Media
Media
The Woodbridge Burglaries
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/29/2009 - 19:03Today, I receive an email from the Hartford Police Department. Their Media and Communications Coordinator was responding to a request I had sent to be added to their distribution list.
Thank you for your email. I am always looking for new avenues/groups to get the HPD message and information out too - so I welcome your request and have added both Connecticut News Wire and your personal email as well. BTW, I also joined CT news wire. Happy New Year.
I set up the Connecticut News Wire earlier this year as a means for government agencies, elected officials, candidates, and advocacy organizations to get their message out to the people of Connecticut, especially to bloggers and citizen journalists.
I am pleased to find that the Hartford Police Department is interested in reaching out to the people of Connecticut to help make our State’s Capitol safer.
The importance of this sort of outreach was brought home to me this evening as I read an article in the New Haven Independent, After Burglary, Family Helps Find Suspects. It provides a great example of what happens when police departments and citizens work together. What is particularly striking is that suspects are believed to have been involved in the Woodbridge Burglaries that led to my request to receive press releases from the Woodbridge Police Department. The Woodbridge Police Department declined my request and several journalism organizations, freedom of information organizations and open government organizations have offered to assist me in gaining the public information I have requested.
Yet as the Hartford Police and the story in the New Haven Independent illustrate, there are better ways to promote community involvement in protecting our neighborhoods than police departments denying requests for public information from its citizens.
How are the police in your community trying to improve communications between citizens and the police department? What are you doing to help?
The Woodbridge Police Department and the National Battle of Open Access for Citizen Journalists
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/23/2009 - 10:08It was a quiet day yesterday. I received several notices from the Connecticut Department of transportation about various motor vehicle accidents around the state, including an accident in Stratford. The Attorney General’s office sent me an email about Attorney General Blumenthal submitting to the court a proposed settlement providing around $1 million in restitution to F&S Oil Company customers. I received a press release from the Connecticut Office of State Ethics concerning court reporters “allegedly using their state positions to obtain financial gain”, including a court reporter from Orange and the City of New Haven sent a press release informing interested parties that “the Chapel Street bridge in the City's Fair Haven neighborhood has been closed temporarily for mechanical reasons. “ It is expected to reopen today. In addition, ConnCan sent out to mailings about their latest report card on Connecticut Schools.
On the national level, I received a press release from Sen. Dodd’s office concerning his letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates urging him “to halt procurement of any further Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters until an analysis of options-including an American-made alternative helicopter-has been completed”. Around the same time, I received an email from the communications director of the Connecticut Democratic Party concerning the latest polls in the U.S. Senate Race.
The U.S. Census Bureau sent a note to correspondents concerning the release of 2009 State Population Estimates. The release had been scheduled for Tuesday, but has been postponed because of the inclement weather which closed the federal government on Monday. It should come out today at noon. I also received various notices from the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice and a fascinating news release from the National Building Museum and National Capital Planning Commission about twenty-four middle school students views on the best way to design a new White House Visitor Center.
In many cases, a volunteer citizen journalist can relatively easily get information from various agencies. Unfortunately, Woodbridge is different. Last Friday, a neighbor forwarded a copy of a press release concerning two recent burglaries in town. I sent a request to be added to the distribution list for the emails of the Woodbridge Police Department Press Releases.
Yesterday, I was disappointed to receive the following reply:
We received your request, however, the Press Releases are e-mailed to our Police Commission members as a courtesy. The Press Releases appear in the New Haven Register. At this time, we will not be e-mailing Press Releases to any other outside agencies.
This raises concerns on many levels. The most immediate is public safety. If the Woodbridge Police Department is truly concerned with public safety, they should be making every effort to distribute public information to any journalist or citizen in the town, and not simply to the police commissioners and the police department’s preferred news organizations.
Likewise, there is the message of courtesy. The police department shows courtesy to commissioners but not to journalists that reside in the town. That is not a message that is good for the Police Department’s image. On a mailing list of media reformers, one person wrote that this was the dumbest thing they had ever heard and hoped that the Woodbridge Police Department was better at fighting crime that it is at handling information.
A Woodbridge resident noted that the Woodbridge Police Department does not seem to understand public relations and noted that the point of issuing press releases is to publicize activities in a consistent and efficient manner.
Then, there are questions of fact. Do the press releases appear in the New Haven Register? Most news organizations do not publish press releases directly. Instead, they are used as material for their reporters to write news stories. I’ve contacted several reporters at the New Haven Register to ask for details about how press releases from the Woodbridge Police Department are handled and am awaiting replies. A quick search online for the press release that started this discussion did not show anything at the New Haven Register. However, it did find an article in the Amity Observer, a local weekly paper. That article does not identify itself as being a press release thought it appeared to be a nearly verbatim copy of the press release.
Even if the press releases do show up in the New Haven Register, or the Amity Observer, there can be an additional lag before this information gets distributed, returning back to the public safety issue.
There is also the issue of unfair preference to some news organizations over others. This can be a subtle attempt at censorship, by not sharing information with news organizations that write critical stories of the Police Department. I believe it was protection from this sort of concern that led our forefathers to including protection of the press in the Bill of Rights.
Beyond the issues of how this action relates to freedom of the press, there are important freedom of information issues. One lawyer observed that a basic rule of government speech is that while they may not be compelled to speak, once they do they should do so in a nondiscriminatory manner. Several people encouraged me to contact the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission which I will probably do after the holidays.
Yet it is not fair to single out the Woodbridge, CT police department. I found similar stories of people dealing with local police departments in upstate New York, Virginia, and other states. Others have reported police departments that have been particular helpful in disseminating public information, including police departments in Washington State and California.
It isn’t just police departments that make efforts to restrict public information. According to Huffington Post, radio talk show host Bill Press took a job as an intern in Sen. Bernie Sanders office to better cover what is going on in the Senate after being denied he “was denied a request for media credentials from the Congressional Radio-Television Galleries”.
Numerous people noted that this is a problem that is likely to get worse before it gets better, especially as more and more downsized traditional journalists set up their own online news sites and attempt to get access. The media advocacy group Free Press is looking at this on the national level and the Citizen Media Law Project has launched the Online Media Legal Network, a project hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. They are prepared to offer legal aid to online journalists in these battles.
On the one hand, I am hoping that this is just a small misunderstanding on the part of the Woodbridge Police Department and I will not have to pursue legal actions with the help of the various organizations listed above. On the other hand, if I do have to pursue this through various legal fronts, I hope that this will prove beneficial to citizen journalists around the country fighting for more open access to public information in their communities.
Have you tried gaining access to important public information? What have been your successes? What have been your challenges? How have you worked around them? Let’s get a good dialog going to discuss how we can all work together to improve government services in all our communities.
How Closely are You Following the News?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/11/2009 - 10:32The Pew Research Center has a very quick poll that I would love it if some of my readers took and reported back their results.
Read the rest of my blog post after you’ve taken the quiz.
Free, as in Hard Cider
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/08/2009 - 13:43On two different mailing lists recently, the discussions between Gratis and Libre, or “Free, as in Beer” versus “Free as in Speech” has come up. Since I’ve started making my own Hard Cider and giving away a fair amount of it, it struck me that thinking about Free Hard Cider provides an interesting way of exploring “Free, as in Beer”.
In many ways brewing hard cider is similar to writing blog posts. First, and foremost, I do both of them because I enjoy doing it. Then, I place my blog posts up on the Internet for anyone to freely read. While I’m less liberal with my hard cider, I also give away a fair amount of it.
If people like my blog posts, I am grateful when they add a comment in response to my blog posts, essentially, freely giving me information about their reactions or other information they think I might appreciate. If they buy something from one of my sponsors, thereby generating revenue for me, that is also appreciated.
In a similar manner, much of my cider is given away at pot luck events. We bring things that we like to make and give it away freely and others do the same thing. As a result, I often have a nice Mexican Layer Dip to eat with the cider that I drink.
Another interesting aspect of Free Hard Cider, which perhaps tells us something about production and distribution of other things is that the cost of the bottles is greater than the cost of the cider itself. In other words, the big expense is in distribution. To deal with this, I try to recover as many of my used cider bottles as possible to reuse them. In a similar manner, the cost of distributing the written words has always been expensive; printing presses, trucks to deliver the papers, newsboys to take the paper the final mile, and so on. Yet as more of the written word gets distributed online, the cost of distribution decreases. The same is applying to lots of things that can be delivered online and is causing many to rethink their pricing models. This has been a big issue in the news and music industries and is likely to spread.
Of course my cider production and blogging are avocational interests. What about the journalist who needs to get paid for his work? Are their ‘free’ models that could work in this manner? Some of my friends might see this as a return to bartering or some sort of socialist enterprise. Yet this presents an interesting way of rethinking our work. Would we be better off if more people worked at what they loved, in hopes of getting enough compensation to live instead of people toiling away at things they are less interested in out of a contractual obligation that provides them of a somewhat steady income stream?
Perhaps at a party someday soon, I’ll eat some Mexican Layer Dip, drink some cider, and discuss these ideas with friends. Until that time, feel free to leave your comments here.
The Tedium of Electoral Politics
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/06/2009 - 10:00As the battle for the Governor’s Seat in Connecticut heats up, so does the battle about how the election will be funded. On Friday Republicans announced their latest deficit mitigation package which
For the fourth time since they’ve been offering alternative budget plans to their majority party colleagues, the Republicans proposed eliminating the funding for the Citizens’ Election Program. Currently the fund has about $30 million in it, which would be used to help fund the 2010 elections.
Apparently, they would rather see a campaign for governor between two men from Greenwich that can self fund their campaigns.
Then, in the Hartford Courant today, Former Republican State Senator Kevin Rennie suggested that Election Finance Law Shackles Candidates. He suggested that “Raising that $250,000 from the thin ranks of Connecticut Republicans requires a taste for tedium.” Given the lack of substance in most Republican discourse I’ve heard over the recent months, I can understand why some would view discussions with Republicans tedious, but I would hope that anyone running for office would not find talking with their possible constituents, especially constituents in their own party, tedious.
Most candidates in the 2006 cycle reported that by participating in the Citizens’ Election Program, they spent more time talking to their possible constituents about the issues that matter most. First, they had to spend time talking to a wide array of low dollar donors, and then, when they had completed this, they were free to spend all their time talking about the issues, and not having to waste more time dialing large donors for dollars.
Yet perhaps it is this fear of having to talk about positions that worries Mr. Rennie and his friends the most. Ken Dixon, in a recent blog post wrote, Tom Foley Wants To Be Governor, But Needs Time To Say Why. Several people commented on Mr. Dixon’s post suggesting it was unfair for members of the media to want information about why a candidate is running for office.
Mr. Rennie seems to long for the days when donors could give up to $2,500 per person. He also goes on to say that “The campaign finance law championed by Rell, Fedele's ‘partner in government,’ bars many citizens from participating in politics.” The ‘many citizens’ that Mr. Rennie is so concerned about are the 622 registered lobbyists and their family members who are barred from making financial contributions to campaigns and for Mr. Rennie, ‘participating in politics’ seems to be limited to writing large checks.
I should note that I am the spouse of one of those 622 registered lobbyists. My wife is a Senior Organizer for Common Cause here in Connecticut. She continues to fight hard for the Citizens Election Program. The law does bar me from making financial contributions to the Gubernatorial campaigns. However, I believe there are much more important ways of participating in politics than writing checks, including discussing the issues that matter to the people of Connecticut.
This leads me to a final thought, for right now, about Mr. Rennie’s column. He ends off his column saying,
If there's an unexpected choice, someone who isn't rich but who advocates interesting ideas, he or she will have a hard time being heard. So many people are banned from participating that if you aren't rich, you're sentenced to months of scavenging for small contributions in the name of Jodi Rell's virtue.
I fail to comprehend this logic. If all the candidates, whether they have a rolodex of rich friends, or an email list of loyal supporters, are limited to spending the same amount of money, then everyone has the same chance of getting their message out. Of course, this will depend on members of the media, both old and new, to focus on the issues, the way Mr. Dixon and myself wish to do, instead of making sure that rich lobbyists can pay campaigns to hire expensive consultants and air expensive television advertisements, the way Mr. Rennie seems to think political coverage should be done.
(Cross posted at My Left Nutmeg.)
