Tag: Transparency Tuesday

For those responsible for burnishing the public-relations image of the University of Montana, the last half-year has brought a nightmarish cycle of one unspeakably bad story after another.First, the Grizzlies football program was plunged into turmoil by a string of sexual-assault allegations against prominent players, leading UM to fire its head football coach and athletic director.Next, the university was accused of foot-dragging in bringing charges against a visiting Saudi national student who -- when confronted with accusations that he raped one student and attempted to sexually assault another -- fled the country and evaded prosecution.Then, the U.S.

It's important, and relevant, to tell the story about the continued employment difficulty facing new college graduates.

How public employees are performing their jobs (or whether they're showing up at all) would appear to be pretty essential information for journalists (or just inquisitive citizens) to figure out whether government agencies are, or aren't, working effectively.It's long been the case, however, that personnel information is some of the toughest information to obtain by way of a public records request, in part because of the myth that personnel records are always confidential.For instance, a North Carolina television reporter was told that, because of "personnel confidentiality," she couldn't be told why the City of Charlotte was still paying the city's former top tourism official for at least two months after he left the job, or how long it would continue paying him into the future.And a New York requester recently was denied access to questionnaire responses completed by candidates for a city planning board, which asked about their qualifications to serve.

If your campus newspaper broke the story that big-name athletic director, recruited and paid top dollar to build a major-conference powerhouse, had helped instead dig the athletic program into an $18.6 million yearly deficit, you'd think you had a pretty strong semester.For the staff of The Daily Campus at Southern Methodist University, it might not even have been the biggest story of the week.That distinction may belong to the investigative team responsible for "Sweeping Rape Under the Rug," a painstakingly reported package that begins with a gasp-inducing statistic: "Over the past 25 years, more than 100 SMU students reported they were sexually assaulted.

The outcry over lavish spending on a General Services Administration retreat, where federal bureaucrats enjoyed $44 breakfasts, is a reminder that few things get readers more incensed than learning that government employees are treating themselves to luxuries that budget-strapped citizens are forced to scrimp on.That's why it's an especially good -- and easy -- public-records story to take periodic stock of how employees at your college or school district are using government-issued cellphones and other communication devices.It's been estimated that the average American spends $635 a year on cellphone service, one of the highest rates in the Western world (and since that estimate comes from 2008, before data-gulping smartphones were in universal circulation, it almost certainly is low). Because it's one of the biggest bills consumers pay every month, knowing that a state or city official is abusing a taxpayer-subsidized cellphone provokes special outrage.Last summer, the Nashua Telegraph published an examination of four months' worth of bills from phones issued to local government officials.

A federal court's recent ruling that Notre Dame police are subject to civil-rights lawsuits as "state actors" helps bolster the case for journalists to obtain access to records from police agencies operated by private colleges.In Torres v.

After the devastating Long Beach earthquake of 1933, California swiftly enacted an unprecedented set of construction safety standards requiring new schools to be certified as quake-resistant -- and then, according to a 19-month-long investigative report, did very little to see that the standards were followed.To the contrary, a team of reporters from the nonprofit investigative website California Watch found, the job of certifying schools as earthquake-proof was put in the hands of questionably competent inspectors, and overseen by bureaucrats with cozy ties to the construction companies they were supposed to regulate.The result? Many thousands of construction projects never got the safety certification required by California's Field Act -- and hundreds more cannot be verified because their inspection files were simply closed due to missing paperwork.Public schools may be in need of a shake-up -- but not the kind that registers on the Richter scale.The journalists' April 2011 multimedia package, "On Shaky Ground," shared the highest award, the IRE Medal, bestowed Monday by the journalism training organization Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc.The work of the California Watch team, who partnered with journalists from San Francisco's KQED radio, is breathtaking in its use of every presentation method known to journalism -- even a smartphone app to help parents detect whether their kids' school has been identified as deficiently constructed.