Speaker 1: I'm Susie Kim. I'm a national reporter for NBC News. Today we're going to talk about being smarter about FOIA requests.

Speaker 2: A common household product linked to the deaths of hundreds of children. More deaths linked to these baby products than the government initially reported. Susie Kim, she's been all over the story.

Speaker 1: It can be very frustrating just to deal with what people want to say on the record.

Speaker 3: We have laws that restrict us, our ability to talk to the public. I couldn't go and tell you about it without actually first going to the company itself.

Speaker 1: That seems backwards. You don't just have to rely on the public statements that a politician makes, the public reports that are put out by a government, the public statements made by a manufacturer, an industry, a trade association. And you can look at how it's affecting real people and real families and communities and businesses. You don't just have to go by what they're saying. You can look at what they're doing. So the reason that public records requests can be really helpful to strengthen reporting in general is that you can show not only the ways in which government policies are affecting people, but what the government knows and what they aren't actually telling the public about what they do know. The Death by Delay series looks at ways in which basic safeguards have been delayed for years, even sometimes decades. Products that are known to be fatal, that are known to harm particularly infants and small children, that pose hazards that people have been aware of, yet have failed to take aggressive action on. What is stopping regulators from acting? What is stopping manufacturers from changing the designs of their products to prevent these kinds of deaths? The federal government has a lot of data and a lot of records, but they do not always make them public. These federal records to show that in fact there were more deaths of infants linked to baby loungers, more strangulation deaths from corded window coverings, than had been publicly reported by these federal agencies, that at least had been publicly acknowledged. We asked the federal government for all sorts of records they had detailing the number of incidents linked to consumer products that we were examining, investigating. After our series of stories on baby loungers, two members of Congress demanded that the Consumer Product Safety Commission actually ban pillow-like infant loungers altogether. And lo and behold, a few months later, the CPSC actually did put out a rule that would effectively ban a lot of the products that are out on the market today. Filing a public records request is definitely not a guarantee. It's more like a wish. I hope that you have that those records will come back. Unfortunately, the federal government can be extremely difficult to wrest records from. The biggest tool they have on their side is time.

Speaker 4: In some circumstances, the agency will be able to respond to the request within the standard time limit established by the FOIA, which is approximately one month. In other instances, more time may be needed before the request can be completed.

Speaker 1: I consider myself lucky if the federal government gets me records back and responds to requests in months rather than years. It is not easy and it is important to be persistent and also just to learn about the most effective way to ask for what you want to increase the chances that you will actually get it. So how do you know what to ask for? Essentially, that takes reporting. Feeling like it's just a stab in the dark makes it a lot harder on you and on the person responding to say yes to that request. Treat it like any other reporting task. Okay, I'm trying to figure out what records to ask for. Who do I ask for that? And just start from that point and that'll help you really narrow your focus a lot more. One of the most frequent replies you'll get is that this request is overly broad. It's too vague and too broad and there are just too many records to reasonably go through. So it's important to know what you're looking for and to try to be as specific as possible. The most important thing is knowing the agency that you're dealing with, knowing if you're asking for a certain data set, knowing how that data set is set up, knowing all the different rows and forms that have to be filled out. So being as specific as possible and as narrow as possible is really, really helpful. Don't assume that the FOIA officer understands your story, can interpret what you're talking about. They're oftentimes just plugging things in. They're manually just copying and pasting what you put in there and seeing what records come back. So thinking about how you would actually search, for example, on a computer for what you're looking for. I think it's really important to pick up the phone. That includes public information officers who you might just be emailing back and forth. I think it can be really helpful and can get information and build a connection, also rapport with the person you're talking to that you just can't do over email. Be persistent. So I will set up a calendar reminders for following up. And for politely bugging the FOIA officer who you know is in charge of your requests, I always create a spreadsheet, sort of a tracking system, because it can be very easy to lose track of when you filed what and if you have multiple requests going on. So another tip I would have is to use something called expedited processing. It speeds up, puts your record further up in the queue. And you can make this argument saying, this is time sensitive. There are people's lives or welfare or the general public interest is at stake and the clock is ticking here. That's something I almost always put. If you're writing a news story, it's almost always relevant that we're not just sitting on stories that are evergreen for years or decades. We actually really, there's a reason that you're pursuing this story. And that reason might justify expedited processing.

Speaker 2: After our reporting, federal regulators taking a major step today that could save lives. Parents out there should go to NBCnews.com and share your article with other parents. Really important developments that impact the littlest among us. Susie, thank you so much.

Speaker 1: The reason I think it's important to use records and interweave that with people's personal narratives is that these are different kinds of evidence. So from the personal end, obviously you can get the human impact of that, the impact on an individual. Records can show you whether, for example, it's a systemic problem. It's not just this one person, but this is happening again and again, or it's happening for a very long time. The reason I think the Death by Delay series was important to me is because we were talking about ordinary consumer products that I know were in my life are in millions of people's homes across the country. And there's this sort of assumption, if I buy it from a store, if I bought it off the shelf, they wouldn't make it if it wasn't safe. I think we show that that isn't always true. Who knew about it? And how long did they know? And what did they do or not do? And to hold people accountable to that, for all those reasons, you know, the series was important to me.