Colin Drane is an unlikely warrior in the fight for open government.

An inventor and TV infomercial producer, Drane spent much of his career marketing products like the Trunkanizer  for organizing car trunks, a toy called Bendaroos, and Invisi-lift self-adhesive breast enhancement pads.

Six years ago, Drane started a different kind of business – a company called ReportSee, which operates the website SpotCrime.com. The site obtains publicly available crime records from police agencies and graphically displays them on colorful maps.

Drane says the site attracts a million views a month from people curious about the burglaries, shootings, and other bedlam in their towns. The site makes money through advertising and from partnerships with television stations and other media organizations.

“Its primary appeal is folks involved in neighborhood watches and people who want to know what’s going on their communities,” Drane said in a phone interview. He said the information on SpotCrime, which typically is culled from police department logs and incident reports, can make communities safer.

“If an unusual van is in the neighborhood, and everybody knows there’s been a rash of burglaries, maybe somebody takes time to call the police, where maybe in the past it would have been brushed off,” he said.

More than 300 law-enforcement agencies around the country cooperate with Drane and provide him electronic access to their crime reports. But he’s had conflicts with dozens of other agencies, which either deny him access entirely or provide information that’s dated or incomplete.

Often, he finds that agencies already have struck deals with one of his larger competitors. The owners of sites such as CrimeReports.com, CrimeMapping.com, and RAIDS online compile and publish similar maps.

“Police departments contract with a vendor and give them preferential access to very important public data,” Drane said. “If you’ve got agencies controlling the information through a vendor, that’s not full transparency, and it limits accountability.”

Public data: profitable and contentious

Drane’s situation isn’t unique. As private companies have discovered there’s profit to be made from some kinds of government records, public agencies increasingly are outsourcing parts of their recordkeeping. That’s led to disputes over whether private firms can receive exclusive or preferential access to public data, copyright it, or withhold it from business competitors and other parties who request it.

“Conflicts are becoming more common,” said Peter Scheer of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit California group that advocates for open government. “The demand for data and the perceived value in data has been rising exponentially, and that’s raising thorny legal-access questions.”

California, Connecticut and Wisconsin are among the states that have seen lawsuits over GIS data — the mapping technology local governments use to track property records. Scheer’s group successfully sued to access Santa Clara County’s GIS database, which the county claimed was a copyrighted “trade secret.” In the Wisconsin case, courts ruled that municipalities’ land records are in the public domain and forced a private contractor to release records to its competitors.

Drane has been sued, too. In 2010, the owner of CrimeReports.com – a company called Public Engines — discovered SpotCrime was robotically “scraping” CrimeReports.com for police data. Though Drane claimed he was entitled to scrape his competitors’ sites because the original police reports are public records, he agreed to stop the practice as part of a legal settlement. (Nieman Lab summarized the issues raised by the lawsuit in this 2011 analysis.)

Indeed, Drane is at the center of much of the tension in the crime-mapping industry, not surprising for an unconventional and sometimes brash entrepreneur who describes himself as a “disrupter.” SpotCrime is a relatively low-budget operation that Drane said he started because “moving data seemed a lot easier than moving Trunkanizers.”

In many ways, his business couldn’t be more different than that of his competitors, such as Public Engines, the Omega Group — owner of CrimeMapping.com, and Bair Analytics — owner of the RAIDS online site. Those companies are larger firms that develop and market technology for law-enforcement agencies. They sell software that not only powers public crime mapping websites but also provides an array of tools the agencies use internally to compile and analyze data.  (Think of an electronic equivalent to those big maps with pushpins that used to hang in police stations.)

“People look at our website and see that obviously as a public-facing manifestation of the law-enforcement data,” Public Engines CEO William Kilmer said in a phone interview. “But our primary mission is really to help law-enforcement agencies unlock the power of their own data for their own analysis.”

Those computerized crime mapping systems have become important tools for law-enforcement agencies over the past two decades. For a relatively small investment, the software allows police to identify crime patterns and “hot spots” in their communities and make decisions about staffing and resources.

Kilmer said his company is aware it’s dealing with records that belong to the public. While Public Engines doesn’t allow competitors to scrape its website, he said there’s nothing in its contracts that prohibits police agencies from releasing crime data to anybody else who requests it.

That point was echoed by the Omega Group, which provides software and mapping tools for more than 600 law-enforcement agencies.

“The agency has the right to give whatever data they want to give,” said Omega spokeswoman Gabriela Coverdale.

Police agencies try to control information

Still, some police departments appear to treat their contracts with Public Engines or Omega as exclusive or at least preferential.

When Drane’s company requested access to Las Vegas police records under the Nevada public-records law, he said the police department’s public information office wrote him in an email that “we have no need to join with more of these kinds of services such as yours than we already have in place.” Las Vegas contracts with Omega and its crime reports are posted online via CrimeMapping.com.

Likewise, the Omaha, Neb., police department contracts with Omega and won’t release electronic records to Drane.

“The reason we signed a contract with CrimeMapping.com is so we have control over the information released,” Lt. Darci Tierney told me in an email. “There is no legal obligation for our department to provide additional information beyond access to records that we provide to the general public upon request in hard copy format for a nominal fee.“

But that policy — which allows CrimeMapping.com to access police records electronically, but restricts other requestors to “hard copy format” — likely violates Nebraska’s open-records law, according to several legal scholars.

“Since some company is getting these records in electronic form, you can also get them in electronic form,” said Nebraska Press Association attorney Shawn Renner. It doesn’t matter that one company has a contractual relationship with the city, that SpotCrime is small and not well-known, or that Drane’s motive in requesting the records is to profit from them.

“The records are open to all for any purpose,” said Mark Caramanica of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. “We define journalism quite broadly, so an online outfit that’s in the business of taking data and presenting it in an informative way is engaging in a journalistic activity.”

Caramanica worries that if police agencies are allowed to withhold crime data from for-profit websites that compete with their preferred vendor, they may start denying information to mainstream media organizations (most of which, of course, also are in business to make money), bloggers, advocacy groups, or individuals.

It’s not a big jump. Part of the reason police departments contract with the crime mapping services in the first place is to ease the workload on their often overburdened staffs. Public Engines boasts on its website that CrimeReports.com helps “free up time for employees who used to try and answer [citizen] questions by phone.”

“Some of it is just administrative ease,” said University of Missouri Journalism Prof. Charles Davis, co-author of two books on public records. “They can kind of wash their hands of the whole issue, and say ‘if you want that stuff, it’s on the website.’ ”

Likewise, some agencies may see their relationship with a crime mapping vendor as a way to bypass the traditional media.

Public Engines’ website highlights the experience of the Boca Raton, Fla., police department, which stopped sending press releases to local media. The site says that when police agencies partner with CrimeReports.com,“[t]he power to interpret crime data has now moved out of the hands of the traditional media gatekeepers and into the hands of citizens themselves.”

Computerized data, ‘manila envelope’ laws

In and of itself, direct public access to information isn’t a bad thing. Police reporting in the mainstream media can be simplistic or sensationalistic and lack context about the actual risk of crime in various communities. An accurate online crime map can offer information that’s more complete, more local, and easier to access than a newspaper police blotter or the murder-and-mayhem stories that are nightly staples of many TV newscasts.

But in order for online crime mapping to live up to its promise, police agencies need to see it as a way to broaden access to information, not narrow it. The raw data generated from modern crime analysis tools — such as those marketed by Public Engines or the Omega Group — should be considered public information and made available to the public, the media, and even those companies’ competitors. That will allow such data to be disseminated more widely and analyzed in more ways.

And because police generally include in crime mapping databases only a portion of what they know about each particular incident — for instance, names of victims or suspects are usually deleted — the standard long-form police reports and daily crime logs must remain easily available, too.

Davis expects more disputes and litigation as governments increasingly entrust public data to private companies, especially in states where public-records laws fail to clarify contractors’ obligation to share information. He said only a handful of state laws even contemplate the possibility that public recordkeeping may be outsourced.

“These are laws written in the age of manila envelopes and the typewriter,” Davis said. “This is one of a dozen different issues where technology has raced in front of the law.” Read more

A little more than a year ago, BuzzFeed made the leap into the realm of serious journalism. It hired some known journalists and a lot more hungry young writers, expanded its verticals, and announced a plan to create serious content to go alongside the site’s trademark clever lists.

Now, with BuzzFeed creating a home for its long reads, building a business vertical and trying to figure out how to expand into breaking and international news, it’s a good time to assess.

BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith interviews U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio in February (Screengrab from BuzzFeed video)

BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith told me in a phone interview that he’s mostly pleased. “I’m psyched about the amount that we’ve been able to punch through,” Smith said. “We are advancing stories. I think that’s what we want to do.”

He emailed me a list of what he considers BuzzFeed’s greatest hits, including Rosie Gray’s story on the GI Bill not working, McKay Coppins’ coverage of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith and Reyhan Harmanci’s profile of an anonymous Google contractor who had to look at porn and violence all day.

• On hiring: Smith says he looks for people who are fearless, have raw talent and aggression and take themselves “seriously in a good way.” Also, he doesn’t hire big names for the sake of their star power. “I hired Michael Hastings because he’s a workaholic, not for his name or his good looks.”
• Current size of the staff: 225 people with roughly 80 working for Smith on the editorial side, making it larger than most mid-size newspapers.
• The 2012 presidential election was BuzzFeed’s year. “Presidential elections are unique. Every cycle there is a news organization that breaks through. That was our cycle.”
• You may not be in the target audience. “Most of our stories are written for someone who cares about the Twitter front page. Not all of them, but many of them.”
• Good stories succeed wherever they are, but entertainment stories rule: “Good stories get a lot of readers. That’s true across journalism and history. But more people care about entertainment. A great Beyonce story will get more attention than anything else.”

I interviewed two staffers who work for Smith, reporter Rosie Gray and political editor McKay Coppins. They described a creative, exciting environment where they have a lot of freedom to select their own stories and ignore the competition, two workplace benefits that would make lots of other journalists jealous.

• They’re still a little sensitive about their serious efforts not being seen as a novelty. “A year ago we started doing serious journalism,” Gray, who is 23, told me. “We have to combat the idea that we are just about fun lists.”
• Three days is a long time to spend on a story. Gray and I first talked about her piece on foreign governments using NGOs to disperse propaganda within in the United States. “It took like two days to report. I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday focused on it. We published it on Thursday. That’s a long time. I don’t usually take that long.”
• They get it that their target audience is not Mom and Dad. Coppins, who is 26, told me: “It’s clear that we are having some success in producing serious, in-depth journalism in a way that is digestible for people who spend all day on the internet.”
• Why BuzzFeed is like a Parisian café. Quoting BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, Coppins explained the site’s philosophy this way: “You have people sitting at a table reading philosophical text, a religious text, or a newspaper and sometimes they stop to pet a dog that walks by.” On the day we talked, the Top 5 stories on the site illustrated that outlook.
  1. A story about how “The Bible”‘s Satan character looked like President Obama.
  2. A piece about how folks discussed gay marriage at CPAC.
  3. “13 ways Republicans Can Win The Internet.”
  4. A classic: “23 Kitties Of Congress.”
  5. And rounding out that list was a scoop about Democratic activists who sneaked into CPAC hoping to catch attendees jeering Ashley Judd.

Yet BuzzFeed isn’t quite the major player it wants to be. The site has yet to prompt a major investigation, resignation, firing or any of the other measures of watchdog impact. Some of that’s because it just hasn’t been in the game long enough. Eventually that will happen. BuzzFeed will have the equivalent of Deadspin’s Manti Te’o moment. Here are three things I’m looking for in the evolution of BuzzFeed during its second year of grownup journalism.

• Stronger editing. With with the exception of BuzzReads, the long pieces especially need more structure and precision. Some stories run 6,000, even 7,000, or 10,000 words. That’s New Yorker length. If you want to write that long, you have to make it that good. So pieces like this one on a staffer’s sleep disorder, which Smith named one of the highlights of 2012, need to be rethought. It’s not a bad piece. But a rigorous editing process ensures that the story has a tight-enough architecture to move it along and keep the reader engaged. BuzzFeed’s long reads have to be even better than that, because they might compete with a banner teasing absurd items of clothing or a story predicting which character will die next on “The Walking Dead.”
• Mentoring and growing expert journalists. The benchmark of a journalism staff is not how great they are today but how much each individual can continue to grow. Some of this comes through the editing process described above. Writers get better by writing a lot, which BuzzFeed writers do, and by working with transformational editors. Writers also grow through developing expertise, critical thinking skills, and doing increasingly sophisticated analysis that works. Writers also have to be allowed to occasionally fail, or start working on pieces that never make it through the publication process.
• Getting the attention of people who make things happen. When Anne Hull and Dana Priest wrote their Washington Post series on the failures at Walter Reed Medical Center, people in Congress introduced legislation to shake things up even before their constituents started writing. Even though some of the issues BuzzFeed takes on have that potential, the stories aren’t delivered with the authority and heft and that compels people in charge to respond. BuzzFeed Brews has the potential to become a place serious politicians go to have serious and cool conversations.

BuzzFeed’s journalism model is a bit like ESPN’s, an organization I’m familiar with. They both produce a large volume of highly entertaining information, sprinkled with some regular journalism and some high-end stuff. BuzzReads reminds me of ESPN’s 30 for 30 film documentary series, not least because both are produced mostly by outsiders. BuzzFeed should occassionally free its writers to do that level of work.

I was asking Smith to describe the difference in traffic between the serious journalism and the silly stuff. That’s an artificial distinction, he told me. There’s a way to make a serious or poignant statement that people want to share. In an email exchange after our phone conversation, he pointed out that a political piece will reach hundreds of thousands, while animals reach millions, but perhaps the greatest hit ever on BuzzFeed was an aggregation of the most powerful photos of 2011. “Do you think it’s unserious?” he asked.

And that may be the point. It’s emotionally powerful. It took a skilled editor to assemble it. But it doesn’t change anything. The sheer size and growth of BuzzFeed gives it the opportunity to be a major player in American journalism for years to come. To fully step into that role, BuzzFeed will need to harness its existing genius of poignant aggregation, and apply it to the creation of new information. BuzzFeed has the potential to invent a new form of journalism.

Steve Kandell, who edits BuzzFeed’s longreads, disagreed with my assessment that there is too much distance between BuzzFeed staffers and what he is producing with the help of outside writers. He pointed to BuzzFeed’s work last week covering the Supreme Court’s consideration of the Defense of Marriage Act.

“From where I’m sitting, there’s a lot of editing, a lot of mentoring, and I just watched our entire DC bureau work on nothing but the DOMA case all last week, which seems pretty deep to me, as an observer,” he wrote in an email.

Later this year when the Supreme Court announces its rulings in the gay marriage cases will be a good test for BuzzFeed. Can it create and aggregate in a way that furthers understanding, advances the conversation and influences those in power?

BuzzFeed doesn’t really need to make great journalism to be successful. But journalism sure could use the boost a fully formed BuzzFeed would give it. Read more

A photo essay vividly documenting domestic assault lit up the Internet this week after Time Magazine published it as part of its LightBox series.

Ohio University graduate student Sara Lewkowicz didn’t set out to take pictures of domestic violence. Instead, according to the photo captions, she spent much of her first semester of graduate school photographing a young mother and her boyfriend who was newly released from prison, to demonstrate his struggle to integrate back into the community.

The relationship, tense from the beginning, ended with the man’s arrest after a violent argument unfolded in front of the photographer and the woman’s 2-year-old daughter.

Time published Lewkowicz’s 39 photos Wednesday on its website. As of Friday morning, more than 1,340 commenters had offered their opinions on the startling images. Some questioned the victim’s fitness as a mother. Others defended her.

But many questioned whether it was appropriate for Lewkowicz to continue shooting pictures rather than intervening in the assault.

Motrbotr wrote: as disgusted as I am by Shane’s actions I am equally disgusted by the inaction of photog to try to stop it.

Slaphapii wrote: Come on, getting hired by a newspaper doesn’t turn you into a wildebeest. Journalists don’t have instincts; they have jobs. Sara CHOSE to get an awesome photo spread rather than to provide critically needed help. If it was you, would you pick up the crying two year old, carry her into another room and comfort her

Lewkowicz met similar criticism in January when she posted the essay on Fotovisura.com. She wrote this response in the comments under that post:

I understand your feelings, and I understand why you may feel upset seeing the photographs. Allow me to clarify. I am a 5’2″ woman. I am not physically equipped to do what you are suggesting. There were two other adults there who were much larger than I am, and both individuals were too scared to do anything.

It was my phone that called 911, I had to steal it back from him in order to do so. In putting my hand in his pocket, I already risked being attacked. Thankfully, I wasn’t.

It will be my photographs that are used to put Shane in jail (and I have my own mixed feelings about that fact, as well.)

Intervening physically would have not only put me in danger, but potentially endangered Maggie and her daughter as well, as it would have made Shane angrier.

To say I should have clocked him over the head with my camera also doesn’t make sense, as I probably would have been charged with assault. According to the law, I am only allowed to attack someone if they are committing a life-threatening act of violence against another person, and I would have had to be the one proving that. This is why we call the police in a crisis situation, rather than trying to handle it ourselves. I made sure the police were called, I stayed with them and didn’t let Shane get Maggie alone with him, I surrendered my photos after being subpoenaed, I rubbed Maggie’s back while she was throwing up after the attack, and I drove her to her best friend’s house after the assault and slept on the couch in the same room as her and held her as she was crying.

I’m sorry you feel this wasn’t enough, but frankly, you sound very self-righteous. I have no regrets about how I handled that situation…Regards, Sara Lewkowicz

What to do in the moment is one thing and it seems like Lewkowicz explains a reasonable series of decisions.

But what to do leading up to that moment and what to do after that moment are just as important.

I emailed Lewkowicz and am hoping she agrees to an interview. Until then, here are some questions that could have been considered during the documentation and publication of this essay.

For Lewkowicz:

• It seems there was a potential for violence before the evening of the assault. The pictures document the tension between Maggie and Shane, and more disturbingly, between Shane and Maggie’s son. Did you discuss with your teachers or fellow photographers what options you should consider if Shane became violent?
• You document Shane’s clear affection for Maggie’s daughter and his distaste for her son. How did you think about your responsibility to report any suspicions you might have had of abuse?
• After the assault, you comforted Maggie, rubbed her back, held her as she cried and drove her to a friend’s house. How might your actions have influenced Maggie’s independent ability to continue to consent to be part of the story?

For editors at Time:

• What could you have done to anticipate the response to the story of Maggie and Shane? Could you have provided more information about the photographer’s decisions?
• As the comment section lit up with good discussion, how could Time or Lewkowicz engage with the audience?
• What other contextual information on the issue of domestic violence might the audience find useful or helpful as they digest these photos? (Time recently updated the story with this tag line: UPDATE: Readers who feel they–or people they know–need assistance can call the National Domestic Violence hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE.)

Powerful journalism is often controversial. Asking questions early — as material is gathered — and often — as material is published — can often surface alternatives that minimize the harm stories caused. When journalists and newsrooms do this, they often diminish distractions and encourage the audience to focus on the message of the story, rather than the method in which it was reported.

Related: Reporting on Sexual Violence (a Poynter NewsU self-directed course in partnership with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center) Read more