Finding public records from the outside in

Many reporters approach a long-term project by researching “from the outside in”. This means circling around a topic using publicly available information and people on the fringes of the topic before they approach a key source.

In our case, your goal is to know exactly what you are looking for and what your rights are before you ever contact the agency.

I will provide you some examples of public records requests that were developed that way, and there is an example in your textbook. Generally, here is what you need to learn before you request electronic public records:

The specific agency that holds the records you want to acquire.
The formal name of the form or database that you want.
Which portions of the records are public under the relevant law.

Taming your topic

Start by thinking of a story idea or a line of coverage that would benefit from some public records. These aren’t just ideas that you think need some “numbers” – if that’s all you want, then a special interest group or expert can probably just give them to you. Instead, think of something that requires individual levels of information or a story that isn’t just dependent on one or two facts.

Example: You want to report on wildfires in Arizona. If you already have a story, you may just want to know how many lives, acres and dollars have been destroyed by wildfires in recent years. This fact is readily available from a variety of sources. But if you want to delve into the details of each fire, including exactly where it started, how it started and how it spread, you are likely to need more granular data: records on each fire.

Get inspired

You should do a thorough search on where you are on this story. Who else has done something similar? Was it a long time ago, or in a different area? What did other local coverage miss?

Sources to check include:

IRE resource center, story database and story packs. To find stories, be sure to log into IRE using your membership account, and search in the main page search box, not the sidebar:

Most large non-profit news investigations of your topic will have an IRE entry. Once you find it and are logged in, you can download the contest entry that shows what sources they used and what problems they had reporting the story.

Do a targeted Nexis or Proquest search through the library, limiting your results to long stories that contain keywords that will limit your results:

Do a good Google News and Google search. For example:
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news investigation allintitle: wildfires
```

In each of these sources, pay attention not only to what they’ve found, but to the experts they quote, the organizations they mention and the documents or data they source in graphics and in the stories.

Find people who know more than you

Look for:

Congressional (or state level) legislative testimony
Interest groups that cover your topic. You can use the Encyclopedia of Associations through the library, or look at Project VoteSmart’s special interest group list for national organizations. Then look at their websites to see if this is a topic they care about.
People who have been involved in the issue. Retired agency employees - especially inspectors - are usually quite knowledgable and are interested in helping the public understand what they used to do. You might also look for lawyers who represent people hurt by the system you want to examine, or victims themselves.
Academic researchers who are invested in your topic. Use Google Scholar to find them. Be sure to read through any relevant articles they have published before you call them.
Back to IRE, this time for the Tip Sheets section. (search it the same way you do stories, using the box in the center, not )

In each of these sources, you should focus not on their findings or opinions, but on HOW they do their work, and what documents or data they rely on.

Find other data that has been released

Look on websites of other cities, states and the federal government to find what data might have already been released. Don’t expect it to be complete, but it will give you a least common denominator for a lot of sets of records.

Federal records are often a subset of what’s collected at the state level, which is in turn a subset of what’s collected by counties or cities. As an example, water quality measures are taken one by one by individual water utilities sampling specific households. Those records are often on paper. They are typed into a database, then usually forwarded to a state agency, which standardizes the format at sends them along to the federal EPA. At every stage, some details are lost.

Some places to look:

Public records aggregators : data.world, enigma.io’s public site, muckrock.org. There may be data aggregators for your specific topic as well.
Open records portals in the federal government and some other states and cities. Other places that have released data in the past include California (state), Oakland, New York State, New York City, Washington DC and Chicago. Think of these as the minimum you should be able to get in most areas.

Narrow your topic and your story ideas

Now that you have a little background and can guess how difficult it will be to get records, you’re ready to narrow your story ideas and your plan for acquiring the records. For our purposes, remember that the records cannot be readily available on the Internet, and should come from state or local government agencies in Arizona.

Burrowing in on your agencies

Now it’s time to figure out what might be available to you from your own state or local government agency. This involves learning the specific name of the document set or database, and which agency is responsible for it. You’ll also have to research the law to understand what can and cannot be released.

Before you request records, you have to understand:

What agency is responsible for them – is it the state or a county? Which department? Which part of the department? You’ll do that by browsing their website, looking at their budgets and searching for any audits or inspector general reports that describe the process. You may also want to call the legislative staff of the committees in the State Legislature that oversee the program that collects the records.
What is and isn’t public from those records? Don’t just take what they say – instead, study the law and determine if you have a right to some portion of the records.
NOW you can call the agency and ask how you go about getting the records – you should ask for them by name, and make sure you are talking to the right person.