THIS BOOK represents the work of many hands. Most obviously, we are indebted to the contributors who have provided fine papers and have weathered in good spirit our editorial interventions along the way.
Less apparent, we owe much to those who offered moral and financial support for the conference we organized in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Held at the Columbia Journalism School in June 2016, the two-day event was made possible by a generous gift from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, who also supplied welcoming remarks. Both of us significantly underestimated how much a conference like this would cost; President Bollinger, fortunately, did not. Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the Columbia Journalism School, provided us our first financial assistance and thereby helped us believe that we would indeed be able to pull together an ambitious gathering of journalists, FOIA officers, freedom of information activists, historians, media scholars, and legal scholars. We are grateful also to Dean Steve Coll of Columbia Journalism School, to the Journalism School’s Dean of Academic Affairs Sheila Coronel, and to Dean Gillian Lester of Columbia Law School, all of whom endorsed our efforts.
Many other participants in the conference contributed to our own education about freedom of information laws in the United States and elsewhere. Their absence from these pages reflects only that this book is not a “conference proceedings” but rather a collection of the academic (yet nonetheless readable!) papers that were presented in early form at Columbia—along with four other papers that were not part of the event but that, in earlier incarnations, seemed so essential to our thinking about FOIA that we twisted arms to have the authors revise earlier work for presentation here.
There are a great many logistical issues that arise in the planning of an international interdisciplinary conference, and we could not have managed without the stellar assistance of Soomin Seo, then an advanced Ph.D. student in communications at Columbia, now an assistant professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. Kelly Boyce, assistant director of the Dart Center, also provided indispensable support. More recently, Kara Kohn-Gardner assisted with proofreading of the manuscript.
We are very grateful to our editor, Philip Leventhal, for shepherding this project to completion. He has worked wonders to make Columbia University Press a leader in journalism studies and adjacent fields. The whole staff at Columbia University Press has been a pleasure to work with.
We recognize that edited volumes do not make most publishers swoon. Nonetheless, sometimes edited volumes can become important signposts in intellectual life, and we hope that this may be one such case. Taking transparency in governmental affairs seriously, without taking it as a Holy Grail of democracy, is an ongoing scholarly and political task that we hope this book helps advance.
We dedicate this book to our families, whom we love more than we can say.