Online outfit trains, empowers journalists to scrutinize government

September 17, 4:54 PMCivil Liberties ExaminerJ.D. Tuccille

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Civil Liberties Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

The "crisis" afflicting newspapers is a popular topic these days -- especially among professional journalists. They engage in endless hand-wringing, and occasionally indulge themselves in fantasies about following the example set by General Motors and bypassing the fickle audience by sucking off the government teat. But if old-style journalists forsee doom for their ink-stained world, the sentiment isn't shared by the flood of new media journalists -- many of them amateurs -- rushing to fill the void left by the collapse of newsprint dailies. And outfits like the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity are arising to assist the new scribblers with resources for keeping the spotlight on the government agencies and officials that wield so much power over our lives.

Right now, the Franklin Center Website mostly contains categorized links to resources for finding important data. For the federal government, this includes basic information, like the Thomas Website for information about federal legislation, as well as the PACER service for court filings, sources for statistics at the Labor Department and the Centers for Disease Control, and who to contact at government agencies with freedom of information requests.  But it also compiles links to independent sources like LegiStorm, which is a valuable source of information about Congress, Judgepedia, which has indispensible information about the judicial branch, the Open Government Guide, where you'll find open records and open meeting laws for around the country, and Sunshine Review, devoted to government transparency.

Going forward, the Frankling Center's mission statement says it will accomplish its goal of keeping government under scruting "by networking and training independent investigative reporters, as well as journalists from state based news organizations, public-policy institutions & watchdog groups." To that end, the Center sponsors several local "watchdogs" -- journalists who put the organization's DIY philosophy into practice.

Many of the Franklin Center's staffers, including President Jason Stverak, come from the Sam Adams Alliance, a free market/small government outfit that created several of the resources promoted by the Center, such as Ballotpedia, Judgepedia and Sunshine Review. The Franklin Center looks like an effort to incorporate the Sam Adams resources into an overall effort to train and empower independent journalists and turn them loose against politicians. This enthusiasm for keeping the microscope on government action is the only obvious area in which the group's founding small-government ideology comes through. Since the resources are available to all-comers, that shouldn't matter overly much to anybody, except people who think politicians should be free of scrutiny.

In and of itself, the Franklin Center isn't the answer to "what comes next?" in the world of journalism. But it's a good indicator that part of the answer will be efforts to professionalize and empower swarms of eager amateur journalists who are ready to build a post-newspaper world.

email J.D.: civilliberties (at) tuccille.com