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Government records are fuel for the engine of investigative reporting. Using documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests, journalists regularly expose waste, mismanagement, and corruption across every level of government, from Cabinet-level federal agencies to the tiniest local police department. The Supreme Court of the United States has recognized the foundational role of accessible government documents “to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.” But records are notoriously challenging to obtain.
This Article proposes a better system. Drawing on a very different body of law—the law of public utilities—the Article recommends enacting a system of “net metering” that would enable news organizations to earn government compensation for adding value to public records. Just as the owners of rooftop solar-power arrays can offset their electric bills by selling power back to the utility grid, news outlets should be compensated for generating public serving datasets—in effect, doing the job that the government should be doing itself. This Article attempts to lay out a case for why “net metering” makes sense in the newsroom context, and how a net metering compensation approach might work in practice
Frank D. LoMonte *
* Legal Counsel, Cable News Network, Inc.; Adjunct Instructor, University of Georgia School of Law. J.D., University of Georgia School of Law, 2000. B.A., Georgia State University, 1992. The author is the former director of the Joseph L. Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, where research for this Article began