Alabama paper, university students to compile cases of denied open-records requests in state

Here's a good idea: Collect information about officials' denials of requests for government records in a state, then compile them in a way that will give journalists and other citizens a clearer understanding of the law and how it's being used and abused. That's what The Anniston Star and students at the University of Alabama plan to do. For details, see Page 3 of the October issue of AlaPressa, the newsletter of the Alabama Press Association.

The project follows on the heels of one in which students in the university's master's degree program in community journalism "collected and analyzed more than 1,000 pages of documents detailing spending on 2012 political ads from five television stations in the Birmingham market and published a special report on their findings," the Star reported this summer. The newspaper has a continuing relationship with the degree program.