Community Events

Who: Taylor Barnes is a field reporter for the award-winning outlet Inkstick Media, an independent, nonprofit newsroom covering war, power, and peace. Her reporting has brought her to key sites across the map of military-industrial America, from Huntsville, Ala., to Madison Township, Ohio and Promontory, Utah. You can sign up for her newsletter, Military-Industrial America, here. Her reporting has exposed arms industry lobbyists targeting local voters in Ohio, how Utah government officials let a major defense contractor off the hook for worker deaths at a missile plant, the Mormon church investments of tithe payer funds in ballistic missiles despite historic opposition to nuclear weapons weapons, loopholes written in North Carolina state legislation to benefit a key defense contractor, and more.

What: In this meet-and-greet training, field reporter Taylor Barnes will walk through the sources, methods, and tools she uses to carry out the enterprise and investigative reporting she has done on the people and places tied up in the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget. She will give a “how I did this” training on investigative pieces that have exposed worker deaths in the missile industry, uncovered arms industry lobbyist influence at statehouses, and scrutinized state contracts for tax breaks and subsidies to the industry.

Ever wonder what happens to your request after you hit send? This session pulls back the curtain on the world of FOIA officers. It considers how they're trained, what resources they rely on, and what's actually going on behind some of the most common responses requesters receive.

Watch as MuckRock's Dillon Bergin is put through training process by Nick Santos, MuckRock's in-house FOIA expert and former FOIA officer at the U.S. Coast Guard. Nick flips the script and puts Dillon to work processing requests instead of sending them. Together, they'll walk through a couple real FOIA requests from the analyst's side, breaking down what each response actually signals and what's happening behind the scenes when requesters are left waiting, redirected, or denied.

Understanding how FOIA officers think and work can make you a sharper, more strategic requester. So the next time you get a response, you'll know exactly what it means and what to do next.

FOIAFriday is a community space for journalists, researchers, and transparency advocates to connect, share ideas, and dig into the practice of public records research and reporting.

Join Good Jobs First experts for a hands-on introduction to tools and tips that can help journalists make sense of economic development incentives, and dig into corporate misconduct, even on deadline. In this one-hour training, you’ll learn how to:

• Investigate corporate incentives: Use Subsidy Tracker to find tax breaks and other economic development incentives awarded to companies and in specific communities.

• Expose corporate misconduct: Use Violation Tracker to uncover regulatory penalties, prosecutions and lawsuit settlements involving major corporations and across nearly 500 federal, state, and local agencies.

• Uncover foregone revenue: Learn how to use GASB 77 disclosures in Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports (ACFRs) to see how much revenue governments and school districts are giving up through economic development tax breaks.

We’ll show you where to find the data and public records you can use to deepen your reporting, spot trends, and ask sharp questions about economic development deals. We’ll also cover what to look for in a well-structured incentive deal. The training is designed for both new and experienced journalists. Submit questions in advance to arlene@goodjobsfirst.org or bring them to the webinar.

This FOIAFriday is a little different.

Instead of a panel or a presentation, we're rolling up our sleeves and working through FOIA requests together, live, in real time. Bring a request you're stuck on, a denial you're not sure how to appeal, a strategy you want to think through, or just curiosity about where to start. We'll workshop them as a group and tap into the collective knowledge of the FOIAFriday community.

A note: this session will not be recorded, so you'll want to show up live to participate.

FOIAFriday is a community space for journalists, researchers, and transparency advocates to connect, share ideas, and dig into the practice of public records research and reporting.