Everybody needs a roof over their head – even local businesses. Jonathan Lansner, a veteran reporter at The Orange County Register, details how to cover the story of real estate locally and nationally.
With existing home sales for May posting their best gain since 2011, as USA Today reports, and this week’s new home sales report expected to show a modest increase, according to Business Insider, you might want to take a mid-year checkup of the real estate market’s spin-off effect on other lines of business. I was [...]
The commercial real estate sector tends to get overlooked amid spring selling season in the single-family housing market, but a couple of interesting stories have caught my eye recently and they’re ripe for localizing. And the root causes of the activity can make for some deeper local economy stories. First, the Wall Street Journal reports [...]
I always admire alternative storytelling, from video to maps to interactive graphics or just clever ways that writers use prose. A a recent business story in the New York Times recently caught my eye and I think it’s just ripe for biz reporters nationwide to localize. In “The buck shops here,”the NYT columnist Ben Schott [...]
We’re amid one of those stimulating times of year when the seasonal news pegs are so numerous it’s hard to keep up. I missed National Love Your Produce Manager Day and going to have to take a pass on National Garlic Day; hoping to squeeze in some Earth Day ideas but meanwhile here are a [...]
New numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau on state tax revenues are just out for the fourth quarter of 2013, with the annual summary for the full year also due out April 8. Because these figures are broken down into categories ranging from property tax to alcohol purchases, you might consider using them as a [...]
Whether a lakeside cabin, desert ranch, riverside RV or beachfront cottage, owning the getaway home is many a consumer’s dream. And as summer draws near, a new spate of information indicating an upswing in buyer demand makes this an opportune moment to take a look at trends in the sale of second homes and other [...]
The spring that seemed like it would never arrive – and in many places across the U.S., still doesn’t – actually rolls around this week. And aside from basketball madness, tulips and school breaks, it’s a big season for residential real estate. With many bullish forecasts out there boding well for sellers and real estate [...]
Time flies on news-heavy weeks and the “ones that got away” pile of good stories to localize is growing at an annoying clip. (Among the missed opportunities, to my chagrin, was this Ragan’s PR Daily piece on tacky MLK Day marketing if you want to add it to next year’s tickler file.) So before the following are added [...]
This free workshop was originally held on Jan. 23, 2014 in Lexington, Ky.
Governments award millions of dollars in contracts and are often some of the largest employers in town. Yet journalists sometimes overlook the business stories in the workings of local and state government. The Watergate admonition to “follow the money” applies to investigations of government at all levels, down to the economic-development agency and library board.
