For instance, Jason and Jack write:

“In 2002, E&J Gallo, the world’s biggest winemaker, purchased Louis M. Martini, which owned more than 1,000 acres of prime Napa and Sonoma County vineyards. None of the property was reassessed because Martini was divided among 12 Gallo family members, none of whom acquired more than 50%.

Some of that property today is worth more than $150,000 an acre but continues to be taxed based on its 1975 value of a few thousand dollars an acre, according to Napa County assessor John Tuteur.”

Jason Felch

“It’s one of the reasons why the property tax burden shifted from corporations to homeowners,” Jason says. “We were looking to explain how the shift happened.”

Your state may not have the same law, but you can dig into this story by looking at property reassessment laws. If you understand the tax law, you can find loopholes and what companies do to qualify for them, Jack says. Contact lawyers who’ve used the loopholes for their clients to help you, he says.

Jack Dolan

Property tax records from county assessors’ offices will show how parcels of land are taxed. Submit public records request because the website data is limited, Jason says. Look for disparities in tax rates and work backwards to find commercial property owners.

For Jason and Jack, determining if companies used the majority-ownership loophole wasn’t easy, Jason says. In California, corporate entities have to report changes in majority ownership to the state; however, the information is exempt from public records laws, he says.

“That’s when it helps to have really good human sources,” Jack says.

Kyung and Janet focus on H-1B visas that allow companies to temporarily hire foreign skilled workers. They use data for Microsoft in their story, but Kyung says the story can be localized. “It would require some digging, and a bit of spreadsheet analysis,” she says.

Kyung says to start with the Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification, which keeps a database of visa and green-card applications. The information can be sorted by employers or by state. For instance, this link shows national information such as number of applications and top 10 employers.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has specific company data; however, contacting Ron Hira, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who uses the data, might be quicker, Kyung says.

“I suspect most employers will not readily divulge the percentage of foreign workers on their payroll,” she says. “Microsoft did, but even it refuses to say how many visa workers it hires through contracting firms.”

Also, find and interview workers hired through the visa program, since there is a direct impact on them as well, she says.

A map turtle released in Wilder Creek. Photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Midwest Region

Elizabeth McGowan, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer won a Pulitzer Prize this year for their InsideClimate News series “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of,” which looked the impact of a diluted bitumen or “dilbit” spill in Michigan.

Elizabeth says she discovered the spill while looking at energy and environmental concerns as an election issue. She realized the spill in the Gulf had overshadowed the one in Michigan. “The local papers had covered it, but it was not on the radar screen of anybody else,” she says.

Many months later, the three-part series and epilogue as well as an e-book launched on the InsideClimate News site. (A follow-up version of the e-book is now on Amazon.) Reporter Lisa Song, who did the scientific research for the series, described it as a “suspenseful tale like a crime thriller” when I spoke with her for a previous post.

That’s partly because Elizabeth and her editors chose cinematography as the writing style early on, Elizabeth says. “It’s important what you put in and what you leave out,” she says. “If you do a notebook dump, readers will be lost.”

That style is apparent from the beginning. Elizabeth says she met the lead character John LaForge when she traveled to Marshall, Mich., in November 2011. She starts the series with him noticing an “acrid stench” as he left his home. When he returns later, she writes:

“LaForge said he was stooped over the creek, looking for the source of the gunk, when two men in a white truck marked Enbridge pulled up just before 10 a.m. One rushed to LaForge’s open front door and disappeared inside with an air-monitoring instrument.

The man emerged less than a minute later, and uttered the words that still haunt LaForge today: It’s not safe to be here. You’re going to have to leave your house. Now.”

Elizabeth says she and editor Susan White worked closely from the first draft to add the “little bones, flesh and skin” to the skeleton outline, she says. “In telling a story, it helps to have more than one set of eyes,” Elizabeth says. “The writing was back and forth, line by line. We had to keep the reader coming along.”

Elizabeth McGowan

Elizabeth organized her notes by sources, she says. Separating by source allowed her to easily find notes from neighbors, Enbridge officials and others as she worked through the story, she says.

Elizabeth does not have a feature writing background like many reporters who write long narratives. But, she says, “It’s something my brain seems to be able to do.”

She’s using lessons learned from writing the Dilbit series to write a book about a cross-country bike ride and cancer survivor, she says. She left InsideClimate News last year to write the book.

She was working on the book when an Associated Press reporter called to interview her about winning the Pulitzer Prize, she says. It was her birthday and she hadn’t heard the news. “I said, ‘You’re making that up!’” Then she called a friend who confirmed the win. “It still feels unreal.”

The reporters and editors had to “steal time” to get the project done because of the organization’s small staff. Elizabeth kept going because there was something wrong, she says. She also had sources like LaForge who – despite her warning that she would call often, talked to her because they wanted to help others.

“We didn’t do this because we thought we needed to win an award,” she says. “We did the series because it’s egregious and there are too many situations like this.”

Lisa Song

From Lisa, I learned you don’t always have to leave the newsroom to find an expert. She has degrees in environmental science and science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She says her background allowed her to comprehend what sources said without too much explanation. Because she understood the information, she was able to ask important follow up questions, she says.

Her primary task in the project was determining the technical aspects of the oil that caused it to sink into the water instead of lying on top like most oils, she says. With no specific research available, Lisa had to do her own. “I couldn’t get at the question directly,” she says. She searched for articles, interviewed scientists, and dug through government records, she says.

The reporters needed information about the oil to show how the Michigan spill differed from others, including the Gulf of Mexico spill that also happened in 2010. They found most procedures and equipment focus on floating oil. “Because the Marshall accident was the first major spill of dilbit in U.S. waters, cleanup experts at the scene were unprepared for the challenge of submerged oil,” one story says.

Lisa also had to crunch numbers from a database of pipeline spills. (You can read more about that process in this Investigative Reporters and Editors post.)

One of her most daunting tasks was reviewing about 10,000 pages of a National Transportation Safety Board investigation. “I was able to go through the documents to pull out key facts,” she says. “It helped strengthen the story and fact check information from the Congressional Record.”

As part of a joint project “America’s Big Beef” with The Kansas City Star, Peggy Lowe of Harvest Public Media and KCUR in Kansas City found a connection between university research and corporate donations. Her lead sums the story nicely:

“Agricultural colleges in the top five beef-producing states have become quasi-arms of the cattle industry, selling science to corporate bidders who set the research agenda with their dollars.”

I contacted Peggy because she was among this year’s winners of the Radio Television Digital News Association’s Edward R. Murrow Awards. I also reached out to get tips on gathering financial details about colleges and universities.

“It’s a rich, fertile soil for business reporters or higher education reporters,” Peggy says. “It’s really insidious the way money comes into these schools and flows out in research dollars.”

Some schools don’t hesitate to divulge information. Many even distribute press releases touting the donations, Peggy says. But getting donation information from other public schools takes more than filing public records requests.

One hurdle that surprised me was the separation of financial information for colleges within colleges. For instance, an agriculture school could have separate Animal Health or Crop Science schools within it, Peggy says. Tracking this can be difficult so carefully phrase public records requests, she says.

Reviewing alumni groups, boards of regents and naming rights can indicate who’s giving money, she says. Commodity boards or interest groups such as the American Farm Bureau also can provide clues or information, she says. She warns some schools receive money through private foundations or other private entities, which removes the donations from the purview of public records requests.

For those of you looking to get around hefty charges for information, Peggy says to ask for a cost breakdown. One school wanted to charge $5,000 to fulfill a records request, but once she asked for the cost details (and did some negotiating), the cost dropped to $138, she says.

What stood out to me was footage of the “smoking gun.” The reporters were there when inspectors used small cameras to examine the speed control cable. The video showed a recall repair that wasn’t modified after the auto company notified dealers the problem needed a different repair.

Joe Ducey

It takes timing and good sources to get access like this. But this story also took digging deeper into a routine news story and a team of lawyers.

Joe and Lauren say the story started in January when the station did a 30-second piece about a teenager killed while driving a Ford Escape. They looked deeper into the story because of a 911 call from the teen’s mother, who was following her daughter when the accident occurred, Joe says. “It could have gone unnoticed,” he says. “There are a lot of tragic stories. How do you know which to go after?”

Joe and Lauren knew there was a story when they reviewed the model’s recall information and found Ford had issued two remedies for fixing the cable, they say. The first was part of a recall sent to vehicle owners. The second one was sent only to dealers nine months later, they say. “It was a huge ‘aha’ moment,” Joe says.

Lauren Gilger

They had two hurdles: the legal challenge and ensuring fairness to Ford, which didn’t want to comment on the accident, Lauren says. The station hired local attorneys to work with the team, Joe says. “The lawyers watched every frame with us to see what we were saying and showing,” Lauren says. “We ended up putting on screen everything [Ford] sent us. We couldn’t paraphrase what they said.”

Lauren says she was surprised to find so much information online. They found details about other deaths and lawsuits through court documents, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and consumer complaints, she says.

Joe, Lauren and photographer Gerard covered the story for almost a year. They spent most weekends in the newsroom researching, Lauren says.

“This story was about justice and giving people a voice when they didn’t have one,” she says.

Watch: Ford Recall Award Entry from ABC 15 Editor on Vimeo.

Sun Sentinel image of items offered to cover legal fees

“A herd of cattle in Venezuela is one of the most unusual offers [defense lawyer Jason] Kreiss has rejected. He also turned down a boat from a guy accused of stealing boats and declined the offer of paralegal services from the guy who pleaded guilty to impersonating an attorney.”

“My beat at the Sun Sentinel is federal courts, but we try very hard to keep the focus on stories that are of very general interest, informative, outrageous or amusing for our readers,” Paula says.

Paula says she’d considered this story since she noticed a lawyer driving a vintage car he received from a client who’d run out of money.

A recent story about a judge ordering a defendant to surrender his wine collection to pay legal fees made the timing right, she says.

Paula McMahon

Getting stories from lawyers wasn’t a challenge, she says. “One lawyer called me back and left a voicemail where he was laughing so hard that he could barely get the words out,” she says. But she also checked with local prosecutors to see if any lawyers had been charged for doing illegal trades, she says.

Paula suggests beat reporters keep a list of funny things that happen so they can find trend stories. She keeps a list on her phone. “I go through notebooks so quickly that some of the ideas scrawled on the back cover of my notebook disappeared into the abyss of my desk or the trunk of my car,” she says.

She also says reporters should know their beats well enough to “feel confident enough to step back and write these ‘overview’ kinds of stories.”

A screenshot from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's series "A Time to Build."

Rick Romell of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found another measure of local economic growth: entrepreneurship.

In the four-part “A Time to Build” series that started Sunday, Rick juxtaposes the backgrounds and businesses of two entrepreneurs of different generations. He tells their stories while providing research and data to question whether entrepreneurship could boost economic growth.

Rick struck gold with his two characters. He starts part one of the series by clearly noting their differences. He writes:

Charlie “Hillman finished at the top of his high school class, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for good measure, later got himself a master’s in engineering. He’s a trim 61, with a shock of white hair, a toothy smile and the button-down look of an earnest guidance counselor.

[Jalem] Getz is 40, dark and tall, and has a taste for Italian sports cars. He used to drink a lot of Mountain Dew, and still rocks with AC/DC. His formal education ended in junior college.”

Rick Romell. Photo by Kevin Eisenhut

Focusing on these two guys wasn’t always the plan, Rick says. Like most of us would have done, Rick planned to focus on experts and write separate short profiles of 10 entrepreneurs. But a conversation with a colleague shifted his plan, he says.

Rick worked on the project for six months as part of a Marquette Law School fellowship. He spent most of his time narrowing his general assignment to write about Milwaukee’s economic future, he says. He also studied the data and more than 50 scholarly studies that are now “piled up like a landfill on my desk,” he says.

“Reporters are good at sorting out expert research,” he says. “But there is no way to get a full grasp without putting in a lot of time.”

The good news: If you focus the story ahead of time, you can do a similar project in a month, Rick says. His tips:

• Start with the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City-based group focused on entrepreneurs, to get background and data.
• Use your organization’s archive and local groups that promote entrepreneurship to find sources.
• Gather data from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics. His data collection filled four dozen spreadsheets. (He suggests putting the spreadsheet titles into your draft to help with fact checking later.)
• Read academic studies.

Finally, I asked Rick why his series runs Sundays and Wednesdays for two weeks instead of four consecutive days. His response: there are more readers and space on those days. I’m embarrassed to admit that’s something I’d never considered.

“More than half of the 168,324 charged-off loans failed before 20 percent of the loan was repaid. More than one in three repaid only 10 percent or less of the loan. More than 7 percent did not reduce the principal on their loan at all.”

Operators of national franchises like Cold Stone Creamery received millions of dollars in loans.

Getting data is rarely easy and the SBA data was no exception, Ken says. The reporters received about five sets of data from their FOIA requests before they got the information they needed. He suggests reporters do “integrity checks” by counting different fields and records. He also says to check for missing years and coding values.

The next obstacle: the data came in an Excel format.

“Excel does weird things to data types because it can’t specify what data is what,” he says.

He came up with what seems to be an easy solution – though I wouldn’t have thought if it. He exported the information into the Access program, saved it as a .csv file and imported it into MySQL,which handles a larger pool of data, he says.

Finally, they learned SBA lenders submit loan information without a standardized system, which meant the team had to clean up more than 1 million records, Ken says.

The result was a localized searchable database showing companies that defaulted on their loans. The analysis also allowed them to see the effects the recession had on defaults and lending.

Stay tuned for more stories generated by the database, Ken says.

Tracking offshore accounts can be done with tips from insiders and some luck, says senior editor Mike Hudson. But ICIJ benefited from 2.5 million files obtained by director Gerard Ryle. He collected the files during his investigation of Australia’s Firepower scandal that involved offshore accounts and corporate fraud, according to ICIJ’s story on how it analyzed the files.

The project involved 86 journalists in 46 countries, which provided the local knowledge other reporters wouldn’t have, Mike says. But it is also riskier. While American reporters may be “snubbed at a party” or cut off from sources when someone dislikes a story, reporters in other countries may have their jobs, lives or families threatened, he says.

During the Reynolds Center’s “Great Sources, Great Storytelling” presentation at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference, we ran out of time to discuss knowing when to stop reporting and writing. I asked Mike, who was a panelist, when that happened for this series.

They knew they were ready to publish when they’d gotten enough names, stories and real reporting to give a good picture of what’s going on, he says. They also knew it would be an ongoing series, which meant there would still be time for other stories.

“You have to be disciplined to say I can come back to this later,” he says. “Now we can pull back to do bigger picture stories.”

Often external forces like competition scoops or pending developments force you to stop reporting, Mike says. Sometimes, it takes an editor to tell you to start writing. “With investigative reporting, we often leave ourselves too little time to write,” which is important for great storytelling, he says.

Possible good news: Mike says the ICIJ is trying to determine how to release a database with names. While it’s no sure thing, he says they’d like to release it within the next few months.