Among the many good intentions Attorney General Janet Reno spelled out during her ASNE convention address on enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act, one of the most humdrum might also have been one of the most important:

"We are now making FOIA performance part of the job description of every relevant Department of Justice employees and rating them on how well they do."

Since FOI legislation first provided the key to unlock federal files in 1966, Reno and President Clinton arguably have been friendlier to the causes of open government and free press inquiry than any other administration.

But implicit in Reno's comments - and at the root of the new Justice job descriptions - was the fact that, long before the Clintons hit town, a mostly Republican-trained generation of federal bureaucrats had developed a palpably unsympathetic view of the FOIA. They are yet to be totally turned around by this Democratic band of comparative short-timers.

One continuing consequence is that journalists' FOIA requests occasionally still languish literally for years.

"I don't doubt Janet Reno's basic commitment to open government," says Jane E. Kirtley, executive director of the Reporter's Committee on Freedom of the Press. "But that still hasn't really reached fruition among the rank and file. ... There is still the perception that handling FOIA requests is a diversion from an agency's real work and that the allocation of resources to that is inappropriate."

Today, that resistance is being challenged not only by the administration but by demand for more and quicker compliance. Justice's struggle to meet the workload was the core of Reno's speech.

Last year, she said, "the Justice Department received about 125,000 FOIA and Privacy Act requests and had the equivalent of 617 people working full-time on the requests at an annual cost of over $35 million."

The result so far: The FBI currently is "5.6 million pages behind in processing FOIA requests."

That doesn't mean she isn't seeing progress, though. Reno said about 70 percent of department divisions have cut their backlogs, by such methods as:

• Sidestepping the FOIA system when a readily available document can be assessed and released quickly.
• Releasing information on misconduct by Justice employees without FOIA processing.
• Giving first priority to requests from numerous news agencies for the same material, for instance, FBI transcripts of negotiations with the Branch Davidians at Waco. In turn, Reno alluded to problems of FOIA efficiency she thinks journalists cause:
• If the FBI's FOIA staff didn't have to spend about a third of its time generating defenses against press lawsuits, she suggested, it would have more time to fulfill other, less contentious requests.
• If reporters didn't make such elaborate requests - she mentioned one from Pennsylvania 11 pages long, containing 206 questions - more might be served.
• And if reporters followed the opinion of the Supreme Court, that the best use of FOIA is to seek information about what the government does rather than what it stores, responses could come more quickly.

Few journalists are likely to change their ways on any of those counts, but Deborah Howell, Newhouse Newspapers Washington bureau chief and a member of the Freedom of Information Committee, believes that a real rapprochement has occurred between press and Justice under Reno.

"She has a very keen feeling, because of her family background (as the child and sister of journalists) that this is something she must do," Howell said. "I don't think we're the enemy to her."

Blonston is Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers