FROM THE PUBLISHER

Getting to the bottom of a story often means locating a public record, or some piece of paper documenting what happened.

Sometimes that takes considerable effort. It takes some digging to find what you’re looking for, or you don’t even know what might exist but you have to start somewhere.

In other cases, the state laws governing public records and what must be released versus what could be released and how they can be released to you can be challenging.

When we first heard th...