggers -- and groups like EFF that are giving them free and valuable advice -- enter the equation. Bloggers have available to them the tools that they need to unearth and write the best stories of tomorrow, if they will but seize the power.
Posted by Danny | 11:45 AM
