• St. Louis Public Radio filed a formal complaint with Missouri’s attorney general Tuesday over fees that the city of Ferguson wants to charge for releasing public records. Reporter Chris McDaniel asked Ferguson officials for records and was told he’d have to fork over $2,050 for the documents. “To charge the media for this basic function is repugnant to the idea of self-governance,” said Adam Marshall, a legal fellow with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “We have seen a lot of public distrust and questions about how the city of Ferguson and the state of Missouri are responding to the events there, and part of that distrust, I have to imagine, is from a lack of information.”
• Glynn Washington, host of public radio’s Snap Judgment, talks with The Daily Beast about what sets his show apart. “The one thing you will never hear on Snap Judgment is me giving you the moral of the story, or telling you what the story means, or any of that stuff,” he says. “What we’re really trying to do is give you a vicarious experience.”
• TechDirt takes a look at Leading Edge with Jimmy Johnson, a show that claims to air on public television and asks businesses to pay to appear on the program. The scam is similar to one perpetrated by Vision Media TV, which involved Martin Sheen and Ben Kingsley as hosts. “[T]his seems like another version of the same old scam, tricking businesses into paying big bucks for questionable claims of being on ‘public television’ on a show hosted by some celebrity,” writes TechDirt’s Mike Masnick. “. . . Hopefully, with a bit more attention, Jimmy Johnson will back away from this, the same way Walter Cronkite, Hugh Downs, Joan Lunden, Martin Sheen and Ben Kingsley did in the past. But, of course, it seems likely the deal will just morph and be back with another semi-famous ‘host’ soon after.”
• Bustle presents a Buzzfeed-ish listicle of “13 Reasons PBS’s ‘Zoom’ Was the Best Non-Cable Show From Your Childhood.” Kooky science experiments, recipes and the cup game all make the list(icle).