Small Staff, Grand Feats

By Sara Murray
October 3, 2007 06:35 PM

A six-month legal battle is exactly the type of hurdle that makes newspapers strapped for time and cash shudder at the thought of taking on a major reporting project.

But when Syracuse Post-Standard reporters Michelle Breidenbach and Mike McAndrew were denied tax credit information for months for their project, newspaper management stood behind them. With that support, the reporters sued the state and exposed the mismanagement of New York’s Empire Zone tax incentives program.

Long-term projects prove daunting even for well-resourced newspapers but with business staffs at newspapers across the country shrinking, the juggling gets downright creative. Still with heavy pre-reporting, careful planning and supportive management, small papers can churn out projects that make a big impact.

With the Empire Zone Giveaways project, The Post-Standard showed the amount of money companies were receiving in tax credits and brought to light companies who weren't keeping the promises they made to get in the program in the first place.

“We put that information out for the first time, and we got a huge response from people who were curious for years,” Breidenbach said. “Everyone wants to know who gets government help and to what extent.”

Be prepared to pitch

To create a successful series, the reporters and editors did a lot of legwork before a single story was written, said Projects Editor John Lammers.

“Editors hate to hear that somebody wants to take a look at something,” Lammers said. “The pitch of a story where it’s a noun - like I want to look at energy or poverty - those are suicide missions.”

So at the outset Lammers and the reporters created an outline of stories they knew they would be able to get based on pre-reporting.

In the midst of their legal battle the reporters pored over federal securities records, property tax records and grilled local officials to craft the first six or seven stories without state records.

“(The publisher) came out into the newsroom several times to congratulate us on stories,” said McAndrew, who has been at the paper for 24 years. “I can probably count on one hand the number of times he had previously come out.”

And though they began pursuing the story around August of 2005, the reporters didn't make it their sole priority until the summer of 2006, McAndrew said.

“You really want to be like a guided missile when you get freed up,” Lammers said. “You don't want to waste time while you're on the clock trying to figure out where your records are or where the story is."”

Make sacrifices to fill the void

But once a paper commits to a project, sacrifices usually have to be made across departments, said Mike Benbow, business editor of the two-person section at The Herald in Everett, Wash.

Benbow’s desk underwent quite a bit of juggling when he wrote a series on the decades of challenges facing the area’s dying fishing industry.

“Sometimes there's a lot of wire in our section but it’s worth it if you can do some good local journalism,” Benbow said. “Do people really care? I don't think they remember…I think they remember the big stories that you do.”

Benbow encourages his writers to do at least one project a year. They get started early and do daily stories at the same time but when they need time for important interviews or to write, Benbow or the other reporter will fill in. Or they'll beg for help from the city desk, he said.

And since both of his writers at the time had been assistant editors at other papers, they filled in on afternoons Benbow needed to work on his project. But when it came to writing the series, he had to use his own time.

“You can't put out a daily section and write a series, you just can’t,” he said. “So I actually wrote it on my vacation. I get like five weeks off a year and who needs five weeks right?”

The Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine took a slightly different approach when Carol Coultas, its only business reporter, took on “Seeing Green,” which examined the effect of pulp and paper production in Brazil on Maine’s pulp and paper industry. It also pulled her away from her daily reporting for about two months over the course of a year, including a 10-day stint in Brazil.

“When I was really in high gear on reporting, my editor basically left me alone,” Coultas said. “We had agreed that this project was going to be important enough that I could be suspended from my daily responsibilities.”

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism