Often it's poor training or understanding of the law, not necessarily anything nefarious. Smaller governments can—and do—drag their feet, but on the whole I find they're more cooperative. Probably because they have smaller backlogs and fewer resources to put up a real fight if it goes to court.

Police department records are often hard to get ahold of, but that will vary widely from state to state. But FOI laws can be extremely useful for records on the municipal level, and data and other records from executive agencies on both the federal, state, and county levels (think departments of transportation,…

Correct; and while FOIA does not codify access to judicial information, the Supreme Court has recognized it a constitutional and common law right. Still, courts are permitted broad discretion in deciding what records and proceedings should be public or closed.

Actually, she served as President and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America in the early '90s. But yes, she has primarily always been on the publishing, not editorial, side of things.

It's certainly possible. Unfortunately, there's no way to know for sure.

Didn't realize I wrote this story...

Actually, legislators often exempt themselves from public records requests. Congress, for instance, is not a covered entity under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

I actually wrote a feature on the NYPD's issues with FOIL compliance back in 2010 for the Voice: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2...

Yeah, there's really no way to know for sure, unfortunately. And there have been cases in the past (not necessarily NYC, but certainly elsewhere), where government agencies falsely claim a record doesn't exist.

You're probably onto something here. My request only covered emails between Cathie Black and the mayor's office, but surely there are some more substantive communications regarding, say, education policy, to be found if someone FOIL'd communications between Cathie Black and the Education Department.