3 public records tips to remember: ‘Learn how it works‘
When The New Yorker’s Parker Yesko started trying to get records from federal agencies, it felt “kind of like sending requests through a portal into a void.”
And compared to working with local, city and state officials, “it was quite intimidating and it did feel very hopeless,” Yekso said in the latest episode of the “WriteLane” podcast.
The New Yorker’s third season of the “In the Dark” podcast chronicling a deadly massacre in Haditha, Iraq, won numerous awards this year, including the Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting and the Poynter Journalism Prizes’ First Amendment Award. According to the judges’ citation, “the reporting team worked for years — filing more than 700 FOIA requests and six lawsuits — to tell this story, which also included locating and interviewing 39 U.S. Marines who were involved in the event being described, many of whom had never been interviewed.”
And even though the task of getting records felt hopeless, it wasn’t. Here are three tips Yesko shared with WriteLane’s Maria Carrillo and Lane DeGregory on navigating public records requests.
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