Frankfort paper calls Kentucky State's 'gag order' outrageous, at odds with a university's mission

This editorial from The State Journal in Frankfort is published in its entirety because the newspaper's editorials are behind a pay wall.

A gag order is a means, usually issued by a court, for restricting information from being made public.

A judge may not want sensitive information from a closed hearing to be discussed publicly, may need to protect the privacy of victims or minors, or may feel it necessary to keep trade or military secrets from being revealed.

Negatively, however, gag orders may also be used as a form of censorship to limit freedom of expression or freedom of the press.

State Journal editorial cartoon by Linda Boileau

Unbelievably, a type of gag order is apparently in existence at Kentucky State University after being discussed at its Board of Regents meeting Wednesday in Lexington.

Regents discussed that if approached by a student, staff member or faculty member, they should refer them to KSU President Mary Sias, who will in turn speak to Board Chair Karen Bearden to place them on the agenda to speak at a future board meeting.

Furthermore, the board also discussed how to react when approached by a reporter wishing to speak to them about a dissenting vote on an issue. Bearden asked them to respond with “no comment” and inform her about it, so she could contact Sias about the best way to respond.

This discussion by a public university’s board of regents — at any college or university — is not only outrageous, but is completely incongruous with what we hope college students are being taught.

A majority of the regents are not employees of the university. While the board includes a faculty, staff and student representative, the other eight are appointed by the governor. No one is higher on the organizational chart than a member of the Board of Regents. They do not report to the university president, rather the university president reports to them.

A member of a school’s faculty or staff may feel so deeply about an issue he or she wishes to speak to a board member rather than an administrator. If the policy is to tell that person to instead speak to the university president, faculty and staff members would certainly be more reluctant to come forward.

Plus, they may wish to speak in private, not be placed as an item on a future meeting agenda.

The men and women appointed to university boards should be thoughtful, intelligent people. They have offered to serve in a leadership role at an institution of higher learning and they bring together diverse and varied views and backgrounds.

So we refuse to understand why they wouldn’t be allowed to speak — and more importantly wouldn’t want to speak — to faculty, staff or a member of the press.

We know we are outraged by the actions of the board and we believe others should be as well, among them the governor, the taxpayers, the faculty, the staff and the students.

The members of the Board of Regents are not appointed to be puppets and mimes. They are appointed to be independent thinking individuals willing to express their viewpoints.

There are important reasons why laws govern open meetings and open records, especially that the public has the right to know how its tax dollars are being spent.

Similarly, appointed and elected individuals should have every right to speak freely to those they oversee and those who report on their actions.

That the Kentucky State University Board of Regents would essentially decide to say no comment until they ask the university president how they should respond is a slap in the face of all that governing boards should be about.

We suggest the members of the KSU Board of Regents undo this ridiculous policy or let the governor find people willing to intelligently speak to the public that he can appoint to replace them.

Lawyer Kim Greene wins UK's James Madison Award for service to the First Amendment

Kim Greene, who was one of Kentucky's leading First Amendment lawyers, received the James Madison Award tonight from the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. The center presents the award for outstanding service to the First Amendment by someone with ties to Kentucky.

Greene, of Louisville, was instrumental in starting the Freedom of Information Hotline for the Kentucky Press Association in 1986. It remains the only such free hotline for newspapers in the U.S. In 1996 she helped start KPA's Legal Defense Fund Hotline. She was named KPA's most valuable member in 2001.

Greene represented many Kentucky newsrooms. Max Heath, who was executive editor of Landmark Community Newspapers, said in his nomination that she was "a velvet hammer" as an attorney, always smooth and professional but firm in her advocacy. She won the First Prize from the Louisville Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2005 for her First Amendment work.

Greene, a native of Ashland, told the crowd at UK's Young Library Auditorium that she fell in love with the First Amendment when she was in law school, then with journalists who used it to serve the public. "The First Amendment is just that special ingredient that makes our country so different from all others," she said.

Greene told the student journalists in the audience, "there's hardly any more important work in our country that you could be doing." She is married to First Amendment lawyer Jon Fleischaker, won won the Madison Award several years ago.

Grayson, left, speaks with UK accounting
senior Aleksey Graboviy after his speech.
(Kentucky Kernel photo by Tessa Lighty)

The award was presented at the center's annual Celebration of the First Amendment. The annual "State of the First Amendment" address was given by Trey Grayson, director of the Institute on Politics in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Kentucky's secretary of state from 2004 to 2011.

Grayson spoke on occasional conflicts of the First Amendment with the right to vote, as seen in news-media coverage of voting and the ubiquity of cameras, which pose threats to the privacy of voting, and Kentucky's law on electioneering near voting places, passed after a federal appeals court struck down a ban on electioneering within 500 feet of the polls, with an exception for private property. Current law sets a 300-foot limit with no private-property exception, and "That strikes me as still being a little broad," Grayson said.

Sun gives police letter alleging schools' laxity about weapons, but honors request for anonymity

A newspaper in a Kentucky county that had one of the first mass school shootings gave police a letter it received from a student alleging lax enforcement of rules about weapons on campus, but refused to identify the student, who asked to remain anyonmous. The Paducah Sun gave the McCracken County Sheriff's Department a copy of the letter about Reidland High School on Monday "after a reporter called the department . . . although the name of the author was not included," the paper reported Tuesday in a non-bylined story.

Reidland High School

The story quoted from the letter: “Someone who sits in class with us, who has brought weapons twice ... has yet to be punished for anything.” It "does not mention the person’s name," the story says. "It adds that the person has plotted attack sites around the school area and asks why school administrators are afraid to enforce school rules. The letter does not contain any specific threats of violence, just the student’s observations."

After being told about the letter, police and school officials decided to close the school and the attached Reidland Middle School. “School will not be in session until the threat has been adequately investigated,” Sheriff Jon Hayden wrote on his department's Facebook page. The paper's story is here; the letter is here.

Reidland (A) and Heath (B) schools (Google map)

On Dec. 1, 1997, a student at a high school on the other side of Paducah fired on a group of students at a prayer meeting, killing three and injuring five. He pleaded guilty but mentally ill and was given life in prison with the possibility of parole in 25 years. "A federal appeals court panel is considering whether Heath High School gunman Michael Carneal should be allowed to take back his guilty plea and get a trial," Angela Hatton of WKMS in Murray reports.

The Wednesday, Dec. 19 Sun has a copy of the letter, a story about an unnamed teacher who says she prompted it, and a column from Editor Jim Paxton explaining the paper's handling of the matter: "Newspapers by statute in Kentucky have a right to protect the identity of their sources, just as law enforcement agencies do. Absent that ability, we would never be able to develop the type of information that is reported in today’s lead story about the school threat issue, information we believe most readers will agree sorely needs to see the light of day." Paxton said the paper asked the student's parents if he could speak to the sheriff's department if his confidentiality was protected. "The parents expressed reservations, noting their son is a juvenile. We advised investigators of the parents’ position, but said we would continue to try to broker a resolution that would allow investigators to speak to the student directly."

Paxton says a press release from the sheriff's department at 10:30 p.m. Monday "was at best disingenuous and at worst defamatory. The release was crafted in such a way as to make it appear that the newspaper had received a letter from an individual who had directly threatened the high school and we were refusing to tell authorities his name citing 'journalistic ethics.' The release didn’t say that specifically, but it was clearly intended to be interpreted that way, and it was." That release appeared to be the basis for a story by WPSD-TV, also owned by Paducah-based Paxton Media Group. The county school superintendent sent a similar message to school-district employees.

"The effect was as officials planned," Paxton writes. "People called to cancel subscriptions. Advertisers called threatening to pull out of our newspaper. Profane comments poured onto our Facebook page." And though the paper's First Amendment lawyer said it had an absolute right to withhold the student's name, "we continued working to broker a resolution, and later that morning, our source, his parents, and an adult employee of the school system who we learned was our source’s source agreed to meet here at the newspaper with Sheriff Hayden. While we were in the process of setting that meeting up, a sheriff’s detective showed up in our offices with grand jury subpoenas demanding that Executive Editor Duke Conover and yours truly appear in less than two hours before a grand jury along with the letter disclosing the identity of our source. (In what can only be described as a show of belligerence, the sheriff’s detective undertook to 'read' the subpoena to Conover in Conover’s office while Conover was engaged in a phone call. First, that’s hard to do, since subpoenas mostly have boxes and checkmarks on them. Second, legally, it has no effect. Subpoenas are simply supposed to be delivered, and sheriff’s deputies are well aware of that.)" Paxton, a lawyer, writes that the subpoenas were illegal and "purely an effort to intimidate a news organization. We doubt Kentucky’s attorney discipline board will smile on this exercise."

In the end, Paxton reports, "Our source and others familiar with this matter did meet in our offices with the sheriff, and as today’s lead story indicates, much was learned. Interestingly, some of what was learned was very unflattering to school administrators and others in the school system. Meanwhile, we as a newspaper remain puzzled by the scorched earth approach taken by local officials involved here." (Read more; subscription may be required)

Sheriff Hayden issued a press release Tuesday night saying that the alleged threat was a misinterpretation of two students' conversation about explosions in a video game, which had been investigated and cleared. "Had investigators been provided contact information sooner, this incident could have been cleared up much quicker," Hayden said.

Federal judge keeps ban on contacting jurors but will contact them on behalf of Herald-Leader

U.S. District Judge Greg Van Tatenhove is allowing the Lexington Herald-Leader to contact certain jurors in the groundbreaking case of kidnapping and assault of a gay man in Harlan County, but he  declined to strike down a Kentucky federal-court rule against contacting jurors in criminal trials.

"Jason and Anthony Jenkins were charged with attacking the victim, Kevin Pennington, in April 2011 because of his sexual orientation," a hate crime, Bill Estep of the Herald-Leader recounts. "The Jenkins cousins were the first people in the nation tried under a section of the federal hate-crime law that makes it illegal to injure someone because of the victim's real or perceived sexual orientation."

The jury convicted the cousins on kidnapping and conspiracy charges Oct. 24 but acquitted them of the hate-crime charge. "That was a setback for the government in its first attempt to win a conviction at trial under the gay-bias section of the hate-crime law," Estep notes. "The Herald-Leader refrained from contacting jurors for comment on their reasoning in the decision because of a court rule."

The newspaper asked Van Tatenhove to strike down the rule as an unconstitutional infringement of its First Amendment right to gather news. The judge declined, but noting that the rule allows journalists to contact jurors with a judge's permission, said he would ask the jurors if they are willing to be interviewed and provide the names to the paper. (Read more)

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/11/21/2416764/judge-allows-newspaper-to-contact.html#emlnl=Breaking_news#storylink=cpy

Editor, lawyer say open-government laws being obeyed more, but the battle will never end

By Al Cross
Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues

Public officials in Kentucky are doing better at obeying open-government laws, but many still have a ways to go, but Kentuckians are making increasing use of the laws to hold officials accountable.

So said the chief author of the laws, and one of the leading users of them, in an interview being broadcast on statewide television this week to mark the 20th anniversary this month of the laws' major rewriting. They also said the battle for open government will never end.

"We have to re-educate our local officials every four years about open meetings and open records," John Nelson, executive editor of Danville-based Advocate Communications, told Bill Goodman on "One to One," broadcast on KET Sunday afternoon. The show is airing on KET2 Tuesday, July 24 at 7:30 p.m. ET and Wednesday, July 25 at 7:30 a.m. ET and on KET Sunday night, July 29 at 12:30 a.m. ET. It is available online by clicking here.

Host Bill Goodman shares a laugh with Nelson, center, and Fleischaker

Nelson, a leader in using the Open Records Act, said "We use it or consider using it at least weekly" at the company's papers in Danville, Winchester, Nicholasville and Stanford. He said he has seen recently seen an increasing use of open-government laws by the public, and "I would love to see more citizens become more aware of the law."

The General Assembly passed the laws in the mid-1970s and revised them in 1992. Since them, users of the records law have made some progress in reducing an attitude among public officials that records were "their business, not the public's business," said Jon Fleischaker, a Louisville attorney who helped draft the first laws and was the Kentucky Press Association's chief counsel on the rewrites.

Fleischaker said one powerful aspect of the laws is the ability of anyone to appeal the denial of a record, or access to a meeting, to the state attorney general and get within 20 days a ruling that has the force of law unless overturned in court. He said the process for "a quick and easy determination that is inexpensive" is "close to unique" among the states.

He said the attorney general's office has become increasingly helpful with successive attorneys general: "They're very consumer-friendly, citizen-friendly." He said later that most judges have also been a boon: "The courts in Kentucky have been very favorably inclined toward openness."

A key court decision, opening the donor records of university foundations, stemmed in part from a better definition of "public agency" included in the 1992 rewrite, Fleischaker said. The loser in his lawsuit for The Courier-Journal was the University of Louisville, which claimed privacy but had "wrongly assured" donors they would remain anonymous, he said. "In most of those cases there was a deal being made" with the donor. "That's not a private matter."

KPA and others began pressing for improvement of the laws little more than a decade after their passage because newspapers had become concerned about repeated violations of the laws and difficulty in achieving their goal of open and accountable government.

In 2004 KPA, The Associated Press and journalism schools in the state conducted an "open records audit" by sending strangers to local agencies to request specific records. Nelson, KPA president at the time, said there was "largely a positive outcome, but we did find that there were problems."

Nelson said the "glaring weakness" that remains in the laws is a light penalty for non-compliance. Fleischaker said it is "a very small fine that almost never gets implemented," and "That takes litigation and expense," usually against a public agency that can "go to court at the drop of a hat."

Fleischaker said it is also rare for courts to grant attorneys fees in open-government cases, but noted that the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services was ordered to pay in its dispute with major newspapers and the Todd County Standard about child-abuse fatalities and near-fatalities.

He said the case has "become a procedural nightmare" as the state Court of Appeals considers several procedural questions and the cabinet gives The Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader documents that are "being redacted much more than they should be," including "names of people charged in criminal court with murder." He added, "This has nothing to do with children and protection of children; it has to do with protection of people in the cabinet."

Harrodsburg police officer stingy with information about fatal traffic accident

Five days after a traffic accident killed a prominent Mercer County farmer who was driving his tractor, a Harrodsburg police officer refused to release most details about it, citing moral grounds and a promise to the family of the 21-year-old driver of the other vehicle that "he would keep their son’s name out of the media until after his investigation was complete," Todd Kleffman of the Advocate-Messenger in Danville reported Wednesday.

Only under orders from Police Chief Billy Whitenack did Officer Jeff Pearce identify the 21-year-old as  William Phillips of Boyle County. Pearce still refused to release the name of a passenger in Phillips' vehicle or say what type of vehicle it was. "On Saturday, Mercer County Deputy Coroner Chuck Bugg said the driver of the second vehicle was airlifted from the scene but was unsure of the person’s identity or extent of the injuries," Kleffman reported. Bugg also identified John "Van" Landrum as the decedent "after Harrodsburg police released a statement saying only that one person died as the result of a two-vehicle collision on US 127."

State police are not involved in the investigation. "Pearce said he would not release any more information on the crash until after his investigation is complete, which he said could take between 10 days and a month," Kleffman reported. "Pearce told a reporter releasing information about the crash went against his morals. He also said he promised Phillips’ family he would keep their son’s name out of the media until after his investigation was complete." (Read more)

Journalists, child-protection officials debate their differing approaches to Ky. child abuse problem

In a state that has led the nation in deaths of children from abuse and neglect, Kentucky journalists and the officials who must protect children agree that more public attention needs to be focused on the issue.

But they don’t agree on how to do it, and have been fighting expensive battles in court over it, because their professions have sharply divergent views on what kind of information the state should have to release.

“The profession of social work is based on confidentiality,” the state’s top child-protection official told reporters, editors and publishers during a panel discussion at the Kentucky Press Association convention in Lexington Friday afternoon.

Confidentiality “was drilled into us just as openness was drilled into you” in professional education, said Teresa James, who became acting commissioner of the Department for Community-Based Services in December after 25 years as a social worker. “Just as passionate as you are about the First Amendment, I am passionate about confidentiality.”

Social workers argue that without being able to assure informants of confidentiality, the system that protects children won’t get some of the information it needs.

But journalists, their employers and their lawyers say the state has been much more secretive than the law allows about cases in which children died or nearly died, circumstances in which state law makes otherwise confidential information available. (Read more)

UK hosts annual First Amendment Celebration

An award-winning investigative reporter, author and journalism professor will deliver the annual State of the First Amendment Address at the University of Kentucky Tuesday, Nov. 15.

Mark Feldstein, author of "Poisoning the Press," is the featured speaker at the annual First Amendment Celebration sponsored by the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center and the UK School of Journalism and Telecommunications.

Feldstein worked as an on-air investigative correspondent at CNN, ABC News, and several local television stations during a 20-year career. For his work, he won the Edward R. Murrow broadcasting prize and two George Foster Peabody medallions.

And for his work, he was beaten up in the United States, detained and censored by government authorities in Egypt, and escorted out of Haiti under armed guard. His exposes led to resignations, firings, multimillion-dollar fines and prison terms.

Feldstein’s 2010 book, "Poisoning The Press," documents the bitter relationship between Jack Anderson, a journalist whose column damaged and destroyed political careers, and President Richard Nixon. Feldstein was once an intern for Anderson, whose column, "Washington Merry Go-Round," was immensely popular. The book has received widespread critical acclaim and earned top academic awards for research.

Feldstein is a graduate of Harvard and earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the Richard Eaton Professor of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Feldstein has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals; he has also won awards for his scholarship from the American Journalism Historians Association and other academic organizations. He is widely quoted as a media analyst by leading news outlets in the United States and abroad, and has testified as an expert witness on First Amendment issues in court cases and before Congress.

The State of the First Amendment Address will be given in Room 106 of the White Hall Classroom Building. The program begins at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 15, and is free and open to the public.

At the celebration, Al Smith will be presented with the annual James Madison Award for Service to the First Amendment. Smith, a Kentucky editor and publisher, founded and hosted Kentucky Educational Television’s “Comment on Kentucky” program, a weekly discussion of public affairs.

The Scripps Howard First Amendment Center, housed in the university’s School of Journalism and Telecommunications, seeks to promote understanding of the First Amendment among citizens of Kentucky, to advocate for First Amendment rights in the Commonwealth and nationally, and to produce internationally recognized scholarship concerning the First Amendment and its related freedoms.

Agency is pressured to re-post database of doctors' malpractice and disciplinary cases

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley has joined journalists, academic researchers and consumer groups in calling on the Health Resources and Services Administration to put back online the National Practitioner Data Bank, a database of malpractice and disciplinary cases against doctors.

"In a strongly worded letter, the Iowa Republican, who has led investigations of fraud and waste in government health programs, said the now-removed file 'serves as the backbone in providing transparency for bad-acting health care professionals'," Duff Wilson of The New York Times reports. Grassley gave HRSA, part of the the Department of Health and Human Services, until Oct. 21 to hand over documents and answer a series of questions, ending with "What is your timeline for getting the database up and running again?"

For a PDF of Grassley's letter, click here. Under pressure, the agency has scheduled a conference call on the issue for Thursday, Oct. 13, from 1 to 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

The database "was created in 1986 for hospitals, medical boards, insurers and others to share information so that bad doctors do not slip through cracks in reporting," Wilson writes. The law makes doctors' names confidential, but the database has a Public Use File for researchers and journalists, in which doctors are identified only by numbers.

Some journalists have been able to identify doctors using information from other sources, such as lawsuits. "After a complaint by one doctor identified by The Kansas City Star, the agency threatened the newspaper reporter with a fine, pulled the doctor’s file from its Web site on Sept. 1 and began a review of how to hide the identities better," Wilson reports. "Its actions provoked protests" from the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and other groups. In a letter, they told HRSA, "Nothing in the Public Use File can be used to identify individuals if reporters or researchers don’t already know for whom they are searching."

Grassley wrote, "It seems disturbing and bizarre that HRSA would attempt to chill a reporter’s First Amendment activity with threats of fines for merely 'republishing' public information from one source and connecting it with public information from another. A journalist’s shoe-leather reporting is no justification for such threats or for HRSA to shut down public access to information that Congress intended to be public."

The Public Use File can be downloaded from the website of Investigative Reporters and Editors, one of the groups, protesting its removal from the HRSA site, but "that file will be more and more out-of-date as the dispute goes on," Wilson notes. She also reports that Robert E. Oshel, associate director for research and disputes in the Division of Practitioner Data Banks, says the agency is misinterpreting the law. (Read more)

News outlets are less inclined to take legal action for open government, but citizens are becoming more active, national survey finds

"While a lack of resources has made news organizations increasingly less inclined to file freedom-of-information lawsuits, citizens have a growing interest in government transparency and are becoming more active in asserting their right to government information," the Media Law Resource Center and the National Freedom of Information Coalition report after an informal, online survey conducted Aug. 9-15. It confirmed continuation of a trend first noticed in 2009.

"If ordinary citizens are becoming more aware of their access rights, and more assertive regarding them, it is indeed a reason to be gratified," said Ken Bunting, executive director of NFOIC. "However, if news organizations are trending toward being less gung-ho in an area once regarded as a matter of responsibility and stewardship, there is the frightening potential that journalism could suffer, as could the health of our democracy." For the NFOIC release and links to the study documents, click here.

After the 2009 survey, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation created the Knight FOI Fund to pay initial expenses and fees for open-government lawsuits that the fund considers worthwhile.

Sunshine Week is March 13-19

Sunshine Week, the annual event that reminds Americans of the virtue of open government, citizen access and oversight, and journalists' role in keeping citizens informed about their governments, is in progress. Promotional materials for Sunshine Week are donwnloadable at http://www.sunshineweek.org/. They include logos, editorial cartoons, other graphics and op-ed pieces on freedom of information and open government.

West Virginia Legislature sends governor a shield law that protects student journalists

Our adjoining state of West Virginia is on the verge of getting a reporter's privilege law, which journalists usually call a shield law. The state legislature passed the bill over the weekend and sent it to Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. The state has been one of several in which journalists can cite previous court decisions, but not a statute to avoid revealing sources to which they have promised confidentiality. The District of Columbia, Kentucky and 38 other states have shield statutes; only Wyoming has no reporter's privilege in its Constitution, court decisions or statutes.

"The measure provides West Virginia reporters with a qualified reporter's privilege to refuse to disclose confidential sources, and documents that could identify confidential sources, in civil, criminal, administrative and grand jury proceedings," says the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. With on exception, the law does not protect unpaid journalists; it defines "reporter" as someone who gathers and disseminates information to the public "for a portion of the person's livelihood."

The exception is that the law does cover student journalists. "This language puts West Virginia at the very forefront of the country in recognizing the value of student journalism and the importance of protecting students who are increasingly doing professional-caliber work," said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. For background from the Reporters Committee on West Virginia case law and the bill's path through the Legislature, click here.

Let's observe Sunshine Week March 13-19

It's time to plan your observance of Sunshine Week, the annual event that reminds Americans of the virtue of open government, citizen access and oversight, and journalists' role in keeping citizens informed about their governments. Today we saw a new way to make readers, listeners and viewers remember it.

"It may be just a coincidence but the combination is apropos: Sunshine Week begins Sunday, March 13, the same day that Daylight Saving Time returns," the Arkansas Publishers Association notes in its latest Arkansas Publisher Weekly. Perhaps Sunshine Week could be promoted in conjunction with the annual reminder to move clocks forward.

Sunshine Week has coincided with the start of DST since a change in the federal time law a few years ago. The week has been built around national Freedom of Information Day, March 16, the birthday of James Madison, our fourth president and author of the First Amendment.

Promotional materials for Sunshine Week are donwnloadable at http://www.sunshineweek.org/. They include logos, editorial cartoons, other graphics and op-ed pieces on freedom of information and open government.

$1.5 million in grants fund project to hire one anti-corruption reporter in every state

The Center for Public Integrity, a well-established, well-respected source of not-for-profit accountability journalism, is recruiting reporters for "an ambitious risk analysis of corruption in all 50 state governments," covering everything from pension fund management to disclosure laws to state budget processes.

"The journalists will assess the existence and effectiveness of anti-corruption and government transparency measures at the state level, including political financing, civil service management and state budget processes," the center says. "The goal is to hire 50 reporters (one in each state) on a part-time, freelance basis to help us complete the project with on-the-ground reporting and data entry. We’re looking for experienced reporters who know their state and know how to dig." Apply here.

The project is funded with $1.5 million in grants from the Omidyar Network and the Rita Allen Foundation to the center, Public Radio International and Global Integrity, which analyzes government accountability and corruption trends.

Two leading open-government advocates among 2011 Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame inductees

Two leading advocates of open government are among six people in the 2011 class of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, announced this week: Tom Loftus, longtime chief of the Frankfort bureau of The Courier-Journal, and Robert Carter, retired publisher of the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville.

Bob Carter, left, was president of the Kentucky Press Association in 1976 when the legislature passed the Open Records Act, and was on KPA's leadership ladder in 1974 when it passed the Open Meetings Act. For his work on that and other projects, he was named KPA's outstanding member in 1975. "Carter began his career on the advertising side of the newspaper business, and he thrived there, but countless journalists have benefited from his role in getting the Kentucky General Assembly to adopt the open-meetings law and the open-records law," New Era Publisher Taylor Hayes wrote in his nomination letter.

One of the leading users of the act, to the benefit of his newspaper and the public, has been Tom Loftus, right. Chief of the Louisville newspaper's state-capital bureau since 1987, "He’s an ardent watchdog who has made use of those laws than perhaps any other journalist in the state, as signified by the James Madison Award from the [UK journalism] school’s Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in 2008," said the nomination by Al Cross, his former C-J colleague, now at UK's Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, and Bill Straub, his former colleague at The Kentucky Post, now Washington correspondent for the The Gleaner of Henderson and the Evansville Courier and Press.

Others elected to the Hall of Fame, overseen by the UK Journalism Alumni Association, are Bill Bartleman, recently retired reporter for The Paducah Sun; Jackie Hays Bickel, retired anchor for Louisville’s WAVE-TV; Ed Shadburne, former general manager of WLKY-TV and of WHAS-TV-AM-FM in Louisville; and the late Albert Dix, publisher of The State Journal of Frankfort. The six will be inducted at a luncheon April 5 in Lexington.

Online paper highlights procedural open-meetings violation but forgoes complaint

An online newspaper based in Louisa prominently noted the Lawrence County Fiscal Court's violation of the state Open Meetings Act in a story this week, but said in the article that the paper would "not file a complaint because the mistake was obviously not intentional." The first paragraph of Roberta Blevins' story in The Levisa Lazer said the new set of magistrates held their first meeting and handled routine transition business. The next three paragraphs read:

The special meeting was not advertised nor was the press sent an agenda or notice of the meeting, said Michelle Miller, who is remaining as secretary in the judge’s office under new Judge/Executive John Osborne. She said she understands this is a violation of the Kentucky Open Meetings Law.

Ms. Miller said the special meeting was announced at the swearing in ceremony last week, but formal notification was not made. The courthouse was closed Thursday and Friday of last week because, Ms. Miller said, state computers are shut down during those days and business cannot be done which comes from the state. This could be the reason notice was not officially given for the organizational get together, she said.

The Lazer management has decided to not file a complaint because the mistake was obviously not intentional.

A "complaint" could take the nature of an appeal to state Attorney General Jack Conway, who could rule that actions taken at the meeting were null and void because the meeting was not legal. The open-meetings violation was not mentioned in the story's headline, which reported that the court named a former magistrate as road foreman.
 
The story ended with another meetings issue, noting that "Several citizens have complained that the meetings are not held at a time when they can attend." The court meets at 10 a.m. twice a month. "Osborne has said he will look into changing the meeting time if enough people request a move to an evening hour so that working men and women can attend if they so choose," Blevins writes. (Read more)

New SPJ president urges journalists to fight official secrecy, says it's growing at all levels

Journalists must redouble their efforts to fight growing secrecy, the new president of the Society of Professional Journalists told the organization's convention as it wrapped up Tuesday in Las Vegas.

"We are under attack, from the smallest communities to the federal government," Hagit Limor, left, a reporter for Cincinnati's WCPO-TV, told the crowd at her installation banquet. She quoted a report from Freedom of Information Committee Chairman David Cuillier, saying that in many communities "We have the equivalent of a police state."

Cuillier, right, a journalism professor at the University of Arizona, made an "Access Across America" tour to 33 states this spring and summer, including one in Louisville, funded by SPJ's Sigma Delta Chi Foundation. It won him two awards and much recognition at the convention. In his report he cited cases of "no access to jail logs, arrest reports, 911 logs, incident reports or scanner traffic," but said the biggest FOI problem "isn’t that government is denying record requests. The problem is that not enough journalists are submitting record requests. Small news organizations need much more training in access. In some newsrooms the reporters didn’t know they could ask for public records."

Limor, whose father survived the Buchenwald concentration camp and saw her sworn in, said the Holocaust wasn't reported for years though governments knew about it. "Ask him why we have to fight for press rights, for access to government records," she said. "We are part of something that is bigger than all of us, that depends on all of us." For more on the convention and SPJ see http://www.spj.org/.

Danville editor wins James Madison Award for service to the First Amendment

John Nelson, editor of the Advocate-Messenger in Danville, Ky., last night received the James Madison Award for service to the First Amendment, presented by the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. (A-M photo by Clay Jackson)

Nelson, who also oversees editorial operations of other Schurz Communications newspapers in Kentucky, won the award because "He has fought for open government in a number of important ways," former Kentucky Post editor Judith Clabes, the award's first winner, said in presenting it to him. She cited the nomination from Kentucky Press Association Executive Director David Thompson, who wrote, “Few people in Kentucky are as adamant about open government. If more had the drive that John Nelson has exhibited during his journalism career, there would be a demand from every corner of the state that all public agencies operate in ‘sunshine’ and make the agency’s business truly the public’s business.”

As KPA president in 2004, Nelson led Kentucky's first statewide public-records audit and was instrumental in creating the KPA Legal Defense Fund and a lawsuit that KPA filed to open juvenile court proceedings. Federal courts rejected the suit's arguments, but the Court of Appeals "interpreted state law in a way it had never before been interpreted, giving judges an opening to allow the press into the courtroom at their own discretion," he said in his acceptance remarks. Nelson has also been president of the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

KPA appeals over denial of Midway budget

The Kentucky Press Association has appealed to the state Attorney General's office the refusal of Midway Mayor Tom Bozarth to release copies of the city's proposed budget for the next fiscal year.

The Midway City Council is scheduled to discuss the budget proposal on Monday. The Midway Messenger had asked in writing for a copy after Bozarth gave it to council members. Bozarth refused, saying the budget was "purely preliminary" and wouldn't be released until the council has finalized it. The Messenger is a blog and website run by Professor Al Cross at the University of Kentucky's Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues as an outlet for stories written by students in his community journalism classes.

In its appeal, the KPA argued that exemptions to the Kentucky Open Records Act relating to drafts and recommendations were limited.

"Our position is that it ceases to fit that phrase ("preliminary") once it is distributed to and discussed by members of a public agency at a public meeting. After all, a budget is the basic policy document for a government," the KPA said.

Midway is located in northern Woodford County, halfway between Lexington and Frankfort. For the Messenger story and a link to the appeal, go here.

Louisville SPJ hosting session on freedom-of-information issues; register by March 10

The Louisville Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists is hosting a half-day session on the Freedom of Information Act and related issues Saturday, March 13. The event, in partnership with the Institute for Media, Culture and Ethics at Bellarmine University, will be held at Bellarmine's Brown Activity Center from 9 a.m. to noon.

First amendment attorneys Richard Goehler and Monica Dias will present three sessions, according to the SPJ press release. The first will focus on FOIA and open records issues; the second will examine legal issues facing bloggers and other Internet users; and the third will look at recent court decisions on tweeting and blogging inside the courtroom.

The seminar is free for students, $10 for SPJ members and $15 for others. Participants must register by Wednesday, March 10 by contacting Robyn Davis Sekula at robynsekula@sbcglobal.net, or by calling 812-981-8223.