Happy Sunshine Week! We’re taking some time and space this week to celebrate our recent investigative work based on public information, talk about the value of open government, and empower you to take ownership of what’s already yours — the data and work product generated by local and state government — and use it to help guide your own decisions about how your local governing should work.
Thursday we’ll have a members video call to talk about the importance of public information, featuring Megan Rhyne of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. On Friday we’ll release the results of our regional public audit of twelve local governments.
Today, I’m going to peel back the curtain on some of our work.
In the early months of 2025, my college-age daughter’s bedroom was turned into a makeshift data warehouse.
About a dozen large posterboard-sized sheets were pinned or taped to the wall. I was on video meetings with our reporters every day trying to mash through all the data we’d squeezed from hundreds of pages of contracts between local law enforcement agencies and public surveillance technology companies (mostly Flock).
We’d hit our first magic number: over 80% of our area towns, cities and counties had some form of public surveillance tech.
As reporters and editors leveraging our right to public information to get to the bottom of things, it was a moment to savor.
For a literal moment, I mean.
Because the next question came quickly: okay, we know how many agencies. But how many cameras are trained on us? That data was in those contracts, and we began to set out to answer that question. My daughter’s bed was a sea of contracts and emails, arranged by some logic that I can’t quite recapture now, managed with six different colors of Sharpie markers. I tested my own numbers constantly against the more digital version of data crunching being done by Lisa Rowan, the voice coming out of my laptop as we checked each other’s work.
In this type of reporting, every answer leads to the next question, in this case How did they pay for all of this? That led us to more exclusive reporting, and a story that I continue to get emails about to this day, including two last week from people in other states trying to fight the surveillance state as homeowners and citizens.
Getting the right data is just the beginning of strong watchdog and investigative work. (This assumes you asked for the right documents in the right way.) Now you have to dive in and interview it, interrogate it, walk with it a while.
Sometimes, you have to leave it behind to do some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting.
That’s what Elizabeth Beyer did when she realized that the math didn’t add up in the data she’d been given by the Office of the Attorney General and the Department of Corrections, data that supposedly supported then-AG Jason Miyares’ oddly specific (and wildly inaccurate, as it turns out) claims about early-release inmates turning into murderers as soon as they hit the streets.
Elizabeth contacted commonwealth’s attorneys, public defenders, third-party experts who might know a thing or two about how the wheels of justice turn in this state. After over a month of this work, we shared what we’d learned in an hourlong video call with OAG and DOC folks, who were convinced enough by our additional data to take another look. Three days later they admitted their data did not support Miyares’ claims.
Good old-school reporting got that story over the finish line, again with reporting that nobody else had because Cardinal News reporters did original work, following the numbers, the money and the next questions.
It’s how Samantha Verrelli found out that the city and fire department were well aware that the Riverdale complex had no water lines feeding its tenants’ fire suppression systems, leaving their property and the people (including children) who came there very much in danger.
This week, we’ll be raising funds to match the $5,000 we estimate we’ll spend on FOIA requests. What I wanted to show you is that our commitment to telling these exclusive stories goes far beyond the cost of a public document. It goes to the heart of solid and responsible reporting that we put the hours in with those documents once we get them, sometimes holding our reporting until we have it just right, which — ask any reporter — can be the longest last little tasks leading to publication, and those most fraught with a rollercoaster ride of anxiety, certainty, doubt and ultimately, satisfaction at a job well done and well received by you, the reader.
We’re always open to tips on the things that are most important to you. Don’t hesitate to let us know if something doesn’t seem right to you and you’d like us to investigate.
My daughter did get her room back when she came home from college for spring break. But I thnk she felt the whispers of all those numbers swirling around her at night for a while.