This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss FOIAing after those racist pet-eating claims, the art and science of paywalling, and gambling with journalism.
JASON: Earlier this week, I published an article about emails that city officials in Springfield, Ohio received in the days immediately before and immediately after the presidential debate containing the word “Haitian.” We haven’t been writing about the election that much because there are hundreds of other journalists covering it and millions of other people playing political pundit on social media all day every day. It’s just not an area of coverage where we can regularly differentiate ourselves from what you can find elsewhere, and even though elections are very important (at every level of government), our time is usually better spent covering topics that have less attention and fewer journalists focusing on them.
That said, when we do have the chance to differentiate ourselves or when something happening in politics intersects with one of our beats or areas of expertise, we’re going to join the fray. In this case, I am not an expert in immigration, but I have gotten pretty good at filing public records requests, and I have gotten particularly good at filing them at the local level. Watching the presidential debate, I knew from covering other, uhh, news events, that Donald Trump namedropping Springfield would inspire some level of response from his supporters in the form of, frankly, insane emails. I think in this case I ended up filing my request for emails that night or first thing the next morning. When it was reported that people were making bomb threats in the days following the debate, I knew I would get some newsworthy emails back if Springfield officials weren’t totally overwhelmed or if they didn’t try to redact or exempt everything they had received.