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 [...]
I was listening to Bill Moyers the other night, where his guest was Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald. The latter talked about official secrecy, the danger it poses to our society and got in a dig at the media for not playing its essential adversarial role to government. It got me thinking about business journalism. Should [...]
Joe Ducey, Lauren Gilger and Gerard Watson of ABC 15 in Phoenix won an Edward R. Murrow award from the Radio Television Digital News Association and a Peabody Award from the University of Georgia for their investigative series on a Ford recall. What stood out to me was footage of the “smoking gun.” The reporters [...]
While reading about the Boston bombing and the West, Texas, explosion, I came across a Sun Sentinel story noting interesting ways lawyers get paid for their services. It was the kind of lighthearted trend story that many of us need this week. Reporter Paula McMahon writes: “A herd of cattle in Venezuela is one of [...]
Beware of bitcoin Bitcoin* is all the rage. It’s extraordinarily difficult to write about because no one – including its creators – seems to be able to say exactly what it is. That makes it tough to come up with the nut graf**. This would-be educational video takes a stab at it, but is almost [...]
A panel of journalists from the Los Angeles Times recently discussed what it’s like covering the entertainment industry, how it has changed and coverage challenges. They all agreed that the beat’s biggest hurdle remains the same – finding the real story in Hollywood. “Hollywood has never been known for truth telling,” said Dawn Chmielewski, who [...]
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 [...]
I was never afraid of the Internet. I was at the Charlotte Observer when the Charlotte.com site was launched, and much gnashing of teeth and tearing of garments happened at this newspaper known for its careful, writerly approach. Should we put up stories before they appeared in the physical paper, even for breaking news? Should [...]
Using Small Business Administration 7(a) loan data, Lynn Hulsey and Ken McCall of the Dayton Daily News found a pattern of defaults among some restaurant franchise owners, and few payments on some defaulted loans. They write: “More than half of the 168,324 charged-off loans failed before 20 percent of the loan was repaid. More than [...]
