The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records. David Cuillier and Charles N. Davis (2010). Washington: CQ Press. pp. 236.
Free For All: The Internet’s Transformation of Journalism. Elliot King (2010). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. pp. 328.
If data-driven reporting is a hallmark of the information society, then Cuillier and Davis’ 236-page tome has burst upon that society as a sort of elixir: What spinach is to Popeye, this book would be to public affairs journalists.
“[Y]ou could produce 10 years’ worth of [document-driven reporting] projects from this one book” (p. xxv), the authors boast in the preface. It is not a vain boast. Story ideas ooze from the nine chapters, marshalling a superlative guide to producing record-driven local and hyper-local stories.
The authors, former reporters, display a light, accessible, reportorial style. Their panache is neither overly flamboyant nor distracting from the book’s terms of reference, which are: (1) why accessing records is important; (2) how to seek records and deal with denials; (3) what problems arise in obtaining government data; and (4) how officials see the access process.
Some thirty “Pro tip” boxes showcasing nuggets of wisdom, drawn from the idols Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, among others, punctuate the pages. From them emanate pointers on how to “fight phantom exemptions,” “play the patriotism card,” “empathize with FOIA officers,” and such. Cuillier and Davis have “interviewed more than 100 experts from throughout the world,” which shows in their wide-angle approach and anecdote-studded prose. Many other gray boxes, containing lists headlined “ten ways to reduce or eliminate outrageous copy fees,” “12 tips for writing document-based stories,” and “four justifications to push hard for public records,” offer superb visual relief.
Bite-size tips or leads on information sources abound. Each chapter has a “try it!” section, with “exercises and ideas for journalists, newsrooms and classrooms” that make the book highly usable. Each chapter ends with a “suggested links” section of URLs.
Educators may use chapters 4 and 5 to build learning modules for a reporting class. An annotated list of 100 public records “that you can tap into for stories or to find out more about your neighborhood” appears in an appendix. A list of URLs to help with laws, story ideas, and request letters, and a bibliography of about three-dozen FOI titles appear in another appendix.
The authors’ approach, while lucid, is not quite insight-driven. On the one hand, it would impress reporters and undergraduates, for it lends the book a hands-on character—just what a civic reporter or student journalist might have ordered. On the other hand, cogitating scholars or graduate students seeking a somewhat highbrow take on freedom of information would do well to look elsewhere. It seems that this book has been intended to play out in one’s labor rather than mind.
Regardless, the subject is of singular import to not just journalism but democracy at large. After all, access to information, especially that held by government, is a prerequisite for democratic institutions to survive. In a refreshing, prescient opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice William Brennan in 1964 referred to “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” It must follow, then, that Americans ought to have a right to access information, if only to enable that debate.
Alas, therein lies a curious incongruity: The First Amendment has not been ruled to protect any antecedent right to gather information. Neither does the common law guarantee such a right. “The right to speak and publish does not carry with it the unrestrained right to gather information,” the Supreme Court has pronounced in a separate 1964 case (Zemel v. Rusk); the court has declined, fourteen years on, to recognize any special right for reporters to access government-controlled information (Houchins v. KQED).
If liberty is a natural right unalienable by the state, as John Locke— Thomas Jefferson’s inspiration—has proclaimed, then surely an ability to gather information ought to precede the speech right? Equally surely, a marketplace of ideas would be inadequately enabled when a normative “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate is guaranteed but not a tool to achieve it?
Statutory law, thankfully, completes the logical sequence: Congress has acted in 1966, guaranteeing access to most federal government records via the Freedom of Information Act. Not curiously, the path-breaking law earned only a grudging assent from President Johnson and, later, a lukewarm response from most of Johnson’s successors. The FOIA establishes a “presumption in favor of disclosure” for all departments, agencies, and offices of the federal executive branch, including the executive office of the president. It excludes the office of the sitting president, Congress, and the federal judiciary. In 2007, the OPEN Government Act streamlined FOIA procedure, designed to make the request process easier and more predictable.
Cuillier and Davis do not introduce any theory of information access, but in some of the nineteen pages of chapter 2 they glance at a history. This reviewer wonders if establishing a crisp theoretical driver, a semblance of which is offered in the preceding four paragraphs, might have enhanced the book’s impact. In the crucial chapter 5, titled “strategies for effective requests,” the authors appear to gratify a rudimentary theory of persuasion, discussing the variables of “reciprocation,” “reactance,” and “social proof.” The chapter that follows contains advice on “how to overcome denials.”
Charming quirks abound in the pages. At one point, the authors offer three sample FOIA letters — one a “friendly version,” the second a “legalistic, threatening version,” and the third a “neutral version.” At another point, they advise the reader to “host a soda session” with co-workers in order to share drinks but also “public records ideas and request strategies.” In the authors’ world, documents have “habitats”; there exists an art of “principled negotiation”; a reporter may “argue interests, not positions,” and develop a “document state of mind;” and any journalist may carry in his or her wallet an “objection card” to unobtrusively protest meetings being closed illegally.
In closing, the reviewer can easily visualize this book placed on the intrepid reporter’s ready-reckon shelf, as easy to reach as the famed AP Stylebook.
Elliot King’s book is cut from a different cloth. It is more provocative, more longitudinal, and yet, in a sense, more ephemeral. Over 328 pages and seven masterful chapters, it describes a timeline of the Internet media used by journalists.
King uses the historical method with some techniques of the novel. His book seems to contain many volumes at once: It is a textbook for its broad-based approach, a scholarly work for its fresh insights, and a monograph for its narrative structure. It represents a prescient unity in the discipline, straddling discussions in history, digital media theory, and journalism. It is clearly targeted at graduate students.
Jeff Jarvis pens a crisp, four-page foreword that contrasts the emerging “link economy,” which is based on consumers making value by co-creating the product, and the old “content economy” in which content was controlled and sold multiple times. In a sense, Jarvis’ foreword sets a stage for the book to unravel.
As King takes charge, he is like an engineer commandeering a train—with coaches named for the network technologies videotex, World Wide Web, and so on—through a beautiful scenery of collaborative communication. In that scenery exist frenzied news operations using those technologies to distribute news. In it exist, too, consumers of various persuasions, gratifications, and responses. As it zips along, King’s train engages some hilly terrain, and with flourish: Does journalism even need an organization? Whence does the journalistic value of objectivity emerge? How do specific technologies play key roles in defining news? And so on. If a book is great for stimulating an intellectual tizzy, then this one lies on a cusp of greatness.
King’s nonchalant style is smooth and readable, but it hides a rippling perceptivity that is born of those rocky questions. His style is well suited to chronicle the history, ridden with many surprises, of the Internet ever since President Eisenhower authorized creating an Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1950s to take on Soviet challenges from missile and satellite innovations.
King uses anecdotes liberally and citations, not as much (notwithstanding forty-five latter pages devoted to notes and a bibliography). He focuses on the impact of technologies in journalism practice, not vice versa. His broad-based approach lets him swim, but not dive into, potentially profound topics such as regulatory policy and business models. In the inspirational chapters 2 and 4, King masterfully dissects the evolution of journalism’s technologies.
Clearly, journalism is in the throes of tectonic changes being wrought by network technologies in media, business models, content, styles, and audience response. This reviewer finds it curious that the book does not engage in the semiotics of journalism. What constitutes journalism in a networked society? What, indeed, are the meanings of journalism? How is a meaning a function of objectivity, of accuracy, of completeness? What is fairness? How, if at all, would emerging digital media affect those attributes? It seems that King chooses to gloss over a subject that could have made his book essential to the core of any journalism curriculum, even though “journalism” is presented as a dependent variable in the book’s title. In other words, he does a superlative job on the technology portion but seems to ignore the journalism portion. He treats news content, as defined in a purely political sense relevant to democracy, without regard to overlaps by other sorts of content. A discussion, with examples, of “transformations” of news caused by emerging technologies would have made for fascinating reading, enhancing the book’s value for journalism historians.
Equally clearly, technological eras in publishing have invariably emerged as functions of scientific invention: Writing for the record was galvanized by the Chinese invention of paper. Handbills were transformed into mass-circulation newspapers when Johann Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press. Radio was birthed by Guglielmo Marconi’s successful experiments with wireless telegraphy. Television came out of Vladimir Zworykin’s invention of the electron scanning tube. The high-capacity telecommunication networks became possible thanks to Robert Maurer et al.’s optic-fiber cable. And so on. The decentralized, participatory media known as Web 2.0, which King describes as an amalgamation of blogs, Wikis, Facebook, and YouTube, were in turn spawned by ARPA’s pioneering of the Internet.
So what lies in the future? What new technologies? What new journalism? What transformations of news? Will Alan Turing, Vannevar Bush, and J.C.R. Licklider remain perpetually relevant? King takes on enough of such questions to make for a fascinating read. Post-ARPA history has been so ridden with surprises that perceptions frequently have been oracular. Many of King’s perceptions certainly have that potential.
NIKHIL MORO
University of North Texas