Mission includes public information
One caller in early May was angry that an article in The Enterprise detailed an out-of-state criminal charge and subsequent fine and jail sentence for her husband.
She wanted to know how we knew about it and who gave us permission to publish the story.
We knew about it because that's our job. The Constitution gave us permission to publish it -- and all kinds of laws since then have reinforced that permission.
She wanted to know how she could keep such information out of our paper. That answer to that was simple as well: Don't break the law.
This person -- and others like her -- was caught in the crossfire of something called public information. Basically that means that the public has a right to know about anything that involves filing a piece of paper with a local, state or national governmental entity or spending so much as a penny of tax money.
Things that happen at the police station, courthouse, city hall or school building, and many other places, are public record.
The Enterprise, representing the public interest, gathers some of that information and publishes it, but that doesn't mean we have any rights that you don't. John Q. Citizen also has a right to view those records, because they are PUBLIC records.
Through the years, dozens of people have made calls ranging from polite to threatening regarding such information that they wanted to keep private.
Those include marriages, divorces, lawsuits and bankruptcy filings.
* It doesn't matter if you don't want your ex-wife to know you have remarried.
* It doesn't matter if you don't want the neighbors to know about your divorce.
* It doesn't even matter if you don't want your landlord to know you're insolvent.
It's all public record. More importantly, we publish them all. We don't get selective, we don't take requests and we don't omit anything. To do so wouldn't be fair. So, we might be a bit rigid about this, but we are equally rigid with everyone. We don't play favorites.
Information might be conditional. For example, we run marriage license applications. That means the couple applied for a license. It doesn't always mean they went through with the marriage. In the reverse situation, for the same reason we generally only publish divorces after they have been granted.
Some callers have even gone so far as to offer to pay a little something to keep their names off these lists. No, that doesn't work either. Our editor has a little saying about that: If you're going to lose your job over something, it ought to at least be a Mercedes.
*
Sports fans seem to have survived, and even enjoyed the changes to our @PLAY section. The greatest source of confusion, if not disappointment, seems to be the way we share information about sports on television. Several readers called to complain that the information was missing. It's not; it still appears on page 2 of the section, along the left side of the page.
Take another look. It's not gone; it's just different.
She wanted to know how we knew about it and who gave us permission to publish the story.
We knew about it because that's our job. The Constitution gave us permission to publish it -- and all kinds of laws since then have reinforced that permission.
She wanted to know how she could keep such information out of our paper. That answer to that was simple as well: Don't break the law.
This person -- and others like her -- was caught in the crossfire of something called public information. Basically that means that the public has a right to know about anything that involves filing a piece of paper with a local, state or national governmental entity or spending so much as a penny of tax money.
Things that happen at the police station, courthouse, city hall or school building, and many other places, are public record.
The Enterprise, representing the public interest, gathers some of that information and publishes it, but that doesn't mean we have any rights that you don't. John Q. Citizen also has a right to view those records, because they are PUBLIC records.
Through the years, dozens of people have made calls ranging from polite to threatening regarding such information that they wanted to keep private.
Those include marriages, divorces, lawsuits and bankruptcy filings.
* It doesn't matter if you don't want your ex-wife to know you have remarried.
* It doesn't matter if you don't want the neighbors to know about your divorce.
* It doesn't even matter if you don't want your landlord to know you're insolvent.
It's all public record. More importantly, we publish them all. We don't get selective, we don't take requests and we don't omit anything. To do so wouldn't be fair. So, we might be a bit rigid about this, but we are equally rigid with everyone. We don't play favorites.
Information might be conditional. For example, we run marriage license applications. That means the couple applied for a license. It doesn't always mean they went through with the marriage. In the reverse situation, for the same reason we generally only publish divorces after they have been granted.
Some callers have even gone so far as to offer to pay a little something to keep their names off these lists. No, that doesn't work either. Our editor has a little saying about that: If you're going to lose your job over something, it ought to at least be a Mercedes.
*
Sports fans seem to have survived, and even enjoyed the changes to our @PLAY section. The greatest source of confusion, if not disappointment, seems to be the way we share information about sports on television. Several readers called to complain that the information was missing. It's not; it still appears on page 2 of the section, along the left side of the page.
Take another look. It's not gone; it's just different.
posted by Sheila Friedeck at 3:52 PM
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