I’ve made a change to the online database of city-employee salaries: Full names have been truncated to first initial and last name, e.g., J. Thomas.
Making this change runs contrary to some of the points I made about the database when we posted it last Friday. Namely, by reducing full names to abbreviations, we prevent citizens from scrutinizing city spending to the level of specificity to which they are entitled. Every citizen has a right to know exactly how much she pays Jane Doe, not merely J. Doe, because for all we know, J. Doe could be a fiction. Anything less than complete disclosure that can be verified means we are taking the city’s word for it. Or taking the Gazette’s word for it, which is no better. The Gazette is not a stand-in for government; we are — or should be — a transparent conduit, transmitting government information to citizens. We do not exist to vouch for the government; we are here to enable citizens themselves to hold government accountable.
It is, admittedly, a purist position. I continue to believe that it is, journalistically, the correct position.
Which is not to say it is a comfortable position. We understand that publishing names and salaries makes city employees uneasy. But in the end, it is not any claim of privacy — there is none when it comes to a public employee’s paycheck — that has prompted this change. I’ve made the change after hearing from a small number of city workers with sincere concerns about their safety.
It’s easy to minimize those concerns. Newspapers in Houston; Los Angeles; Albuquerque; Milwaukee; Raleigh; Memphis; Louisville; Phoenix; Tulsa; Columbia, S.C.; Minneapolis; tiny Burlington, N.C. and many more places publish online databases of the full names, job titles and salaries of local and state employees. Indeed, in Iowa it is state law that a complete roster of state workers and their pay be published each year. In Iowa City, you can look up the name and salary for your kid’s kindergarten teacher, your firefighter neighbor, the nurse at the local VA hospital, and the history professor at the university. As far as I know, every last public employee in Iowa City is safe and sound.
I’ve spoken with folks in those places during the past few days. None has reported a single case of harm befalling any public employee as a result of the publicity. In cities where this kind of information has been published for several years, it has become part of the background. No big deal.
Such evidence is not comforting to the few who told me they worry about being that much easier to find by someone who, for example, is the object of a restraining order. It’s easy for me to say they have nothing to worry about; it’s also arrogant. It’s also easy to tell a nurse that, if avoiding detection were truly that important, she wouldn’t seek employment at a public hospital. See: arrogant.
So, a compromise: J. Doe. Call it the “police badge” standard: In Colorado Springs, an officer’s badge displays his or her first initial, and last name.
The Gazette will continue to obtain public-employee salary data and post them in our info center. The lists we obtain will contain full names, and we will shorten the first names to initials. We will spot-check the salary amounts with a number of people on the list, to verify that their pay amounts are correct, and we will report our findings to readers. That’s not complete transparency, but it is our good-faith effort at verification. Anyone who doesn’t believe our database or the city is free to get the same list from the city. My guess is it will be good enough for most people.
Does this change matter? After all, any person can obtain the same list of (complete) names and salaries we obtained. It’s public information. Any person with an Internet connection can post that list, names and all, for all the world to see. In fact, I predict it will happen. The relentless digitization of information, especially public information, makes it inevitable. Eventually, every public employee will have to get used to the idea that his or her name and pay is part of the public realm, searchable and downloadable. If not from us, then from someone else.
Futhermore, haven’t we already let the cat out of the bag? The gazette.com database itself does not cache, so there is no full-name version of it available. If someone has downloaded it and made it into their own spreadsheet, they’ve done something they could do anyway by asking the city for the document.
Some will ask if we made this change because of customer backlash. A few dozen readers have canceled their subscriptions. But we’ve lost more when we’ve modified the layout of the paper or started charging for the Sunday TV programming guide.
As my publisher said to me, we’re making this change not because it feels correct, but because it feels right. Someday, we may conclude that the community is ready for full disclosure. Conditions change. Standards change. For now, we’ve settled on this one.
