FOIA Fest is the Chicago Headline Club’s signature event dedicated to public records reporting. This year, it’s Saturday, March 21 (you can still get tickets).
Ahead of the annual public records conference, FOIA Fest speakers shared their best tips for filing FOIA requests and other in-depth, investigative reporting.
Maya Dukmasova, Senior Reporter, Injustice Watch
Learn to use Airtable to track FOIAs.
Nell Salzman, Local Investigations Fellow, New York Times
Tell agencies you want to make their lives as easy as possible. Involving them early can speed up the process and lead to better information long-term.
Matt Kiefer, Assistant Professor, Medill School
Learn from FOIAs and responses posted on MuckRock.
Jim Daley, Investigations Editor, South Side Weekly
South Side Weekly’s workshops on getting started with FOIA.
Sarah Karp, Education Reporter at WBEZ:
Most government agencies post archives of FOIAs that include how they have responded to requests. Spend some time looking at those as it will help you to see what has been successful in the past and help you to see how to structure successful FOIAs.
Milka Koumpilova, Senior Reporter at Chalkbeat Chicago:
IRE and NICAR have a wealth of great resources.
Cam Rodriguez, Data Reporter:
MuckRock’s FOIAFriday series, which is a monthly community webinar. (And MuckRock, period!) Newsletters, especially from local and nonprofit shops, like 404 Media. Requesting FOIA logs and records retention schedules, to get a sense of what people are requesting or what might exist. Brechner, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press are all also great.
Francia Garcia Hernandez, Pilsen, Little Village and Back of the Yards Reporter, Block Club Chicago
Poynter’s online courses on public records requests and FOIAs.
Amy Qin, Data Reporter at WBEZ:
One way to think about FOIAs is to think about what types of records are collected as part of a government process that you’re interested in. For example: if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who got a parking ticket and whose car got booted…there’s the ticket itself, which includes the citation, amount fined, location of the citation, and date. These are all FOIA-able. Then what happens? Either you pay your ticket or you contest it. Where do you go to contest? The Department of Administrative Hearings. Their records are FOIA-able too. And all of these records are FOIA-able en masse — you could ask for all parking tickets over a given period of time and use that information to see what wards have the highest number of parking ticket citations.
Emeline Posner, Reporter, Investigative Project on Race and Equity
MuckRock for tracking prior public records requests; a YouTube tutorial on filing federal FOIAs; local FOIA workshops hosted by news or advocacy organizations.
Steve Warmbir, Senior Investigations Editor, Illinois Answers Project / Better Government Association
Illinois Attorney General Public Access Counselor binding decisions.
Tatiana Walk-Morris, Independent Journalist
1. FOIA Machine helps you draft FOIA requests citing the statutes of the federal, state or local agencies from which you’re requesting records. The MuckRock tool will also tell you when you can expect to receive a response from the agency.
2. MuckRock has a database of public records requests filed by other journalists, researchers and the public. You can search their database to see what obstacles other journalists have faced and what records others have requested and received.
3. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has a variety of resources for journalists with FOIA-related questions. But if you run into a serious problem, the nonprofit runs a hotline that you can call or email a form on their website to receive pointers from attorneys. Please note that they’re not representing you as your personal attorney with this resource, just general advice based on the problem you’ve described.
Alex V. Hernandez, Neighborhood Reporter, Block Club Chicago
City Bureau and looking at other FOIAs that Chicago area journalists have sent out via the City of Chicago’s website.