AMY TAXIN
Associated Press
Shane Fitzgerald has pushed for public records in court to help his reporters uncover details of a destructive school fire, the police shooting of an inmate and a public defender who wasn't doing much work.
But there are many instances where his newspaper group in suburban Philadelphia has not, especially since the declines in the news industry walloped the budgets for local news coverage and left little to cover the costs of court fights for public access.
"You really have to assess your risk there, and, do you really have a shot at getting it?" said Fitzgerald, executive editor for the Bucks County Courier Times, The Intelligencer and the Burlington County Times. "It used to be you could go and file for open records and fight it a little bit on a hunch or
