Happy Pulitzer week, reporters! And congrats to the winners who I know are reading this 🏆
I’ve got a double feature for you today. First of all, if you use court records at all in your reporting, or even if you don’t, you should really be aware of PACER.
PACER searches federal court records, and it is a very good searcher, considering courts are not the most… digital-first entities. You can search for appeals, bankruptcy filings, lawsuits, all kinds of things. Most importantly, besides just finding a case, you can read the documents in it – the original accusation, the responses, the evidence, the timeline.
The downside is they charge you a few cents per page, but this is where RECAP comes in. RECAP is a browser extension (yep, another one) that gives you free copies of those dime-stealing documents.
Here’s the thing: RECAP is a crowdsourced tool. If you add it to your browser, any PACER doc you look at will get copied to the RECAP database. Free court docs for everybody!
So let’s do the right thing and add RECAP, even if you’re not sure you’ll use PACER anytime soon. Which you should.