Michael W. Hudson, who has been looking into predatory lending and poverty for almost 20 years, says there’s hope for those of us who don’t have his history and experience to write these stories.
Much of Mike’s advice is about getting information outside traditional official sources to write about the mortgage meltdown.
It’s a stoic reader or viewer who can pass up a deadly food story, and the unfortunate outbreak of listeria — attributed to benign, healthy-looking melons of all things — opens the door to a feast of story ideas for business writers.
The new Brad Pitt movie “Moneyball” is scoring a pretty solid home run both at the box office and among reviewers, for its portrayal of a baseball manager who decided to pitch conventional wisdom about building a winning team and recruit players based on a different set of metrics.
Michael W. Hudson of the Center for Public Integrity has become the guru of all things predatory lending. His latest story about Countrywide Financial Corp.’s silencing of whistleblowers for exposing document forgery and shredding clearly shows the amount of work he’s invested in learning about this topic and gathering sources. I asked him if there was hope for those of us who don’t have his history and experience to write these stories. His answer? “Yes.”
We’ll chat live with Kim Barker, a general assignment reporter for ProPublica who specializes in enterprise and investigative stories, on Oct. 11 from 1-2 p.m. ET. Barker just finished her term as the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she studied, wrote and lectured on Pakistan and Afghanistan and [...]
There’s a story I’ve been watching for since about July, but if anyone’s written it at the local level, I’ve missed it: How is enrollment – and more to the point, job placement after graduation – faring at technical, trade, career and vocational schools? For one thing, they’re an alternative for the 40 percent of [...]
Sometimes the allure of new jobs distracts people from tallying their actual cost. But Daniel Connolly and Amos Maki of The Commercial Appeal didn’t shy away from asking about the true costs of bringing 1,240 Electrolux jobs to Memphis.
Nature has wrought havoc throughout the United States and beyond the past few years, with seemingly no end in sight to the floods, fires, storms and drought that have ravaged so many states. Aid to damaged areas is tapping out federal agencies in an already cash-strapped economic era, as we see this week with the [...]
Today’s Tip: Use the Electronic Municipal Market Access program (EMMA) from the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board to access financial statements and disclosures for municipal bonds, including conduit bonds.
That’s what Yamil Beard of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram used to discover that her home county, Tarrant, is among the nation’s leaders in municipal-bond defaults. In part, that’s because it’s also among the leaders in issuing a kind of muni known as conduit bonds.
