Visitors who poke around the pages here will know that I’m for transparency, that is opening a window into the U.S. news media that writes news stories about us and our business. So as this story develops, I’ve got to share some insight into how the Journal News in White Plains, New York not only felt there was news interest in finding out how pervasive the number of legal handgun owners were in their two-county area, but also in the pushback as a blogger published the names and home addresses of the employees of the Gannett-owned property.

Now the next shoe has dropped as I expected they would and the management felt that they had to protect their employees at work from unknown elements. It’s curious to see that in this story from a neighboring competitor that of the email threats they have received, local police determined that there wasn’t enough of a threat to pursue charges.

Let’s recap this story with my sense of what was likely going on behind the scenes. Setting aside any feelings I have about guns and gun control, the Journal News did have a legitimate interest as the sense of the country after the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings to look locally at how this story could play out. As most local news media seek to compete against larger regional news media, they do what plays to their strength: how it affects their local community.

The reason this is a story is because they used open records which is available to anyone in the United States. You can look them up, as well as I, but we don’t do things like that because we don’t have a reason. The Journal News did have a reason. But what’s news to us is that the newspaper got pushback. Now in my past in local newspapers, the drudgery of looking up public police reports often came with focused push back from those that were named in the police reports, mostly having been charged. We would get calls from the few people that were affected, challenging that we had no right to put them in the paper. But they were named in public records, and is available for inspection. If they had stayed in the police station, even fewer would bother, but putting in the local paper was over the line. The reality is that the courts have sided with the news media and I haven’t seen it challenged successfully in court.

But the Journal News brought it to a higher level: Publishing the list of names and addresses of those who had registered to own handguns. That’s a big list and the coup de grace: an interactive map showing where to find these gun owners. Here’s the key difference: A person named in a police report may be charged with a crime, but it’s important to know that they are not guilty until proven so. The people who went through the process to register their handguns are not guilty and have willingly submitted their names and addresses in a legal process. Sure, I could look up the names and addresses, but why would I want to do so? The Journal News in this case seemed to take advantage of citizens who followed the rules and exposed them, almost as if they were guilty. I don’t know that, but it’s not implausible to come to that conclusion.

Now, because there are more people who have the means to do the same thing the Journal News did: publish names and addresses, with map locations, of Journal News employees connected with  the story. This seems to me to be fair, the legal gun owners did not ask for being exposed, nor did the newspaper teams. And our mission here at Sandbagged is to show what’s behind the curtain, but only in a professional manner, not personally.

I don’t see what recourse the citizens harmed by this exposure have. There is talk now of changing legislation to prevent this, but given how heavy the precedent seems to be on the open records laws I’d be surprised if there is any long-lasting effect to chill media access to public records. The only real recourse is for peer pressure from other news media, and given the mindset of their peers, I don’t see that happening. We just have to expose and prepare ourselves for their onslaught.