Happy Monday! We hope you’re having an enjoyable start to your Sunshine Week!
What? You don’t know what that means?
Sunshine Week is an annual celebration of sunshine — or open-records — laws, which require public institutions to disclose many of their internal documents to those who ask to see them. The week is primarily celebrated by journalists, who are usually the ones doing the asking. But Sunshine Week is also an opportunity for news consumers to reflect on what public records do for them.
This week we’ll pen five editorials detailing some of our recent struggles and successes with open-records reporting. But before we do so, it’s important to define some of the journo-jargon we’re working with.
FERPA is a law that protects students’ educational information, which includes their grades, financial information, disciplinary records and more. As a newspaper that primarily covers student activities, we deal with FERPA quite a bit. You’ll read more about this further on in the week.
Another term is the Freedom Of Information Act, which grants individuals the ability to request documents from public entities, such as Ohio University or the Athens Police Department. You don’t have to be a journalist (or a U.S. citizen, for that matter) to submit a public-records request. Our reporters regularly file public-records requests, many of which provide the backbone of the stories we report daily.
It’s worth noting that journalists celebrate sunshine laws for more than seven days out of the year. We are in constant communication with university, city and state public relations officials in pursuit of information and data, and we get a little surge of excitement every time a public records request hits our email inboxes.
So check back here throughout the week for more discussion about our sunshine laws. And if you’re really looking to get in on the fun, we’ll be celebrating the laws in our newsroom, Baker Center 325, all week long.
But like we said above, that’s no deviation from the norm.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post’s executive editors.
