IRE 2010 Blog


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Need help investigating stimulus or lenders? Check these training videos

By Reynolds Staff on Jul 27, 2010 in Best Practices, Economy, IRE 2010 Blog, IRE CAR 2010, Investigation, Investing | Banking, Story ideas

From Center for Public Integrity story on top 25 subprime lendersWe’ve posted two training videos that may be helpful if you’re investigating the stimulus or tracking mortgage lenders. They are graciously provided to us by Investigative Reporters and Editors from sessions at its Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) Conference in Phoenix in March.

In the video on the federal economic stimulus, reporters Tom Grabell of ProPublica.org and Ben Poston of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tell you how to track stimulus dollars into your community and offer examples of stimulus stories that have been done and could be replicated in other areas.  | VIDEO and presentation: Michael Grabell and Ben Poston on Covering the Sluggish Recovery. [Presentation starts on Slide 4.]

In the video on mortgage lenders, David Donald, data editor for the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, talks about how to use federal mortgage data to track subprime lenders. | VIDEO and presentation: David Donald on Probing Banks and Mortgage Lenders. [Donald's presentation begins at Slide 11. Before that, Maurice Tamman of The Wall Street Journal presents on the same subject, starting about 54 seconds in.]

One cool thing about both these videos is that they incorporate the presenters’ PowerPoint. In fact, the PowerPoint can be used to navigate the video. Pick a slide at any point in the presentation, and the video will jump to that point.

If you’d like more stimulus training, please check out the Reynolds Center’s free, daylong workshop in Washington on Oct. 27: “What’s Next for the Economy in Your Town.” Jennifer LaFleur, CAR director for ProPublica.org, and Matt Apuzzo, investigative reporter for The Associated Press, will teach you how to access stimulus data and what five stimulus stories you should be doing now. Reporter Russ Choma of American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop will do the same thing for the green stimulus.

In addition, Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics for Moody’s Economy.com, will provide an overview of where the national economy is headed and how to track what’s happening locally. Ezra Klein of The Washington Post’s Wonkbook will offer the view from Washington on the economy.

SIGN UP for this free training: What’s Next for the Economy in Your Town: Washington, Oct. 27.

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Gannett N.J. papers delve into state’s high tax bills

By Rosland Gammon on Jun 16, 2010 in Best Practices, Featured, IRE, IRE 2010 Blog, Investigation, Personal finance

Gannett series logo on high New Jersey property taxesGannett New Jersey, comprised of the the Asbury Park Press and five other papers, was recognized during last week’s IRE conference in Las Vegas for its investigative series about New Jersey’s high property taxes. It was also a finalist in the public service category of the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes. Writers Paul D’Ambrosio and Jean Mikle started the series writing: 

“It is an archaic tax that preserves New Jersey’s fragmented system of government — 566 municipalities, 605 school districts, and more than 400 other local taxing authorities — the most per square mile of any state. It is a tax driven by runaway local government and school spending, political paralysis at all levels by both parties, and patchwork budget remedies. And it is a tax that ultimately hurts you.” 

The entire series maintained a “let’s do something about this” tone and pushed readers to action. The stories explained clearly why readers should care: lost residents and employers, high salaries for public servants and “why the gubernatorial candidates are talking about everything except fixing your tax system.”    

Today’s Tip: When you add not-so-well-known data to everyday realities, you can shed light on new topics.      

As a former East Coaster, I know New Jersey taxes are high – as do the papers’ readers.  Gannett delved into the topic by posting comparisons – property taxes represent about 43 percent of New Jersey’s taxes versus a national average of 29 percent; New Jersey’s local government employs five times more workers than the state government – to help readers understand where the money goes.    

Gannett reviewed economic, tax and census data, and interviewed residents, economists, demographers and government officials for the eight-day report.    

David Donald, data editor for the Center for Public Integrity, offered IRE conference attendees a list of at least 25 databases where you can find much of the data the papers used.    

Other IRE speakers recommended “unsung documents,” suggesting that reporters “ask for everything you can get, even if you don’t think you can get it.” 

Check out more IRE Conference coverage of interest to business journalists; topics range from covering health-care reform to watchdogging economic-stimulus programs.

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IRE 2010: Best of the Year, reports from the convention

By Robin J Phillips on Jun 14, 2010 in Featured, IRE 2010 Blog, Investigation

IRE’s 2010 convention in Las Vegas is over, but the lessons learned live on.

IRE 2010 logo

Take a look at our IRE 2010 blog.  Reynolds Center Executive Director Linda Austin reported on many sessions that offered good tips for business journalists.

And be sure to take time to check out this absolutely awesome 44-page IRE document showcasing the best investigative journalism during 2010:

  • IRE Year in Investigation (PDF)

    • Coverage from IRE 2010 convention in Las Vegas

    IRE’s annual convention highlighted the best tips for business journalists digging into stories on their beats. We’ve covered many sessions.

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    How to cover health-care reform locally

    By Linda Austin on Jun 13, 2010 in Basics, Best Practices, Health care, IRE, IRE 2010 Blog, Small | Private | Non-profit, Story ideas, TrendingTopic

    Photo by Flickr.com user Doug McIntosh

    LAS VEGAS — John Fairhall, senior editor for Kaiser Health News, offered these tips at IRE on how to cover health-care reform in your community:

    • Stay on top of proposed health-insurance rate increases. Insurers’ filings with state regulators are public record. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners can point you to the office in your state. Seek comment from consumers, employers, consumer groups and politicians. Before the filings, identify the insurers with the biggest market share and have a chart of increases for the past five years ready to run.
    • Talk to business groups and employers about how they’re preparing for the new law. Look for changes in the type of policies being offered, shifts in the share of premiums paid by workers and any increased emphasis on prevention. Insurance brokers and benefits companies such as Mercer and Hewitt can assist.
    • Insurers and hospitals are at war over prices, with each getting bigger to get more bargaining clout. “Mergers are more about money than patient care,” his tip sheet says. Sources include IRS Form 990s for nonprofits on GuideStar.org and bond prospectuses filed when hospitals borrow to finance construction, available on the EMMA database of municipal bonds.
    • Check every bill introduced in your state legislature that changes the role of hospital, doctors, insurers or others in the health-care system, such as nurse practitioners. “Lobbyists are often the best source of information about competitors’ bills,” he says. “Are campaign contributions greasing the skids?”

    And here are helpful websites he identified:

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    Finding fresh angles on the financial collapse

    By Linda Austin on Jun 13, 2010 in Basics, Best Practices, Economy, IRE, IRE 2010 Blog, Investigation, Investing | Banking, Story ideas, TrendingTopic

    Chris Adams (left) of McClatchy Newspapers Washington bureau spoke on an IRE panel with David Heath of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund about investigating the financial collapse.

    LAS VEGAS — McClatchy Newspapers Washington bureau went looking for “fresh meat on old stories” and local angles on national stories about the financial collapse, one of its reporters, Chris Adams, told IRE. He acknowledged that the bureau “did come into this thing late.” Plus, the bureau, which serves 30 dailies, has a different audience than The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, which were leading on the story.

    Its effort resulted in Adams, Greg Gordon, Kevin G. Hall being named 2010 finalists in national reporting for  ”their examination of the nation’s financial collapse and notably on the involvement of Goldman Sachs.” It marked Adams’ third time as a finalist.

    Among the angles that the bureau came up with were how:

    And here are the sources that the bureau tapped to do those stories:

    • Obscure SEC filings, such as the 40-App
    • Collaterized debt obligation prospectuses from the Irish Stock Exchange
    • Pension fund reports using the Freedom of Information Act and Data Practices Act
    • Work calendar for former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson
    • Financial disclosures for Goldman Sachs alumni who took jobs in Washington
    • Quarterly call reports for banks from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
    • Internal files, e-mails and memos from the Federal Trade Commission on its cases against mortgage-service companies
    • Lawsuits and bankruptcy court records.

    Here is Adams’ full presentation.

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    How to find victims of mortgage fraud

    By Linda Austin on Jun 13, 2010 in Basics, Best Practices, Economy, IRE, IRE 2010 Blog, Investigation, Investing | Banking, Real estate | Econ development, Story ideas, TrendingTopic

    David Heath, senior reporter, Huffington Post Investigative Fund

    David Heath

    LAS VEGAS — When he was at The Seattle Times, David Heath produced a compelling story and video about a 90-year-old widow who lost the million-dollar home that she and her husband had built in 1953 because of unscrupulous lending practices.

    Now at the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, Heath told IRE attendees how he found her and others adversely affected by Washington Mutual. The Seattle institution collapsed in 2008 in the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

    To learn the basics about what led to WaMu’s failure, he started looking for victims by:

    • Looking up cases on the federal courts website, Pacer. 
    • Running a list of consumer-oriented attorneys’ names through the state court system. That led him to a suit one had filed on behalf of the widow.
    • Requesting consumer complaints against WaMu from the state attorney general’s office and the federal Office of Thrift Supervision.

    “I talked to a lot of people and heard the same story over and over again — a story of being ripped off,” said Heath, who has been a Pulitzer finalist three times.

    He then started talking to bank employees, starting at the lowest level and working his way up. He found some current and former employees by using the social-networking site, LinkedIn.

    “A lot of employees were very angry with WaMu” and eager to talk, he said. “One thing I got quickly from employees were the rate sheets on loans. It explained a lot.” Because profit margins were dwindling on traditional mortgages as interest rates rose in 2003, the bank paid brokers enormous fees to make more profitable exotic loans, he said.

    To make sure the anecdotes illustrated a systemic problem, he got the “free-writing prospectus” on a mortgage-backed security that listed addresses of the 10,000 WaMu-mortgaged properties that were rolled into it. He took that list to a firm called RealtyTrac, which collects foreclosure data, and asked it to run the addresses against foreclosure records. At least 44 percent of the loans had gone into foreclosure. That tells you there was “something very wrong about way the loans were being made,” he said.

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    5 stimulus programs to watchdog locally now

    By Linda Austin on Jun 13, 2010 in Basics, Best Practices, Economy, Health care, IRE, IRE 2010 Blog, Investigation, Small | Private | Non-profit, Story ideas, TrendingTopic

    The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided $400,000 for solar-panel installation in Ohio's Wayne National Forest, which supplied this photo to Flickr.com.

    LAS VEGAS — AP investigative reporter Matt Apuzzo offers five economic-stimulus programs to look into and three questions to ask about each. Here are the five:   

    • Health information technology. The stimulus contains money for medical electronic records: $2 billion for regional extension centers, $27 billion for hundreds of thousands of doctors’ offices and 5,000 hospitals, and $1 billion for comparative-effectiveness research on various treatments, according to Fred Schulte of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, who spoke earlier.  In addition, on May 4, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded $220 million to 15 “beacon communities” to be models of electronic-medical-records adoption. They are Tulsa, Okla.; Stoneville, Miss.; Brewer, Maine; Danville, Pa.; Salt Lake City; Indianapolis; Spokane, Wash.; New Orleans; Rochester, Minn.; Providence, R.I.; Grand Junction, Colo.; Concord, N.C.; San Diego; Hilo, Hawaii; and Buffalo, N.Y. “Will they live up to the hype?” Apuzzo asked. For more info, see the government’s websites at HealthIT.hhs.gov and www.hhs.gov/recovery,which has state-by-state data.
    • Education. Hundreds of millions in competitive and discretionary grants are being made to local school districts. The awards’ criteria are at www.ed.gov/recovery. Apuzzo said to measure your schools performance by the government’s own standards in awarding the grant. “Has your school really shown a history of increasing dropout rates or improving performance, or are they just fudging the numbers?” he asked. Many grants are supposed to demonstrate best practices for the future. “Are they showing cutting-edge stuff? Or is it just plugging the gaps?” he asked.
    • Small-business loans. Unlike the other programs, no specific data is available on these loans on recovery.gov. You can get individual-loan data from the Small Business Administration headquarters or your regional SBA office. However, the SBA is required to report to Congress on the misuse of recovery loans, which Apuzzo describes as “an often unfulfilled obligation.”
    • Transportation. The Department of Transportation is making $1.5 billion in discretionary grants. Specific award winners and losers are available at www.dot.gov/recovery. Again, hold the projects to the government’s own standards in judging their effectiveness.  
    • Weatherization. He said a shortage of contractors to do this work exists, and the selection process for contractors is susceptible to political influence. He pointed to the Indianapolis Star’s coverage.

    And here are the three questions to ask about these programs:   

    • Is what’s getting the money a priority?
    • Who is doing the work?
    • Is it making a difference?

    Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica.org offered these useful websites:   

    She also offered some websites to consult in checking for bad apples among contractors receiving stimulus funds:   

    You can also go to the job site and check whether any work is happening, how many people are working and who the subcontractors are.

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    Follow campaign spending to local businesses

    By Linda Austin on Jun 11, 2010 in Basics, Best Practices, IRE, IRE 2010 Blog, Investigation, Small | Private | Non-profit, Story ideas, TrendingTopic

    Wendell Cochran

    LAS VEGAS — Much attention gets paid to the donors to political campaigns, but Wendell Cochran advises journalists to dig into the spending in campaigns.

    Cochran, founding senior editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, said that political campaigns, especially those of incumbents are small businesses, hiring people, leasing space and buying or leasing cars.

    “What do we know about officials who get a lot of money and can spend it pretty much at will?” he asked. “Who are they doing business with? In some cases, I’m pretty sure that in the local district, where most of the money gets spent, there are relationships between people who may be giving money and getting it back through a business relationship with the candidate.”

    Jonathan D. Salant, who covers campaign finance and lobbying for Bloomberg News, said he’s found candidates who use the money to pay parking tickets or hand out free tickets to minor league baseball games or donate to local charities.

    Bill Allison of the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government, said to check the payroll to see whether family members or legislative assistants are working for the campaign.

    Cochran said the last serious look at the expense side of campaigns was a book by Dwight Morris and Murielle E. Gamache called Gold-Plated Politics: The 1992 Congressional Races.

    Here are websites these members of an IRE panel on campaign finance recommended to follow the money:

    • Federal Election Commission has data for federal campaign committees, national political parties and political action committees (PACs).
    • OpenSecrets.org from the Center for Responsive Politics provides the top 20 donors to each member of Congress for this particular election cycle and for their entire career. It has campaign expenditures for House and presidential candidates. It also tracks contributions to and from PACs and independent political groups known as 527s after the section of the tax code that regulates them.
    • Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time has a database of invitations to fundraisers collected from lobbyists dating to 2007.
    • IRE’s Campaign Finance Information Center has contributions to and expenditures by candidates. In some cases, it includes information on PACs, candidate committees and party committees. It also has story tips.
    • The Internal Revenue Service has donors to and expenditures by 527 committees.
    • The Federal Communications Commission keeps track of spending by nonprofits, such as 527s and 501c groups, which advertise in federal campaigns. The FEC also has listings, which include the organization financing the ad, but not the sources of the money.
    • The National Institute on Money in State Politics compiles campaign finance information from all 50 states at FollowTheMoney.org.
    • TransparencyData.com from the Sunlight Foundation combines federal and state campaign data, plus lobbying data and government grants.
    • Sunlight also offers Congrelate.org, which lines up information about members of Congress, including voting record and donors.
    • The Center for Responsive Politics has a lobbying datebase, but it doesn’t track new registrations. To search those, go to the House Clerk’s Office and the Senate Office of Public Records. Foreign entities also must report when they lobby Congress.

    For more on the business of elections, see Melissa Preddy’s recent post on BusinessJournalism.org.

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    Find the human element, Barlett & Steele award winners tell IRE

    By Linda Austin on Jun 11, 2010 in Barlett & Steele Awards, Basics, Best Practices, Health care, IRE, IRE 2010 Blog, Investigation, Personal finance, Small | Private | Non-profit, TrendingTopic

    Matt Haggman (right) of The Miami Herald discusses his Barlett & Steele Investigative Business Journalism Award-winning series at IRE. Winner Gary Cohn (center) and Reynolds Center President Andrew Leckey listen.

     LAS VEGAS — Matt Haggman of The Miami Herald slogged through massive databases to turn up more than 10,000 people with criminal records in the mortgage industry in Florida.

     Gary Cohn, then of Bloomberg Markets magazine, delved deep into the footnotes of financial documents to find stealth fees that AARP, the nation’s largest seniors group, charged its members for insurance. 
     

     However, both agree that what made their journalism so powerful were the stories of real people affected by what they found. Each, with partners, won a 2009 Barlett & Steele Award for Investigative Business Journalism, awarded by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.

    “You need the numbers, the overall quotes, the experts, but what you really need are the stories of real-life people to make your readers or listeners care about these stories,” said Cohn, who also won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He said that finding those people was challenging, but that he learned from Don Barlett, when they were both reporters at The Philadelphia Inquirer, that “if one technique doesn’t work, try another thing.”

    For example, Cohn said they started searching the letters to the editor in newspapers in LexisNexis and found more than 100 writers complaining about AARP insurance. “For some reason, people who write letters to the editor have listed phone numbers, and most of these people kept records. We were really able to document this,” said Cohn, who is a freelancer and adjunct professor at the USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

    The awards are named for Barlett and his partner, Jim Steele, who have won two Pulitzers and two National Magazine Awards in their almost 40-year collaboration as investigative reporters at The Inquirer, Time and now Vanity Fair. This video describes the pair’s storied history and the awards that bear their name. The deadline to apply for the 2010 awards, for work published in print or online by June 30, is Aug. 2. They were first conferred in 2007 and carry $7,000 in prizes.

    Haggman said the idea for the “Borrowers Betrayed” series, reported with Jack Dolan and Rob Barry, came out of working the real estate beat. He came across one mortgage broker with a felony conviction and wondered if there might be more in a state already known to have a high rate of mortgage fraud.

    That led them to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which initially wanted to charge the paper $24 for each criminal-history check of individuals licensed to work in the mortgage industry. Haggman calculated that would have cost $133 million. Ultimately, they were able to negotiate with the state to run a study without releasing the names.

    Cohn said his Bloomberg colleague, Darrell Preston, got a tip that unions that had endorsed insurance products were getting legal kickbacks, or royalties, for doing so. They started with a list of 50 large nonprofits and began checking for royalty payments on their tax returns, which are public on GuideStar.org.

    “When we came to AARP, we were startled,” Cohn said. “In the last year we looked at (2007), they were just under half a billion dollars….That’s when we decided to focus on AARP.”

    He said many nonprofits, including AARP, make public their consolidated financial statements on their websites.  “That’s where you would find the really good stuff by reading the footnotes,” he said.

    He and Preston then did a statistical comparison of AARP’s rates to those of similar insurance products and found they were not the cheapest.

    “We wanted to test what we were finding. We went to AARP very early to ask them about this,” he said. Their interview with a financial expert at AARP confirmed they were on the right track, but AARP soon stopped talking to them, making it difficult to balance the story.

    Cohn’s advice to the journalists listening to him on an IRE panel was to make a list of the larger nonprofits in their area and start pulling their tax returns on GuideStar.org. Nonprofits are still largely uncovered, he said, and they “include huge hospitals, private universities and not just small mom-and-pop organizations….They operate as businesses.”

    He added, “Trust your instincts and trust your eyes. If you get a lot of mail promising lower insurance rates, check it out.”

    HANDOUT — Gary Cohn for IRE 2010
     

    HANDOUT – Matt Haggman for IRE 2010

     
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