The Sunshine Awards are presented each year to recognize the work of citizens, advocates, journalists, and government officials whose efforts increase transparency and accountability in public business in North Carolina.

The Frank Barrows Award for Excellence in Student Journalism recognizes the accomplishments of a collegiate journalist or newsroom at a North Carolina university whose work exemplifies the vital role of open meetings, public records, and press access in public life.

Award recipients are chosen by the coalition’s board of directors and presented annually during Sunshine Week events in March.

For more information on the Sunshine Awards, click: Sunshine Awards Call 2022

For more information on the Barrows Award, click: Barrows Award Call 2022

A new project led by the North Carolina Open Government Coalition aims to use state access laws to educate the public about the inner workings of UNC’s public records system and to spur collaboration among journalists covering the state’s flagship university.

In partnership with a coalition of journalists, professors, and nonprofit organizations, the NC Open Government Coalition filed eight public records requests with UNC on Friday seeking records related to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s hiring as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient, and the author and creator of the 1619 Project. Recent reporting has raised questions about .   

The new public records requests lay the foundation for an ongoing collaborative journalism and freedom of information project. The NC Open Government Coalition and the NC Local News Workshop, both housed at ÂŇÂ×ĘÓƵ, will host a series of workshops to help journalists share and edit public records requests, analyze documents, and collaborate on coverage of university governance.

“We hope not only that these requests will help inform the public understanding of this particular case, but also help reporters and others understand UNC’s policies and procedures for handling all public record requests in general,” said Ryan Thornburg, an associate professor of journalism in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. “This is a great real-world example of the kind of thing we teach our students every day.”

Members of the public can .

UNC was embroiled in two high-profile lawsuits last year that raised government transparency issues. In February 2020, the Daily Tar Heel, an independent, student-led newspaper, favorably  when it secretly agreed to transfer “Silent Sam,” a Confederate monument that recently stood on UNC’s campus, to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and pay $2.5 million toward the monument’s preservation.

In August 2020, the . The university had argued that the records were confidential under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

“Controversies are often perfect opportunities for public education,” said Brooks Fuller, Director of the NC Open Government Coalition. “What’s happened at UNC in recent months has captured the attention of journalists, educators, and politicians from all over the country. What better way to seize on a teachable moment about the public records laws than putting them to the test around such a newsworthy issue?”

For inquiries, please contact:

Brooks Fuller, Director, NC Open Government Coalition, Asst. Professor, ÂŇÂ×ĘÓƵ School of Communications, bfuller7@elon.edu

Ryan Thornburg, Assoc. Professor, UNC Hussman School of Media and Journalism, ryan.thornburg@unc.edu

Tori Ekstrand, Assoc. Professor, UNC Hussman School of Media and Journalism, torismit@email.unc.edu

Erin Siegal McIntyre, Asst. Professor, UNC Hussman School of Media and Journalism, esm@unc.edu

Shannan Bowen, Executive Director, NC Local News Workshop, sbowen5@elon.edu

Photo credit: “Old Well” by yeungb, licensed under CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

Rowell, a North Carolina native and graduate of North Carolina State University, started following transparency issues in local government after graduating from the Charleston School of Law and moving to rural South Carolina.

“You could show up after work and just walk down the street to the town hall and you start seeing government in action, up close and personal,” Rowell said. “Washington is where the excitement is. You see it from a distance, but it doesn’t have the impact that local government has.”

When Rowell moved to Huntersville in 2013, he began requesting public records from Huntersville officials on subjects that ranged from land use to policing. He posted the records with original reporting and analysis on his blog and Facebook pages dedicated to local government and politics.

“As the statute says, these are the public’s documents,” Rowell said. “I wanted to share those documents so that the public could see them and come to their own conclusions.”

In late 2019, Rowell requested access to a 900-page independent audit that the Huntersville police department commissioned to assess its progress on improving policing and public service. But that report remains secret. According to Rowell, the department denied his request and classified the report as confidential personnel record with the exception of a few redacted pages. Rowell continues to lobby the Huntersville Board of Commissioners to publish the report, which cost Huntersville taxpayers $150,000. 

According to Rowell, some public officials do not fully appreciate the spirit and the scope of North Carolina’s open meetings and public records laws, but he wants to change that. “I think it’s surprising how many people get elected and immediately seek to keep information from the people that just voted them into office,” Rowell said. “Maybe it’s something that the [University of North Carolina] School of Government should focus on more as part of the new elected official training.”

Rowell’s efforts have materially improved public accountability in small but meaningful ways. When the Huntersville Board of Commissioners debated imposing additional fees for “burdensome” public records requests, Rowell spoke out against the policy. The board tabled the proposal and declined to impose additional fees on citizen access to public information. At Rowell’s urging, Huntersville officials also began publishing meeting agendas that include the basis for convening closed sessions so that the public knows in advance when and why officials are asserting their right to meet behind closed doors.

Rowell sees his transparency efforts as the fulfillment of a citizen’s obligation to support the work of professional watchdogs. “Local journalism has definitely taken a toll,” Rowell said. “I would tell people, ‘Be persistent,’” Rowell added. “But also probably be a little shameless. You can’t be afraid to ask questions. You can’t be afraid to question people in positions of authority.”

To follow Rowell’s transparency work, visit www.ericwrowell.com.

Quigley first began reporting the story in August 2020 when Sheriff Clarence Birkhead told the Durham County Commission during a public meeting that an inmate was on a ventilator after contracting COVID-19 during an outbreak at the detention facility.

Quigley said that when she asked Sheriff Birkhead for an update on the man’s condition weeks later, he told her he was not allowed to speak about the inmate. “I guess that’s when my ears kind of perked up,” Quigley said. “He was speaking so freely about it before. I wonder what changed.”

“I went straight to the records at that point,” Quigley said. “The first place that I went to was the North Carolina state prison system press releases. I looked through those to see if something had happened, if it was reported, if something stuck out to me.”

Quigley combed through press releases, a public database of inmates in Durham County custody, and a variety of other public records to determine that Darrell Kersey was the man Sheriff Birkhead referenced in the August 2020 meeting. An anonymous source confirmed Quigley’s reporting, and Durham County officials confirmed the story’s accuracy in October 2020 as it was published.

During the past year, . Quigley’s use of public records and inmate databases situated Kersey’s death in the context of a statewide — if not nationally significant — story about health and safety in carceral facilities.

Without Quigley’s reporting, the public may never have known that Kersey’s death was linked to a COVID-19 outbreak in Durham’s central jail.

“The best journalism tells truth to power,” said Cathy Clabby, Adjunct Instructor in the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, in her letter supporting Quigley’s nomination. “Dryden spoke it loudly last fall.”

When asked about what this experience could teach North Carolinians about government transparency, Quigley said, “If you hear something that doesn’t sound right, you should follow up on it. I think anyone can do that, and the resources are more at your fingertips than you think they are.”

Quigley is the second winner of the annual Frank Barrows Award, which recognizes the accomplishments of a collegiate journalist or newsroom at a North Carolina university whose work exemplifies the vital role of open meetings, public records, and press access in public life.

Quigley thanked Cathy Clabby, her editor at the Ninth Street Journal, and Bill Adair, her first editor and Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center at Duke. Quigley will graduate from Duke University in May 2021.

While most North Carolinians were asleep on June 26, 2020, Sherman was at the North Carolina General Assembly poring over Senate Bill 168, a “clean-up bill” that may have created an immense loophole in North Carolina’s transparency laws surrounding death investigation records held by the state’s Chief Medical Examiner.

Under North Carolina law, records of death investigations created by law enforcement are generally exempt from disclosure under the public records law. Death investigation records transmitted to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, however, generally become public. Senate Bill 168, which included mostly technical fixes commonly included in end-of-session legislation, went further. The bill exempted death investigation records from disclosure even after they are no longer part of a law enforcement investigation.

Sherman believed the bill raised serious transparency implications by undoing North Carolina law requiring disclosure of deaths investigated by the state. “Seeing a public records provision as the title in one of the provisions embedded in the bill made me take a closer look,” Sherman said. Sherman spent the next day consulting with public records experts and interviewing lawmakers to tell the story of Senate Bill 168’s origins. After sources confirmed her initial interpretations of the bill’s legal effects, Sherman said, “I went ahead and tweeted it.” The story gained attention from transparency advocates around the country. Ultimately, Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill and the death records confidentiality provision never became law.

Although public records stories are often unremarkable, they have broader significance in the context of current events. The North Carolina General Assembly passed Senate Bill 168 just one month after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police. “There are a lot of things that local journalists report on at any given time during any given legislative session that are equally as important as this,” Sherman said. “This story just sort of struck the nerve of people at the wrong time. Journalists are on the floor of the legislature or the house chamber all the time and that’s why we need them to sort of be watchdogs.”

Transparency advocates who followed Sherman’s reporting were swift to demand explanations from North Carolina lawmakers. After Sherman’s reporting, State Senator Jeff Jackson said plainly, “[We] need to fix this one.”

Sherman represented the tip of the spear in an effort by the North Carolina press corps to inform the public of Senate Bill 168’s transparency implications. “I wouldn’t have had the ability to sort of just sit on the floor and skeptically think about everything legislators were saying if it weren’t for the sheer number of people on the News & Observer’s team.” Sherman thanked her editor, Jordan Schrader, and colleagues Kate Martin (Carolina Public Press) and Nick Ochsner (’11, WBTV-Charlotte), for their help reporting the story. Sherman, Schrader, Martin and Ochsner are part of the North Carolina Watchdog Reporting Network, a coalition of journalists focused on government accountability reporting.

“It’s easy to forget the importance of the role of journalists,” Sherman said. “You can never have too many watchdogs in the state house.”

The annual program invites journalists, citizens, government officials, transparency advocates and students from around the state to come together to learn from open government experts and discuss ways to improve government accountability and information access in North Carolina. All events are free, virtual, and open to the public (registration required).

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The program includes the following activities:

Reporters from the NC Watchdog Reporting Network will discuss the annual Sunshine Week reporting project. This year, the collaborative project focuses on accountability in law enforcement. Reporters Laura Lee (Carolina Public Press), Lucille Sherman (News & Observer), and Nick Ochsner ’11 (WBTV-Charlotte) make up the panel, which will be held March 15 from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Melanie Sill, director of the NC Local News Workshop, will moderate the discussion.

A panel of experts will discuss Barriers to Equity in Information Access. Journalists Lisa Sorg (NC Policy Watch) and Victoria Bouloubasis will be joined by attorney and disability rights advocate Susan Pollitt (Disability Rights NC) to discuss creating more equitable access to information for underserved populations. The virtual panel will be held March 17 from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Kate Martin (Carolina Public Press) will moderate the discussion.

Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, will lead a workshop on Transparency in Higher Education with a focus on helping student journalists and reporters covering universities in North Carolina. The virtual event will be held March 18 from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Kate Murphy ’15 (News & Observer) and Chloe Easton (The East Carolinian) will moderate the discussion.

All events will be held via Zoom. . Registered guests will receive Zoom login information one week before the scheduled events. For more information, please e-mail the NC Open Government Coalition at ncopengov@elon.edu.

The North Carolina Open Government Coalition is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3). To support the coalition’s work, click here.

The project, a collaboration with data journalists and data analysis experts from across the country, focuses on the push by Democrats to win state House and Senate elections in order to hold more sway over the redistricting process. Coupled with a presidential and U.S. Senate races, the 2020 election season is likely the most expensive election cycle on record in North Carolina.

Analysis reveals that corporate political action committees (better known as “PACs”) representing healthcare, energy, and real estate interests contributed in all of the ten closest races during the November 2020 election cycle. Donations tended to favor campaigns for incumbents, which are largely controlled by North Carolina’s Republican Party.

Even when candidates did not receive money directly from PACs, money often ended up in their campaign coffers indirectly as the campaigns passed money to one another. The analysis shows that some Democratic candidates in safe races donated money to challengers in more competitive races to help boost their chances of gaining power in state politics.

The project also provides a glimpse into how entities that spend big on federal races route money to state-level races. On the Democratic side, PAC money from Democratic Party-aligned groups often supports candidates directly. On the Republican side, money often flows through in-state power brokers, such as House Speaker Tim Moore. Speaker Moore’s campaign committee, serves as a hub for a significant amount of PAC money, re-routing money to prop up other campaigns by members of the Republican Party.

“Money has been central to the political process for as long as anyone can remember, and its power has only grown with the proliferation of PACs and SuperPACs following Citizens United,” Brooks Fuller, the Director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition, said. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the 2010 Supreme Court case that overturned federal campaign finance laws that limited corporations’ power to influence elections through independent expenditures in favor of or against candidates for federal office.

“This collaboration shows how data can help us better understand the political interests that funnel money into North Carolina and how those interests tend to align in hard-fought elections,” Fuller said.

The project also found significant deficiencies in data made available by the N.C. State Board of Elections. Specifically, candidate committees and PACs are required by law to report receipts and expenditures to the State Board of Elections on a quarterly basis. But while the Federal Election Commission (FEC) collects unique identifier codes for both the contributor and recipient committees for federal transactions, North Carolina’s State Board of Elections collects a free response entry for the names of recipient committees. 

This means that there can be significant ambiguity in identifying recipient committees when there are differing committee name formats or typos on disclosure reports. While this can be annoying for traditional campaign finance analyses that total amounts contributed or received, it makes it nearly impossible to build a comprehensive network of campaign spending in the state without significant amounts of manual labor de-duplicating committee names and matching them to their appropriate State Board of Elections identifiers. 

Network analysis visuals and an accompanying story have been published by the national campaign finance watchdog publication . Jeremy Borden, Kathy Qian (Code for Democracy), and Michael Taffe contributed to the data analysis and reporting. “We are extremely grateful to Michael Taffe for taking on the majority of this intensive labor,” Borden said. 

The project text and associated network analysis visuals are being made available to media outlets in North Carolina at no charge with attribution and links to the original works. Please contact Brooks Fuller at bfuller7@elon.edu for more information.

The Sunshine Awards are presented each year to recognize the work of citizens, advocates, journalists, and government officials whose efforts increase transparency and accountability in public business in North Carolina.

The Frank Barrows Award for Excellence in Student Journalism recognizes the accomplishments of a collegiate journalist or newsroom at a North Carolina university whose work exemplifies the vital role of open meetings, public records, and press access in public life.

Award recipients are chosen by the coalition’s board of directors and presented annually during Sunshine Week events in March.

For more information on the Sunshine Awards, click: Sunshine Awards Call – 2021

For more information on the Barrows Award, click: Frank Barrows Award Call – 2021

The Sunshine Awards honor people and organizations whose work informs citizens about government transparency concerns and helps hold government accountable. The NC Open Government Coalition honors outstanding journalists, public servants, citizens and advocates for efforts to increase government transparency. 

The winner of the 2020 Sunshine Award for government is Buncombe County Finance Director Don Warn. Warn helped launch “The Open Checkbook,” which provides unprecedented public access into Buncombe County’s financial transactions. His efforts help maintain the county’s commitment to data privacy and security while maximizing allowable financial transparency. 

The winner of the 2020 Sunshine Award for citizen work is Justin Parmenter, a Charlotte teacher and education advocate. Parmenter uses his website “Notes from the Chalkboard” as a platform for informing the public on North Carolina education issues and holding elected officials accountable. In the summer of 2019, his reporting helped unearth documents and refute the controversial award of a K-3 reading assessment to the computer-based Istation company DPI.

The winner of the 2020 Sunshine award for journalism is the Fayetteville Observer. In June 2017, the newspaper moved for access to the contents of a civil Superior Court file that had been entirely sealed, concealing the names of the defendants in a case brought by John Doe minor plaintiffs against a prominent North Carolina businessman accused of sexual molestation against the minor plaintiffs. When the trial court refused to unseal any of the documents, the Fayetteville Observer appealed. In September 2019, the trial court ordered the entire file unsealed.

Congratulations to all of the 2020 Sunshine Award winners.

Daily Tar Heel reporters Charlie McGee, Maeve Sheehey, Marco Quiro-Gutierrez, and Preston Lennon were among the many student journalists involved in the coverage. McGee, Quiro-Gutierrez, and Lennon accepted the award March 9 at Sunshine Day, the NC Open Government Coalition’s annual event that focuses on government transparency issues.

“The students worked through final exams and holidays to bring this important story to our community,” said Erica Perel, general manager of the DTH. “So it feels amazing to have that hard work and dedication recognized.” 

The Frank Barrows Award honors the memory of Frank C. Barrows, the former managing editor of the Charlotte Observer, and a founding member and the first president of the NC Open Government Coalition. The award recognizes student journalism that uses access laws to tell compelling stories about events in North Carolina.

“Today’s student journalists have no better model than Frank Barrows when it comes to the craft of journalism and a commitment to transparency and good government,” Perel said. 

“The coalition established the Frank Barrows Award to recognize some of the best journalism in the state, which is often comes from college campuses,” said Brooks Fuller, director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition. “The DTH’s coverage epitomizes the type of contribution journalists make when they use our public records and open meeting laws to doggedly pursue public interest stories.”  

The Barrows award, which includes a cash prize, was made possible by financial contributions from Barrows’s surviving spouse, Mary Newsom, and many of Barrows’s dear friends. For information on how to contribute to the Frank Barrows Award, please e-mail Brooks Fuller at bfuller7@elon.edu. To contribute directly, please send a check made payable to the NC Open Government Coalition with the memo line “Frank Barrows Award fund” or .  For more information on the award, please visit the NC Open Government Coalition website HERE.