The Tucson Citizen is likely to go out of business next month, but at least it’s going out swinging. The small afternoon daily (the little guy in the city’s JOA with the Arizona Daily Star), is expected to close next month unless Gannett can find a buyer, but at least the attorneys will get some money.

This week a judge ordered the Maricopa County Sheriff to pay an additional $29,403 in attorney fees, bringing the total payout to $54,644. The paper sued when the sheriff tried to keep records secret, a common occurence by Sheriff Joseph Arpaio (another common occurence: Arpaio losing to newspapers in public records battles). Arpaio’s obstinance is putting several media lawyers’ kids through college, at the expense of taxpayers. Kudos to Arizona newspapers for continuing to force Arpaio to follow the law.

Sometimes it takes a rap with a gavel to get agencies to follow the law. Last week a federal judge ordered the Treasury Department to responde to a FOIA request from Fox News for documents regarding the financial bailout. See the Reporters Committee Web site for more info.

Many news organizations have been trying to get ahold of basic records to find out where our money is going, but the government has been resistent. Check out the back-and-forth haggling between the Treasury and Bloomberg News, as posted by GovernmentAttic.org. It’s amazing to see the government dink around a journalist who submitted a very specific public records request. The provided documents are a joke, almost completely blacked out. By the way, GovernmentAttic.org is a great Web site for finding interesting federal documents acquired through FOIA requests and posted for the public, including many FOIA logs – so you can see what kinds of documents news organizations are requesting. Might yield some good story ideas.

Kudos to Fox and other organizations that take agencies to task by taking them to court.

A federal court case in the First Circuit (Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island) decided that truth can be libelous if it is written maliciously with intentional ill will. Gads, this is bad case law that starts making us look more and more like England. The decision out of Massachusetts in Noonan v. Staples applied Massachusetts state law and ignored federal law, where “actual malice” means knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.

The case emerged when a Staples manager sent an e-mail to 1,500 employees alerting them that employee Noonan had been fired for violating the company’s travel and expense policy. The information was true, but the court found that the message was sent with malicious intent. (See a good summary at the Reporters Committee Web site).

The message for journalists? Make sure you don’t have an ax to grind and show any indications of malice toward a source. Keep printing the truth and do so for the best of intentions – to help the public.

Sunshine Review is a great Web site, and now it is posting proposed legislation for each state. Check out the list and see what is going on in your state. If they are missing something, feel free to let them know so they can add it. Skimming the list it looks like there’s a lot going on out there, toward secrecy and openness. Check it out!

This week the U.S. House of Representatives reintroduced the Free Flow of Information Act (H.R. 985) that would provide a federal shield law to protect journalists from arbitrary subpoenas. Most states have their own protections, but it’s time to get this federal shield law passed so journalists don’t have to go to jail for protecting their sources (like Toni Locy).

For more information, check out the SPJ statement. To find the contact information for your representative, check out this map. This year, let’s git ‘er done. Call/e-mail now!

The Savannah Morning News brought a little sunshine to Georgia after persuading the Savannah-Chatham County police to post a daily list of incident reports online. The paper also got a little help from the state attorney general, who said the police violated the state’s public records law by keping daily incident reports secret.

It’s a story that has played out throughout the country. For years, police provided incident reports on a clipboard at the front desk, which reporters could look through to identify newsworthy crimes. But in December the police stopped providing the reports when it went to a paperless, electronic system. There was no way for journalists to see reports unless they asked for individual reports.

That is unacceptable. Good for the paper by raising a stink over it. As a result, police will work on getting the daily online postings rolling by June. The agency will start with a basic list of just the crime, date and neighborhood. But eventually a synopsis for each incident will be provided. Then, journalists (and citizens, of course), can ask for more detailed information on specific incidents. That seems like a workable system that saves paper and protects transparency!

The U.S. Government Printing Office launched a new Google-based search system for finding federal records, called the Federal Digital System (FDsys). According to a story by Ed O’Keefe of The Washington Post, the government spent $20 million since 2004 working on this system, intending to archive and make accessible electronic documents from all three branches of the federal government. Tons of information is now a little more accessible through basic and advanced keyword searches. I put in “turnip” and got 325 hits. It should keep journalists busy for a while.