Arresting Agencies and Crime Reporter Boundaries

I'm Anika Myers Palm with the Orlando Sentinel. One of the toughest things for a new reporter who is just starting out covering crime when you're trying to cover an arrest for the first time is figuring out exactly what your boundaries are. Maybe you'll ask for a police report from the arresting agency, the law enforcement agency and they will redact certain information and sometimes that information was exactly what you needed in order to be able to contact someone else involved in the case and you'll have to find a way around it. Other times the arresting agency isn't forthcoming at all whether it's with the documents related to the case or with letting you to speak with anybody affiliated with the case, anybody who's working on it and that can be difficult as well and those are just things that you're just going to have to work through. Some cases are not, some cases are just aren't going to be easy for you no matter what the arresting agency is or what the arrestee has done and so you'll work your way through that it's just one of those things that will get better for you as get more experience.