On June 26, we held our first COVID Public Info training, giving journalists, researchers, and everyone else tips, tricks, and templates for using transparency laws to dig into public records. We covered ground like how to adjust your approach as governments still operate at reduced capacity, as well as called out some specific stories that used transparency to dig into key issues.

Last Friday, MuckRock’s Sam Whitmore Media Survey Fellow Jessie Gomez joined us for our weekly Friday FOIA Chat on MuckRock’s Slack Channel. Gomez is currently working on building FOIA resources for researchers and journalists, and one of the problems she is looking to tackle is the complicated, varying, and often baseless FOIA fees. Here’s some strategies that came out of the conversation.