I was speaking to a group of journalists from New Mexico recently when I told them about one of my favorite public records stories of all time. I watched as their mouths dropped open. It was the same reaction I had when I first read the Tampa Bay Times’ story.
Written a decade ago in 2005, when the paper was known as the St. Petersburg Times, reporters Garrett Therolf and Matt Waite used public records to answer one question: What were Pasco County commissioners doing on their computers during public meetings?
The answer: they were looking at travel websites for upcoming vacations, browsing eBay for prices on golf clubs, looking at stocks and checking a personal AOL email account, among other things.
Therolf’s and Waite’s story, “May I have your attention, please?,” didn’t just examine what sites the commissioners had visited. They also looked at the time stamps and found that some commissioners had surfed the Web even as community members spoke before them.
One commissioner visited eight Web pages while a resident pleaded with the board to oppose a townhouse development. When later questioned, the commissioner admitted he was using the Web to plan an upcoming vacation, but he “bristled at the notion” that he did not give the woman his full attention, the newspaper reported.
“You’re implying I can’t do two things at one time,” he told the paper, which is owned by Poynter, insisting that he did nothing wrong. He later said he regretted his Web use and would remove the browser from his computer.
Photo by Evgeny Pavlov/Flickr
How they did it
I spoke with the reporters – Therolf by email and Waite by phone – to ask how they got the idea to do the story, what reaction they received and how other reporters might replicate their creative use of public records.
“It’s been surprising how many reporters have reached out about that story and said, ‘How can I do it?’” said Waite, who now works as a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Matt Waite, submitted photo
Waite credits his former colleague Therolf, now a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, for being a good beat writer and getting the story.
“We had a county commissioner at the time who had a burr under her saddle about employees using the Internet,” Waite said. “Garrett went, ‘Hey, hold on,’ and he remembered the monitoring software (the county) got installed.”
Therolf says one of the reasons he wanted to check the commissioners’ Internet history was because he had noticed they “were particularly inattentive” during meetings. Thanks to the county’s monitoring software and Florida’s public records law, getting the commissioners’ Web history was fairly easy, he said.
Therolf then shared the Web history database with Waite, who was a general assignment reporter at the time but had a background in computer-assisted reporting. At the suggestion of an editor, they also requested copies of the commissioners’ meetings on video so they could compare the timestamps of the meetings to the Web histories.
Garrett Therolf, submitted photo
“We popped it into a VCR and hit play, and off we went,” Waite said. “I don’t remember it taking that long. It came together relatively quickly and reasonably smoothly.”
Reactions to the story varied. One commissioner “broke down and cried,” Waite recalled. Another insisted the records were wrong. Community members were irate. Fellow reporters were in awe, calling for advice on how to check on their local government officials’ Web use.
“The reaction to the story was pretty swift and deep,” Therolf wrote. “This is such a basic issue that readers really got it on a gut level. In the subsequent election, it came up over and over in Steve Simon’s fight for re-election, and he ended up losing what might have otherwise been an easy coast to another term.”
How you can do it
Reporting a story like this can be a little tricky, depending on the public records laws in your state and how your local government tracks its employees’ Web usage, if at all. Waite suggests contacting your local government’s IT staff and asking how they monitor employees’ Internet usage at work.
“If they had an employee doing something nefarious – it doesn’t have to be a county commissioner, just anyone – how would they know?” Waite said. “From that conversation, you’ll get a better understanding.”
If they do track Internet usage, ask for a database of those records for a specific timeframe. If they don’t track how public employees are using the Internet at work, that could be a story, too.
Stories like this are unexpected. That’s one of the reasons Therolf’s and Waite’s article resonated with me and has remained one of my favorite public records stories of all time. It made me think about all the public meetings I’ve covered and how I often saw officials staring at their laptops. What were they looking at? I wish I had thought to ask.
Related: How to Request Data from Public Agencies: Data Analysis for Journalists
