Where are champions for open government in online era?

Echoing concerns I'd raised about limiting information available on elected judges, the Dallas News' Reese Dunklin says legislation making personal information about state employees closed records limits accountability and would have prevented the News' investigative journalism on the Texas Youth Commission in 2007.

There really needs to be more focused debate on transparency and open government in the online era, or in the current political environment we're going to lose the Texas Public Information Act as a practical matter over the next few sessions. It's already a shadow of its former self - particularly on law enforcement records - and is suffering a slow death by a thousand cuts. Every two years, it seems like a lot more bills are filed to close records than to make government more transparent.

For all of my adult life, the only powerful constituency for open records at the Texas capitol has been the mainstream media themselves - particularly the newspaper and broadcasters' associations. (And mostly, it should be said, they fought and lost.) But the decline in newspapers seems destined to upset whatever balance previously existed on the issue, and nobody is actively filling that gap.

So-called "grass roots" media like blogs don't tend to have the money to pay for significant open records requests, nor the training how to use them. And they certainly don't pay lobbyists to fight for open records at the capitol the way industry associations for the MSM do.

In the online world, the skillsets of a paper-trail dogging investigative reporter from years past seem a little scary. But that doesn't mean open records and investigative journalism aren't just as important to a functioning democracy as they were a decade ago, or in 1973 when the Texas Open Records Act was created. They just have fewer champions now in the political arena.

MORE: See more from Reese Dunklin on the topic.