The Left Coast Delivers the Right (Write) Stuff

By Dick Weiss
Jan. 4, 2008

These are tough times for newspapers as readers stop paying for their news and move online or just on to other things. This has forced dismissals and buyouts in newsrooms nationwide. Staff members at the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and The Seattle Times are among those who have taken a licking...and yet (to paraphrase the old Timex commercial), they have kept on ticking. Demonstrating they are not without resources or imagination, reporters in the Bay area effectively covered different angles of the subprime mortgage debacle by combining their computer-assisted reporting and storytelling skills. In Seattle, The Times has been all over the production of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, which promises riches for many but not for all as reporters discovered through data analysis. For 2008, my hope is that publishers on the West Coast and across the nation find the business model that can sustain this kind of enterprise reporting for both print and online.

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3  Pay in Aerospace is Low for For Non-Boeing Workers
Dominic Gates and Justin Mayo of The Seattle Times
Production of Boeing's Dreamliner promised an economic boon for the Seattle area - so much so that the state of Washington provided a bounty of tax breaks for aerospace businesses that would act as subcontractors. The benefits spurred development but they have not trickled down to the workers, many of whom are earning between minimum wage and $15 an hour. This story is full of numbers, but reporters Gates and Mayo use them judiciously while providing a compelling picture of what these meager pay rates mean for people on the assembly line and across the area.

2  Investors Own About One-fifth of Bay Area Homes in Foreclosure
Erin McCormick and Carolyn Said of the San Francisco Chronicle
The story below this one is heart rending. This one goes in an entirely different direction, but is nearly as provocative. Reporters McCormick and Said found 20 percent of the more than 6,500 Bay area homes that fell into foreclosure, from January through September of 2007, were owned by investors. Another word for them is speculators. Some were looking for a quick score. And McCormick and Said do a nice job of explaining how these investors worked the system and then how it all suddenly collapsed. You will likely feel like many of these folks got what they deserved, but note how the reporters tell the story dispassionately, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.

1  Housing Slump Hits Home in East San Jose
Pete Carey of the San Jose Mercury News
Did you ever find yourself getting choked up over a data analysis? Well, maybe not, but once you read this piece on how housing foreclosures in Santa Clara County have hit Hispanic residents the hardest, you will be very sad. The story starts with some number crunching: 60 percent of the 1,429 properties in the county taken back by lenders from Jan. 1 to Nov. 15, 2007 were owned by people with Hispanic surnames. But the story then quickly moves into the toll this has taken on the families and their aspirations. Clearly, many of these families didn't know what they were getting into when they took on no or low-down-payment loans with adjustable rates. "It was great giving people their American dream," said one long-time resident of the lenders and real estate agents. "But God, how they hooked them in and snatched it away." Note how Carey deftly weaves powerful quotes like these into the fabric of his "data analysis."

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