Many years ago, there was a piece satirizing the rhetorical posturing of "Why are you afraid to debate me?" by I think telling the New York Times that unless they let the author come into their office and harangue them, they were anti-free speech. This might have been Gawker? I can't find any trace.
A state board on Wednesday declined to set the title for a proposed fall ballot initiative that would enshrine in the Colorado Constitution “a fundamental right to know the affairs of all levels of state and local government.”
Fil.one promises S3 compatible storage across distributed number of storage providers, at (I think) 1/4 the cost of AWS. Publicly available files not yet implemented, but given the increasing number of folks targeting hosting providers, I'm excited to kick the tires.
So the theme I want to look at this week is gifts received in a private capacity vs where there's some kind of professional justification
what i do have are a very particular set of skills. skills i have acquired over a very long career. skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. if you give me data now that'll be the end of it.
Hmm, I did one stupid thing that somehow worked, now I'm tempted to try again.
Whoever is running crappy scrapers against DocumentCloud, please stop.
I think @brianbeutler.bsky.social almost certainly right that the bogus OLC opinion claiming the Presidential Records' Act is unconstitutional only really makes sense as a prelude to destroying inconvenient records <cough>Epstein<cough>. www.offmessage.net/p/donald-tru...
Register for our free #JAWS Webinar April 22: Investigating Candidates - Tracking Public Records and Financial Ties. Join investigative journalist & the Editor of @muckrock.com, Anna Massoglia, to go beyond campaign websites to investigate political candidates. www.jaws.org/news/jaws-we...
A window showing a dropdown of search options in the DocumentCloud.org interface!
A dropdown showing options to sort in DocumentCloud.
Smart search filtering is back on @documentcloud.org!
A screenshot showing the page_count: search in DocumentCloud, allowing you to filter by document size range.
Want to see just smol documents? Or Very Large Documents? DocumentCloud has you covered.
A window showing a dropdown of search options in the DocumentCloud.org interface!
A dropdown showing options to sort in DocumentCloud.
Smart search filtering is back on @documentcloud.org!
Would you realize if the book you were reading was AI? What if it was humanized to remove AI-speak?
We find that even without using stylistic cues (e.g., word choice or sentence structure) narrative choices alone give AI fiction away!
Journalists! Want a better way to explore, clean and share data? Join the @muckrock.com team and @alexgarcia.xyz on April 17 as they share how @datasette.io can help. Free training and free tool! us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
NEW: I found IRS paperwork for several nonprofits whose addresses matched Border Patrol stations. Some of the groups, named after the military's "morale, welfare, and recreation" program, were selling challenge coins commemorating last year's enforcement surges: www.wired.com/story/us-bor...
This requires some pre-requisites that are unlikely to appear, but I once was in this situation and VNC'd in. You might be able to flip on remote control with just keyboard commands?
Transparency nerds! Nominate someone doing awesome work for an SPJ Sunshine Award, due April 9: www.spj.org/sunshine-awa...
It’s funny to me when you see someone hedge on a trivial claim on social media. Someone’s pet dies, and you reply “she looked like a very good cat.” Just in case she was actually a terror to strangers, or secretly running guns or something without your knowledge
The War Horse saw one story find an audience in private messaging groups like WhatsApp and Telegram; San Diego's inewsource, meanwhile, is investing in Nextdoor.
www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/nonp...
It Happened to Me: I bought size .38 Muji pens instead of .5. Will I ever recover?
The Pentagon tells reporters to file a FOIA, wait until 2038 to get any info about its war machine.
Not to be outdone, the DOJ blames the public for asking how their government works.
These stories and more in our secrecy newsletter, The Classifieds.
I joined @kgosztola.bsky.social for this conversation exploring how financial access can be a tool to punish journalists who challenge powerful interests. Check it out and subscribe to Kevin's newsletter.
“Access to public records is not optional – it is a cornerstone of a functioning democracy,” --FOI Committee Chair @morisy.bsky.social.
Recently, @spj-posts.bsky.social named Massachusetts the recipient of its 2026 Black Hole Award.
FOIA request filed Feb. 27, 2006. Response sent March 24, 2026.
Ran into this a while back. Really gross.
NEW: Doug Ford is brazenly going after transparency because he can’t be bothered to use a government cellphone. @justinling.ca joins the pod to talk about the long death of FOI/ATIP systems and how we actually have solutions… just not the will. #cdnpoli #onpoli
We've lost an amazing leader and mentor in DeeDee. Still in shock.
