Copy
Join us to supercharge your transparency tactics!

Sunshine Week is finally here, and we have free training and resources for you to fine-tune your FOIA and public records skills.

Today at 1pm Eastern, join us for FOIA 101: A Public Records Primer for Everyone. Led by Kiera Murray and Jodi Rave Spotted Bear of the Society of Professional Journalist's FOI Committee.

We’ll walk through the basics of what you need to know about public records as well as strategies that even veterans will find useful to upping their FOIA game. 

FOIA 101 Registration

Tomorrow at 1pm Eastern, we're hosting a second training focused specifically on sussing out environmental information via public records requests with Air Quality Access with Dillon Bergin and Anthony Moser.

Ever wonder how bad the air actually is on those smoggy days? Wish you knew the impact of that proposal for a new shipping center or how your local government is policing polluters?

Building on our collaborative reporting on Chicago’s air quality and our guides to environmental records requests, MuckRock reporter Dillon Bergin shares practical request ideas you can file immediately that help assess local risks, identify potential polluters and look at how your government is or isn’t responding. Bergin will be joined by Anthony Moser, folk technologist and board president of Neighbors for Environmental Justice (N4EJ), to talk about Ineffective By Choice: A Review of Environmental Enforcement Data in Chicago 2002-2022, and how N4EJ received two decades of previously unpublished data from the Department of Administrative Hearings, analyzed it, and put it in context with inspection reports, CDPH emails, and other documents obtained through FOIA.

Air Quality Access Registration

If you can't make the trainings or want to do a deeper dive into a different subject, we've still got you covered. Check out all of our FOIA guides and resources here, and feel free to stop into the MuckRock FOIA Slack to share your tips, tricks and beguiling transparency questions.

The Foilies 2023: Recognizing the worst in government transparency

Every year, MuckRock and the Electronic Frontier Foundation put out a call for the worst-of-the-worst when it comes to agencies that deny, obfuscate or even come after requesters. 2022 was a banner year in this regard, so in partnership with the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, we're proud to roll out the Foilies, recognizing agencies that didn't quite get the memo that transparency is the law, whether they like it or not.

Read More

And be on the lookout, because the Foilies are coming out in print via alternative weeklies around the country!

There's still time: Have a document-driven project? Apply for the Gateway Grant program to support it

The deadline is approaching this Friday for our next round of Gateway Grants, a program that provides funding and technical support to document-driven reporting, civic engagement efforts and other projects that put DocumentCloud to work to help gather, analyze and publish critical documents for the public.

Apply today, and if you missed it you can check out our informational session for more details and background. And if you're looking for hands-on support, you can also pitch your story ideas to our editorial team.

For The Record was written by Michael Morisy.

Technical difficulties? View this email in your browser.
Love what you're reading? Send it to a friend.
Reading for the first time? Make sure to subscribe.  
Twitter
Facebook
Website
Copyright © 2023 MuckRock, All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp