The Society of Professional Journalists is soliciting nominations for a new award this year, the Black Hole Award, which will be awarded during national Sunshine Week in March. Nominations are due Feb. 28!

The Black Hole serves as the counterpoint to the SPJ  Sunshine Award, highlighting a particularly heinous violation of the public’s right to know. By exposing the bad actors, we hope to educate members of the public to their rights and call attention to those who would interfere with the people’s right to acquire government information so that they may hold their elected officials accountable and enhance self-governance.

(Note that this new nationally focused effort was inspired by the Utah Headliners, SPJ’s state chapter, which has been giving out its own state Black Hole Award for quite some time.)

Here are the conditions nomination should meet:

1. Violation, in spirit or letter, of any federal or state open-government law. This would mean either a clear violation of the statute governing access to public records or public meetings, or using an ambiguity or loophole in the law to avoid having to comply with the law. For example, conducting multiple meetings with small groups that do not constitute a quorum, e-mail discussions outside the public view, or charging unreasonable amounts to copy documents.

2. Egregiousness. In order to maintain the effectiveness of the Black Hole award, it should not be given for just any openness violation. There needs to be a demonstration that this was not an isolated incident or done in relative ignorance. Recipients should know they are trampling on the public’s right, placing personal or political interests ahead of the public good or endangering public welfare. Examples might include an agency or official who attempted to keep information secret to avoid embarrassment or hide misdeeds.

3. Impact. The case should be one that affects the public rather than an individual. We want to avoid using the award to settle vendettas against recalcitrant bureaucrats. Essentially we want to see a case where their withholding the information hurt the general public rather than an individual, or its release would further public welfare.

The SPJ Freedom of Information Committee is doing this with a really tight deadline this year, hoping we can announce the “winner” during Sunshine Week. We would appreciate it you would send us information about any “outstanding” candidates you are aware of.

Deadline for nominations is Monday, Feb. 28. If possible, nominations should include, where possible, supporting documentation to allow SPJ to determine if the criteria have been met. The documentation can include any of the following, although the more documentation the better:

• News coverage of the violation.

• Public records chronicling the dispute.

• Legal papers if there was a lawsuit or other legal action involved in the matter.

• Any expert opinion from an attorney, official or open-government expert that the violation occurred.

• Contact information for the parties involved to allow the committee to obtain more information if needed, including from the government official.

Please email nominations to SPJ FOI Committee member Mike Farrell, farrell@uky.edu,

UPDATE [2/23/11]: This post was corrected to reflect that the SPJ Sunshine Award is not given out during national Sunshine Week. The due date for that award is March 18. It will be presented at an awards banquet at the Excellence in Journalism 2011 conference.

When my former SPJ campus chapter conducted an FOI audit two years ago, we asked for the contracts of some head honchos at the University of Florida. You’re looking at superstars like basketball coach Billy Donovan and beloved football coach Urban Meyer. We also went after UF President Bernie Machen’s contract and UF Athletic Director Jeremy Foley’s.

I wish I still had the documents with me, because the perks and the pay listed made our heads spin, but we supposed the cushy contracts weren’t too surprising.

Conducting the mini-audit didn’t prove to be the challenge we were looking for, thanks in part to the strength of Florida’s Sunshine Law. The University of Florida willingly handed over the contracts in a timely fashion. There was no fuss, and we ran out of time to make a worthy news story out of the findings.

[Has your chapter or news organization conducted an FOI audit that proved to be difficult, and do you have tips for others who would like to do their own audit? Have you revealed pertinent information about community leaders that the public had a right to know? If so, please share in the comments.]

We had hoped to some day make public information requests for something better, something harder to grasp. We were happy to know that UF just handed over the contracts without complaint, but we wanted to find those documents that would produce a front-page story. Perhaps it was unfair to want to go for the university “jugular,” but we wanted to put UF through the ultimate FOI test.

It was definitely a relief being in Florida, which is a leader in FOI openness. But it’s still a shame that some agencies around the nation can’t catch up to 2010.

In recent news, the South Carolina Press Association has made numerous requests to law enforcement agencies that have been denied or altered. For example, a city council member’s name was redacted from a police report, and a Columbia police chief refused to release car collision records that involved the newly elected mayor, according to a column in the Aiken Standard.

According to Jay Bender, an attorney who represents the S.C. Press Association and teaches at the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications, there is an attitude that has existed in South Carolina since the plantation days, where a small group in power “made decisions and told the rest of the population that the right decision had been made.”

This backwards way of thinking is the reason why journalists still need to pool their resources and FOI knowledge to keep community leaders in check. I sat in an interview once and told a Florida newspaper that I really liked the fact they had a Watchdog section. The paper’s representative admitted that they rarely updated the section nowadays and that it isn’t quite what they wanted it to be.

Because news organizations have a lack of manpower and/or funding to make important record requests, they are letting leaders run amuck. And when leaders are running amuck, then readers are wondering why local journalists aren’t blowing the whistle.

We’re a bunch of FOI-loving people, so let’s get some story-sharing going. We’d love to hear from you.

April Dudash is the summer 2010 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern and does the bidding of SPJ Headquarters. She graduated from the University of Florida in May and has been an SPJ member since 2006.