Rosland Gammon is a former business journalist turned college instructor. Her newsroom experience includes reporting for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and reporting and editing at Bloomberg News. Gammon currently teaches communications at Alverno College in Milwaukee. Follow her daily posts. | E-mail: Rosland Gammon
Charles Piller and Robert Lewis are among this year’s finalists for the Gerald Loeb awards for their Sacramento Bee stories exploring hard money lending. The first of their two stories starts with a district attorney who borrowed from a hard money broker, which the story defines as the equivalent of a “legal loan shark who [...]
David Olinger of the Denver Post questions investment bankers’ involvement in school bond campaigns, noting that their help to pass tax increases may be a violation of Colorado law.
Spencer Soper of the Allentown Morning Call exposed the working conditions at an Amazon.com warehouse last year, noting the intense heat and ambulances parked outside to treat employees who were unable to endure the heat. He writes: “An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an ‘unsafe environment’ after he treated several [...]
Jill Riepenhoff and Mike Wagner of the Columbus Dispatch analyzed about 30,000 consumer complaints from people who’ve been unable to correct errors on their credit reports for a four-part series called Credit Scars. The complaints, filed with the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in 24 states, accuse credit-reporting agencies Equifax, Experian and TransUnion of [...]
Alejandro Lazo of the Los Angeles Times reports that mortgage foreclosures have led to a boom for apartment rentals across the country. He writes: “The foreclosure mess has pushed millions of former homeowners with tarnished credit into a competitive apartment market across the U.S. Add fresh demand from young workers, few new units and tight [...]
A recent piece by Shan Li for the Los Angeles Times details the premiums fertility clinics pay for egg donations. She writes: “It’s technically called an egg ‘donation.’ But if you’re a young Asian woman, donating your eggs to an infertile couple can fetch enough cash to buy a used car or perhaps a semester [...]
Ken Bensinger of the Los Angeles Times tells the story of people who paid more than $350,000 for lifetime unlimited first-class travel on American Airlines. Their AAirpass program travels earned them more than 30 million frequent flier miles each. Ken starts the story with two men who purchased the passes and writes: “But all the miles [...]
When Marilyn Geewax of NPR saw foreclosures and apartment vacancies increasing three years ago, she wondered where people had gone. “They had to be someplace,” she says. She found Census data showing a 10 percent jump in number of households with multiple generations of adults. That prompted NPR’s series Family Matters: The Money Squeeze, which [...]
Megan O’Matz and John Maines of the Florida Sun Sentinel found a way to quantify the number of bank-owned abandoned houses in foreclosure. Using data to determine who owns the properties, Megan and John found the proliferation of vacant, often untended properties is partly fueled by ownership uncertainties.
