By STEVE SIDLO
Managing Editor, Dayton Daily News
Chair, APME First Amendment Committee

Steve Sidlo, managing editor of the Dayton Daily News, at his FOI Roundtable. The man immediately to the right of Steve is Larry Moore.

Let me tell you about Larry Moore.

Larry had a low opinion of the Dayton Daily News. He's a gun enthusiast and passionate about the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms. Ohio recently passed a law that allows people like Larry to get permits to carry concealed firearms. We wrote a lot about that. To Larry, it seemed that much of our coverage was biased and unfair. The Ohio law is particularly strange in that it lets journalists find out who gets those permits, but not ordinary citizens. We wrote a lot about that, too.

Larry and many other gun-rights supporters think we shouldn't have any access to those records. Their reasons revolve around personal privacy and security. They don't trust us to use that kind of information in a responsible way. Quite a few state legislators think they're right.

We wanted to talk with Larry and some others like him so we could explain why we believe government records like that should be open, and to hear why they disagreed. APME's Freedom of Information Roundtable Discussion project helped us set up that conversation. Our thinking is that we're as passionate about First Amendment rights as Larry is about the Second Amendment. Maybe we could do a better job of talking to each other. And listening.

We did it last May. First we wrote stories about the statewide debate over whether permit records should be public. Then we invited a panel of 18 people representing a variety of viewpoints to discuss the issue. An audience attended, and a neutral moderator kept everyone on track. We carried a story the next day about the discussion and ran an edited transcript on our Sunday op-ed page. We posted the complete transcript on our web site, and invited readers to express their views on the topic. Lots of people did.

We didn't walk out of the discussion in complete agreement, but we all learned some things about the other points of view. The permit holders don't like the idea of their names being listed in newspapers as if they're on some sex offender registry. We also heard that we make technical mistakes in stories about guns. If we can't tell a .22-caliber rifle from a 20-gauge shotgun, we were told, then why should anybody believe the other stuff we write?

Larry and the others heard our concern about the need for transparency in government. They heard non-journalists say that government records belong to the public, not just to the government, because the public is the government. That resonated with the gun owners because they're not big on government controlling everything either.

Larry said he was surprised at how the evening went. He filed a detailed report on his gun-rights organization's web site. "Well, I found out tonight that I am guilty of stereotyping the media," he wrote. "The event was not the stacked deck I feared ... Overall, a surprising and very rewarding evening."

When we reviewed our gun coverage afterward, we found that we have had technical errors in our stories. We decided to organize a training session for reporters, sort of a "Firearms 101."

While we were at it, we presented a well-attended training session for readers on how ordinary people can use public records.

We also heard the complaint that we sometimes ignore stories about guns being used successfully to prevent crimes. A few weeks after our FOI Roundtable, a couple of thugs stopped a guy on the street and at gunpoint demanded money. The target of the robbery had a gun permit, pulled his own weapon and wounded one of the bad guys. The thugs ran but were quickly arrested. We played our story about the incident on Page 1. A bunch of people who normally don't have much good to say about us wrote letters thanking us. "I would like to commend the Dayton Daily News for putting this article on the front page and not burying it deep in the newspaper," one letter said.

We've learned we have more common ground than was at first apparent. Mainly, we learned that it helps to talk and listen to our readers and others in the community about freedom of information issues.

Following the gun-permit talk, we held a conversation with readers about whether reporters should be put in jail for refusing to disclose anonymous sources. Again, we carried coverage and a transcript in the paper and on our web site. We plan to organize these discussions quarterly.

Our hope is that if we keep doing this, more ordinary people will buy into our arguments about the importance of freedom of information.

It's a start.