The Plan's Aftermath

By Kelly Carr
February 18, 2009 06:17 PM

President Barack Obama’s plan to help struggling homeowners will soon trickle into communities across the nation, with the potential to directly impact the economic health of families, and in many cases, entire regions.

As reporters, our job is to show readers the local impact of this rescue plan. So how do you take a huge national story and begin to dissect it for local readers? The first step is always to zoom in.

Read the text of the overall package, all about the billions of dollars, and then narrow your focus.

Think about a particular region in your coverage area hit hard by foreclosures and identify homes that indicate financial struggle. Obama said his plan will give families a chance to rebuild themselves. Find that family in your area and learn what this will actually mean in their daily fight to avoid economic ruin.

Identify lenders in your community. Will an increase in refinancing spur more businesses? Hold numbers sacred. Become an expert on housing statistics in your community and seek out the individual stories behind the numbers and their fluctuations.

Early Wednesday morning, Rebecca McClay and her colleagues from the Gazette Newspapers in Maryland were grappling with ways to jump on this story for their local readers.

The newspaper group has already maintained a close eye on foreclosure numbers, home sales trends and changes in the lending environment. But now reporters will have the challenge of diving even further into the coverage to show the next challenges and successes for local homeowners.

“In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be trying to learn how successfully the package stems foreclosures, how developers with new projects here are affected and whether the local lending business picks up,” McClay said.

Leslie Wayne, a business, finance and political reporter for The New York Times, agrees that in the weeks and months ahead there are unlimited opportunities for localizing Obama’s plan. Reporters in newsrooms across the country play a pivotal role in portraying the real impact of this initiative.

Wayne said if she was dropped into a new community tomorrow, her first stop would be to talk to a real estate agent. She would plunge deep inside the numbers and the demographics of the area and grasp how one spot fits or doesn’t fit into what’s happening nationally. And she would keep the human element of the story a top priority.

In addition, Wayne offered these questions to consider in the coming months:

• Single out one zip code in your area that’s been hit the hardest by the housing crisis. What is happening inside this specific area? Follow a family for several months and document exactly how the plan affects their lives.


• There are many stories about those homeowners at the lower end, but what about the wealthy who are struggling in your area? What stories do they have to tell?


• Talk to a mortgage broker about what it’s like to place mortgages in this current environment. How has it changed how they’ve done business? How will the plan affect their business in the coming months?


• What’s happening to foreclosed homes? Will the numbers really drop over months to come? And how will this impact home prices in the area? In an area with foreclosures, what impact does it have for the overall tax base of the community? If people aren’t paying taxes, what does that mean for services, staff or schools in the area? How will the plan help or potentially hurt other community services?

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Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism