Arbitrary Arbiters of Public Information: How NorwegianJournalists Describe Right to Information Requests

(Publisert i Journalism practice, (2025)) Open Access

Even though transparency legislation and technology for accessing public information is improving, journalists still encounter numerous obstacles in their efforts to access public information. Transparency laws, which are hard to implement, create “grey areas” for interpretation which lead to a negotiation between the bureaucrats and the journalists for granting access. In this article, we investigate how journalists in one of the world’s most technologically advanced and transparent countries, Norway, still struggle for consistent transparency. The study is based on a qualitative study of 818 citations of journalist’s own descriptions about right to public information (RTI) found in the SKUP methodology reports. The results show a wide range of strategies for resolving different obstacles concerning these requests. Whether a journalist gets the information that they believe they are obliged to is very much dependent on the interpretation of the laws by bureaucrats. The journalists get the impression that these decisions often are based on more or less arbitrary factors, like knowledge of the law, values and relationship to colleagues and the journalists themselves