Fiona Morgan

We’re launching News Voices: North Carolina to forge connections between North Carolinians and the newsrooms that serve them. We’re beginning our community-engagement initiatives in Charlotte and the Triangle, and we anticipate working in places like Asheville, the Triad and Wilmington over the next two years. We’ll host small gatherings, trainings and public conversations. We’ll foster collaborations between newsrooms and community groups. We’ll strengthen networks of journalists, media makers and people who care about quality local news and information, building stronger bonds statewide to foster better and more sustainable news coverage of North Carolina.

As of March 1, the FBI will no longer accept Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests via e-mail. Anyone seeking public records from the FBI will have to use a new online portal — or send requests via fax or snail mail. Online FOIA portals may seem like a good idea in theory, but government agencies make them difficult to use — with way too many burdensome requirements.

The Freedom of Information Act gives us a legal right to request public records, which allow journalists and watchdogs to hold the government accountable. FOIA requests uncovered harmful covert operations like COINTELPRO — an FBI program designed to dismantle civil rights groups, among others — and also exposed government surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists.

[Commentary] A key takeaway from the Alliance for Community Media’s recent conference in Boston (MA): Community media can and must help fill the gaps in local news coverage that are growing across the country thanks to rampant consolidation and newsroom cutbacks. Community media is an umbrella term that refers to noncommercial media that isn’t part of NPR or PBS. ACM is an organization composed primarily of public access, education and government (PEG) TV channels available on cable television, along with the digital media centers and training programs such stations offer. There are more than 3,000 community media outlets in the US, and they’re diverse in terms of the resources they have, the programming they produce, the way they’re organized, and the scale at which they operate. What they have in common is that we need them more than ever.