Journalists concerns over FOI proposals

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 October 2006 at 18:28
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism

This afternoon, I spoke with Martin Rosenbaum, the head of the BBC’s Freedom of Information unit. I asked him how he thought the Government’s proposed changes to the FoI fees regime would affect the BBC’s journalism.

One of the strange ways that blogging has transformed the journalist-source relationship is that sometimes sources report interviews before the journalists file their stories.
Rosenbaum’s reply is now up on his blog, Open Secrets — and it’s not good news. If the Government proposals come into effect, he writes, it “would dramatically curtail the use of FOI by the BBC”.

No wonder the Society of Editors is planning to lobby against the proposed changes next week.

Another blogging journalist concerned about the proposals is FoI campaigner Heather Brooke. She notes that the report (PDF) by Frontier Economics, the company commissioned by the Department for Constitutional Affars to study the costs of FoI implementation, “is more an indictment of the inefficiencies that have grown up in the culture of secrecy rather than a criticism of openness”.

Steve Wood of the UK FOIA Blog notes that the brief Frontier Economics were given by the DCA was very narrow. The company was asked only to consider the impact of four options, all of which would have made submitting FoI requests more expensive.

“[T]he DCA approach has been very much ‘find us some evidence to support what we want to do’ rather than indepedently research then suggest the options based on the evidence”, he writes before asking a few questions.