After officials berate reporter, publisher calls them out face to face, and in paper, for violating bid law

After the commissioners of Crawford County, Missouri, "verbally attacked" a Cuba Free Press reporter who had asked questions about road projects and spending, according to the Missouri Press Association Bulletin, Publisher Rob Viehman confronted the commissioners and asked why they hadn't given the weekly newspaper two records it had requested: a list of bids for road materials and planning records for this year's road work. (Wikipedia map)

His questions, and the commissioners' answers, revealed that the county had been disobeying state law by not seeking bids for the materials. "I'm not saying you didn't get a fair price, but we don't know if you did," Viehman told them. "We just want you guys to follow the rules."

Viehman wrote in an editorial: "Not only does the bidding process give the taxpayers the best deal, it provides the elected officials with cover and accountability. It’s to our commissioners’ benefit to take bids on everything they can so they can tell the voters, their neighbors, 'We asked for bids and we accepted the bid that we felt was best for us because ... ' By not taking bids, our commissioners can’t say that. Taking bids could also get the taxpayers a better price on items that may only be available locally from one vendor. If the only asphalt supplier in Crawford County has to submit a bid for their product, isn’t it more likely they will reduce their price out of concern a nearby competitor might underbid them? If bids aren’t taken, however, that can never happen. By not taking bids, our commissioners don’t know if the taxpayers got the best price for asphalt, rock and culverts. That’s the problem!" (Read more)

Award winner says failing to do good rural journalism tells rural people that they are 'not that important'

All that is, can or should be great about community journalism was on display July 20 as two rural newspaper journalists with very different but equally distinctive careers received the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism.

Jennifer P. Brown, opinion editor and former editor of the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville, and Max Heath, retired vice president and executive editor of Landmark Community Newspapers Inc. received the award from the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

The award is named for the rural newspaper publisher who is a national SPJ Fellow and co-founder of the Institute, based in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. Last year Smith was the first recipient of the award, which is presented for a career of public service through community journalism in Kentucky, or anywhere by a current or former Kentuckian, with preference given to those outside metropolitan areas.

In her remarks to the awards dinner crowd at Eastern Kentucky University's Center for the Arts, Brown, left, gave a clear picture of the fortitude and high goals often required be a good community journalist.

"You have to be careful with friendships, and you have to tell the truth. And then you see the subjects of your stories in the toilet paper aisle at Kroger," she said. "Often, I learn that we don’t expect enough from people. I mean we don’t expect enough from our own journalists and from the people we cover. Setting the bar high usually works. I hate to see people at smaller papers accepting crumbs. If you don’t do good journalism at small papers —and doing good journalism includes filing open records requests and complaining when the open meetings law is violated —then you are telling people who live in rural areas that their place in life, in the world, is not that important."

Heath established the editorial principles that have earned Landmark national recognition. He told the crowd that his work on journalism ethics and freedom of information was guided by the values of SPJ.

For more from Brown and Heath, and more about the award, click here.

Postal service's POStPlan for small post offices gets a hearing, and an unexpected cross-examiner

The good folks at Save The Post Office have provided a handy recap of the history of the proposed POStPlan, the U.S. Postal Service's plan for small post offices. This refresher course is pertinent after last week's testimony by Jeffrey Day, USPS retail-operations manager, before the Postal Regulatory Commission.

Day, the only USPS witness for the plan, was there to be cross-examined about the reduction in hours at 13,000 post offices. "There wasn’t much in the way of Perry Mason moments, and judging by the questions from the commissioners and the PRC’s public representative, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of opposition to POStPlan," Save The Post Office reports. "With the two postmasters associations both on board, it appears that only the [American Postal Workers Union] is interested in challenging the plan, and its concern seems to be who’s going to be staffing the POStPlan offices."

Opposing the plan was attorney Elaine Mittleman, who has been helping to save post offices after her office in Pimmit, Va., was closed last year. She was in the hearing room to question Day. "Whatever flaws there may be in the advisory opinion process," Save the Post Office notes, "the fact that an average citizen, officially representing just herself, could join the commissioners in the questioning says a lot about the commission’s commitment to transparency and public participation." (Read more)

Penn State not covered by state open-records law

If Pennsylvania's open-records law applied to Penn State, the Jerry Sandusky scandal might have been uncovered much earlier, saving some children from abuse, Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute writes after hearing from Sara Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter who broke the story and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Ganim (CNN image) "told a group of reporters and editors at Poynter that the open record exemption made it much more difficult to investigate the sex abuse story," Tompkins reports, and explains why the law doesn't apply to The Pennsylvania State University and three other "state-related institutions." He says they must file less information than publicly traded companies have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That is less than politicians have to file when running for state or federal office." Penn State lobbied to keep the exemption when the law was strengthened in 2008.

Tompkins says forner FBI director Louis Freeh, who investigated the university's handling of teh Sandusky matter, should have included making Penn State subject to the open-records law in his recommendations: "The abuse at Penn State is a lesson to us all about what happens when powerful people and public institutions are allowed to operate in the shadows created by what Freeh called a 'closed culture.' It is a culture that protected abusers, failed to protect victims and survived by closing its records to journalists who might have exposed it." (Read more

Ala. agencies can circumvent open meeting law via serial meetings with less than quorum, court rules

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled narrowly this month that public agencies could circumvent the state open-meetings law by holding a series of meetings with less than a quorum of members -- a familiar ploy that can be hard to prevent and discover, even when state law forbids it, as the Kentucky New Era of Hopkinsville wrote today.

In a lawsuit against the Montgomery Public Schools, the Alabama high court voted 5-4 to uphold a lower court ruling. "The court ruled that although the Board of Education formed three special committees covered by the Open Meetings Act, no meeting of the committee occurred because what they discussed was going to be voted upon later by the entire Board and not the committee," reports the June issue of AlaPressa, the newsletter of the Alabama Press Association. For a PDF of the court's decision, click here.

Justice Department lawyer orders reporter not to quote her as she conducts a public meeting

A U.S. Department of Justice attorney conducting a public hearing in New Iberia, La., told local newspaper reporter Matthew Beaton that he could not quote her. When he and others questioned her authority to issue such an edict, the lawyer "grew belligerent and threatening," demanded that Beaton leave and said "You don’t want to get on the Department of Justice’s bad side," Beaton reported. Beaton initially agreed not to quote her, but she persisted in her demand, then let him stay.

Rachel Hranitzky's "demeanor softened" after the meeting and she told Beaton she "had gotten into big trouble" being quoted. "She said if she was quoted she could lose her job and that was the reason for her demands," he wrote. The hearing was about alleged discrimination in the city fire department. (Read more)

"When a public hearing is announced, the expectation is that whatever is discussed is to be talked about in a public forum," Daily Iberian Managing Editor Jeff Zeringue wrote in an editorial. "The threats of not wanting 'to get on the Department of Justice’s bad side' are unbelievable. Why would any government agency threaten its citizens at all, much less on an issue that is clearly no concern of national security?" (Read more)

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sent the department a letter today saying RCFP was "gravely concerned" about the episode and any such policy or practice, and asking to what extent it has been adopted, when and who was responsible for it, along with relevant documents. (Read more)

Paper puts cases' starting date in court news as a nod to possible changes in offenders' behavior

The first time I ever paid $1 for a weekly newspaper, somewhere in Ohio, I asked the store clerk, "Is this paper worth a dollar?" She thought for about three seconds and replied, "Yeah, for the court news."

Seeing who's been misbehaving, and caught doing it, is one reason people buy community newspapers. But by the time a case appears in the paper, the offender's behavior may have changed. That's why the Adair County Community Voice in Columbia, Ky., recently began adding the year that the case began to each listing in its court news.

"We first discussed the idea because we noticed numerous cases being postponed and a few cases that were several years old," Editor-Publisher Sharon Burton, right, told us in an email. "Then, the mother of a man who was facing drug charges called and said her son was no longer using drugs but his name kept appearing in court record and it was discouraging to him to think everyone who read it would believe he was in trouble again. Cases often get continued numerous times. Because we run the next scheduled court date, we go ahead and run the item again, saying it was continued to another court date. His case had been continued several times, which is not unusual. We decided that listing the year a charge was originally filed would give readers additional information. It was easy to provide, because case numbers include the year."

When Burton started her paper a decade ago, she immediately began publishing circuit and district court records, land transfers, marriages, divorces, building permits and health inspections. "Public record had not been published in Adair County in recent history so people quickly took notice," she says. "Some loved it, others didn't. From the beginning we've tried to educate readers why having access to government is important and we have used public record as a learning tool. We knew we could publish records, but we wanted readers to understand why we should. It allows us and our readers to look for trends and to get a glimpse at what their elected judges and prosecutors are doing. We've noticed that more people convicted of dealing drugs are being sentenced to longer times in jail since temporary judges replaced our elected circuit judge who became ill two years ago and recently died. Those are the types of things readers can look for if they are interested. We have tweaked how we publish court record over the years to make it more informative. We are always looking for ways to make our court records more informative and a reflective picture of what is taking place in the courtroom."