JAWS Webinar: FOIA & Find Out
FREE JAWS WEBINAR MARCH 31: Sunshine Week is March 15-21, but any time is a good time to make public records requests. Miranda Spivack’s book, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards, details how regular people used open records laws to investigate their local governments. Investigative reporter Cam Rodriguez is filing a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request a day in 2026 and writing a daily email about what she’s learning. And Sandra Fish often files open records requests for other people’s open records requests, which can be quite revealing. Bring your questions, examples and join the discussion!
Registration is required to attend the free Zoom webinar on Tuesday, March 31 at 7 p.m. ET.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS:
Sandra Fish is a ‘kinda’ retired data journalist in Colorado who likes to FOIA the FOIAs filed by other people (often ending up with some of her own, but sometimes also learning about small-town disputes, aliens and more). She served as JAWS President in 2016 and 2017.
Cam Rodriguez is a data and investigative reporter based in Chicago, and she most recently was a local investigations fellow at The New York Times. She has worked with teams at MuckRock, Chalkbeat, USA TODAY, South Side Weekly, the Detroit Free Press, WTTW and the Better Government Association, and she writes as much as she codes. When she’s not digging in archives or making another pot of coffee, she’s usually playing with maps, watching rom-coms or exploring the Midwest with her dog.
Miranda Spivack is a veteran reporter and editor who specializes in stories about government accountability and secrecy, urban development and immigration.
Her series "State Secrets" for revealnews.org forms the basis of her book Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back (The New Press 2025) about the underreported rise in state and local secrecy. The narrative is told through the eyes of five accidental activists who are confronted with barriers to information but find a way to overcome them and bring important change to their communities. The series was a winner of SPJ's 2017 Sunshine Award. The book was awarded the Studs and Ida Terkel Award, and was shortlisted for the Goddard Social Justice Book Prize. Her work has been supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Logan Non-fiction Program, among others.
Previously, Miranda spent 20 years as an editor and reporter for The Washington Post, where as an editor on the Metro Desk, she designed a groundbreaking plan for local news coverage that resulted in deep coverage of under covered communities in the District, Maryland and Virginia. While at the Post, Miranda won several journalism awards, including First Place for Local Government Reporting in 2013 from the Maryland, Delaware, DC Press Association. Her stories, which she often finds the old fashioned way - showing up and talking to people - frequently look beyond the headlines to unearth issues that have not been surfaced, or have been overlooked.