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xix Acknowledgments The authors would not have written this book without the inspiration of others. I thank my wife, Kathy, who went along with my spending so much time preparing this book; my graduate school advisor, Professor Emeritus James Hoyt, and my undergraduate professor, Tom Beell, who have spent their careers doing for others what they did for me: instilling the desire to fight for public records; Investigative Reporters and Editors for its commitment to training journalists on how to get and analyze public data; and Kent State professors Tim Smith and Mark Goodman, who continually impress upon their students the importance of pursuing public records. K.I. In addition to Karl Idsvoog, I thank some of the reporters and editors who have pursued government information with special gusto: Susan Goldberg, Doug Clifton, Tom O’Hara, Bob McAuley, Jim Neff, Dave Davis, Joan Mazzolini, Chris Quinn, the late Gary Webb, and the late Bob Snyder—all currently with or alums of the Cleveland Plain Dealer; Mike Philipps, Paul Knue, and Randy Ludlow, alums of the now-defunct Cincinnati Post; the gruff Paul Jagnow, former managing editor of the Youngstown Vindicator ; and the truly intrepid former owner and publisher of the tiny Fostoria Review Times, Clarence Pennington, for whom I won my first case to enforce the public records act. I also thank the Ohio Newspaper Association and members of former Ohio attorney general Lee Fisher’s open government task force for pushing to improve Ohio’s public records act, as well as the owners, publishers, and top editors of the Plain Dealer, the E. W. Scripps Company, the Toledo Blade, the Youngstown Vindicator, the Columbus Dispatch, the Akron Beacon Journal, the Canton Repository, and the Cincinnati Enquirer for devoting valuable resources to enforcing Ohio’s open government laws. Special thanks go to the staff at Baker & Hostetler LLP—Nancy Otto, Tina Koons, and Don Ticknor—whose technical expertise with publishing software and willingness to work especially hard made the layout, length, and revising of this book possible. And most of all, we thank the government lawyers and administrators whose creative ways of saying “No,” while arguably staying within the law, caused us to innovate to try to overcome them. D.M. ...

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