When The Royal Gazette launched its “Right to Know” campaign for the enactment of public access to information laws, senior reporter Sam Strangeways led the charge.

Ms Strangeways had a busy year covering the 2008 campaign for PATI and the political fallout that accompanied it.

“We were coming up against so many difficulties in getting information,” she said. “Alex Scott, the former Premier, had produced a green paper on this issue, but it never progressed from there.

“We were talking about it in the newsroom and started thinking of a campaign to get it moving again.

“There was a political desire to bring the law in, but it had stalled. We figured we should push for it.”

Ms Strangeways came to Bermuda from Britain in January 2006, just as the UK’s Freedom of Information Act was making itself felt.

“The law was passed but, like here, it took a long time to come into effect.”

She had been trained on the Act with other reporters, but using it was still in the discussion phase.

“The thing about Freedom of Information Acts is they are tricky,” she said. “Often, if you don’t understand the legislation, it’s easy to get rejected.”

In her transition to Bermuda, Ms Strangeways noticed a more entrenched culture of “not wanting to disclose information”.

“I don’t want to make it sound especially secretive, but there was a difference,” she added.

Ms Strangeways continued covering PATI issues after the campaign ended, and a 2012 talk by visiting journalist Heather Brooke gave testimony to the power of Freedom of Information legislation.

Ms Brooke exposed the British MPs expenses scandal in 2009.

“If you don’t give people a statutory right to information, you end up with a patronage system where information becomes a commodity and people only get it if they are rich enough, powerful enough or if they are doing somebody a favour,” Ms Brooke told this newspaper.

“The point about public information is that it should be available to all, not just to a select few.”

The unpleasant climate that accompanied the “Right to Know” campaign in Bermuda was recalled by senior reporter Tim Smith, who led the rallying cry for “Wear Yellow Day” — a day on which everyone was encouraged to dress in sunshine-coloured clothing in the name of open government.

“Perhaps naively, we thought this daft idea would offer a bit of relief from the brewing tension between ourselves and Government,” Mr Smith said.

“With hindsight, it probably only made things worse, as ‘Wear Yellow Day’ played out to a backdrop of a radio show decrying the campaign, with senators boasting about how they weren’t even wearing yellow underpants and chortling at the low numbers of yellow-clad people in the streets. With these harsh words ringing in my ears, I went out to interview people, only for those wearing yellow to frequently inform me they were merely randomly dressed like that and were absolutely not, under any circumstances, supporting our campaign, and could I please not put them in the paper, thank you very much. Not my finest moment.

“But where I felt ‘Right To Know’ succeeded was in the human interest stories we wrote: the people genuinely affected by their inability to get information from Government or other authorities — from the residents near Belco kept in the dark over pollution studies, to those trying to find out important details about their pension funds.

“If people can now get their right to know vital details about their health or financial future, we’ll all be better off than we were six years ago.”