Victoria Lim. Photo by Cale Ottens

Victoria Lim visited Haiti after the earthquakes to report a sports story, but found the devastating damage to the country shouldn’t be shared in just words.

The experienced multiplatform journalist turned instead to photography and voice recordings to detail a man’s quest to establish a soccer academy and foundation for children in a shattered city.

Lim shared her experiences working as a multimedia journalist and offered coverage advice to a group of media professionals in her visual storytelling training session held on May 18 at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Visual storytelling was one of the topics discussed at JournCamp, a daylong workshop on digital journalism, sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists  and the Online News Association.

Though digital storytelling can be applied to virtually any aspect of journalism – Lim shared tips specifically for how to tell business stories with a visual eye. Here are her suggestions:

• Show the impact: If you are faced with the challenge of telling the story about a woman who lost her entire fortune because of a scandal, it’s best to simply show the viewers how the woman was impacted, Lim explained. For example: Lim once worked on a story with a similar focus and decided to shoot video footage of the woman’s grandiose home, including her large backyard, picket fence and swimming pool. Then she grabbed footage of where the woman was currently living – a small room in her daughter’s one-story house. Instead of simply stating how much this woman lost due to the scam, Lim detailed the lost with specific examples.
• Compare numbers to something people can relate to: If you are trying to emphasize a large amount of something, it may be more affective to compare the figure to another number, instead of bluntly stating the exact amount. For instance, you could say something like, “the damage caused the company to lose 350,000 gallons of oil, which could fill about 16 swimming pools,” instead of just saying, “the company lost 350,000 gallons of oil because of the damage.”

Gerald Loeb Award

Four previous Barlett & Steele Award winners are nominated for a 2012 Gerald Loeb Award, in addition to a Reynolds Center staff member and presenter.

The Loeb Awards, presented by the UCLA Anderson School of Management, honor distinguished business and financial journalism. The winners will be announced at an awards dinner on June 26 in New York City. Here’s the complete list of the Loeb finalists in all 13 categories.   

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Raquel Rutledge and Rick Barrett are finalists in the medium and small newspaper category for their series, “Shattered Trust.” Both reporters were recognized by the Reynolds Center in January for the same series, which revealed how a firm with a decade of serious regulatory violations of sanitary conditions was allowed to operate while the Food and Drug Administration failed to act. John Diedrich, Ben Poston and Mike de Sisti also contributed to the series, which won the 2011 Barlett & Steele Silver Award for Investigative Business Journalism.

Another reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, John Fauber, is a finalist in the Loeb’s beat reporting category for his coverage in “Side Effects.” He won a 2010 Barlett & Steele Silver Award for his stories “Side Effects: Money, Medicine and Patients,” which examined relationships between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry.

Brian Grow, who grabbed the 2008 Barrett & Steele Gold Award for his contribution to Businessweek’s “Prisoners of Debt,” is a finalist in the news service category. He is nominated with Reynolds Center Senior Online Producer Kelly Carr for their six-part series, “Shell Games.”  Reuters’ Laurence Fletcher, Nanette Byrnes, Matthew Bigg, Joshua Schneyer, Cynthia Johnston and Sara Ledwith also contributed to the series.

Reynolds Center presenter and New York Times contributing writer, Diana B. Henriques, is nominated in the business books category for  “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust.” Henriques will share her storytelling techniques in an Aug. 13 Reynolds Center Webinar, “Telling Great Stories Online.”  

Photo by iStock

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 uses others’ money to make high-priced loans.” They write:

“Newell’s ties to the broker offer a window into a culture of fraud in the hard money community in Nevada County. A Bee review of thousands of pages of court and regulatory filings shows that for more than 20 years, a number of hard money brokers have misused or stolen their investors’ money. Some brokers landed in prison; many investors lost their life savings.

Abuses typify the hard money industry. A Bee review of statewide data for the biggest 344 brokers operating around the peak of the real estate bubble found one out of every four has been accused of wrongdoing or sanctioned by the state Department of Real Estate in the past decade.”

The winners of the Loeb awards, which honor business journalism, will be announced next month. 

Today’s Tip: Make sure you have every record associated with real estate transactions, Charles says.

“It’s easy for your eyes to glaze over, but you have to be sure you’re getting everything because one missing document totally changes everything,” he says. “You have to be dogged and determined to find everything.”

Finding the properties linking hard-money brokers to investors and borrowers required connecting names and various types of transactions, Charles says. Because the real estate records weren’t easily comprehensible, they contacted about six real estate experts to interpret them. They created a guidebook for each transaction to be sure they’d collected all of the information.

Charles Piller

The story also relied on campaign contribution data, contractual agreements with investors, regulatory reports and information from the California Department of Real Estate. The final tally of pages was between 7,000 and 10,000, Charles says.

The reporters also benefited from getting the primary people involved to sit for an interview. Charles says getting the hard-money broker was the biggest challenge. He said no 10 times before finally consenting.

“It’s a rare story where you interview three of the principal characters and they’re all crying in the interview,” Charles says. “It’s never happened in my career before.”

The reporters coverage of hard-money lending prompted legislative changes.

In the day-to-day grind that is modern journalism – hour-to-hour for more than a few – we get caught up on various reporting or production habits that get us through a day, week or month.

However, these rituals – from what sources we use to how we frame our work – can at times nudge our work in the wrong direction. It’s easy to fall into various traps on the real estate beat – with its many facets and forces – if you’re not always mindful of your current and potential audiences.

Real estate is a volatile and cyclical business and everyone has some horse in the race. Photo: Paul Swansen

One harsh reality is that it’s a good bet that editors in your newsroom will see the slew of national real-estate reports and wonder “How does our market fare?”

Don’t fight this hassle too hard, rather, be prepared by (1) knowing the schedule of these major reports so you can plan; (2) knowing which reports contain local or regional data that can highlighted; (3) what local sources have similar data that can amplify – or question – these “widely watched” economic releases.

Don’t always insist on writing these “national” stories. Instead, offer an info box or insert of the local context. In many cases, national trends have little to do with what’s going on in your community.

Now this could get you in “trouble,” but remember you have an audience to serve, too. If you master basic coverage skills, you’ll have time for the far-better stuff.

KEEPING ON TRACK

Assuming your goal is to reach a broad-based crowd of followers, here’s a check list to keep you on track: 10 things a real-estate reporter can’t forget.

1. Your audience: Real estate is a very competitive industry with a lots of colorful and strong personalities that creates frequent internal friction. Resist the urge to cover too much of we might call “inside baseball” of these tussles. That may be great fodder for your sources, but some “industry” news is not interesting to the broader audience.

2. Renters count: Certainly much of real estate’s drama has been in the for-sale housing market, with prices soaring and collapsing. So consequently, apartment rents that don’t move as much seem less sexy, coverage wise. Don’t forget that 40% roughly of America lives in rentals – and numerous experts suggest that the apartment dweller crowd will grow in the coming years.

3. It’s a local business: Know your market. Have great local sources. That is more than being able to put national trends in context. It’s likely that market conditions – residential or commercial, ownership or rental – are not the same all around your community. What niches or neighborhoods are hot. Which ones are not?

4. Use English:Real estate is not brain surgery or rocket science. Still, the industry does have its share of complex and confusing lingo. Always try to keep your coverage simple. You don’t really have to say things like “loan facility” or “mezzanine financing” when you simply mean a commercial mortgage. If you must use lingo — please explain it to your readers.

Photo by Flickr user kaymoshusband

5. It’s a volatile and cyclical business: History likes to repeat itself. And real estate is a prime example. So whatever trends you’re covering, remember that nothing’s permanent. Push sources to provide historical context – especially when you’re writing about short-term trends. If nothing else, watch year-over-year and year-to-date trends as well as monthly data.

6. Real estate is aspirational: Homes or office towers and the like are not just assets to be bought and sold. It’s all not about some price index. People develop emotional ties to real estate, whether they own it or not. Keep eye-catching and thought-provoking properties in mind. The drama of real estate is why, for example, reality TV discovered housing is a hot topic.

7. There is no perfect indicator: There is no Dow Jones Industrial Average to be the wise indicator of all that is real estate. (And even Wall Street’s Dow Jones stock index has its faults.) No single measure exactly covers real estate market activity. Sure, the plethora of indexes can be confusing – but that’s your job: Explain the trends. Showing “conflicting signals” is not a crime.

8. Hate hyperbole: Real estate is an industry filled with strong-willed salespeople with a bad habit of overzealous use of superlatives – whether it be describing a property or a market trend. (Plus, they frame every tidbit as a reason to buy.) Be vigilant. Watch for insanely colorful portraits of properties. Try to keep boosterism to a minimum. No trend is a once-in-a-lifetime or sea-change moment.

9. Construction matters: Even after a horrific loss of jobs that drove building-industry employment nationwide to a 20-year low, roughly 1-in-25 Americans works in construction. While it’s often dirty, less-than glamorous work – trends in construction employment can be early signals of economic turns. Plenty of dynamic personalities dot construction trades, lumber yards and the like. And don’t forget the remodelers, too.

10. Conventional wisdom can be wrong: Just because something hasn’t happened before — or in three quarters in century — doesn’t mean it can’t happen. This recent real estate downturn broke many real estate “truths” — from wild swings in buying and lending patterns as household formation took a sudden turnabout. Bottom line: challenge industry norms and expect the unexpected.

Jonathan Lansner is The Orange County Register‘s business columnist and real estate blogger. Since 1986, he has covered the Orange County economy — and its real estate scene — as a reporter, editor and columnist for The Register. The “Lansner on Real Estate” blog was launched in March 2006.

Dear Reporter:

Congratulations on your new assignment. You’ve been assigned to a coverage area that can potentially touch everyone in your organization’s audience.

The real estate beat comes down to people. Photo by flicker user Fran53.

Real estate is often pigeon-holed in many news organizations as a niche beat. Depending on your news organization’s needs and desires, there’s great potential for real estate to be a newsroom leader in many markets. Face it, everybody needs a roof over their head – even local businesses. It’s your job to tell great tales of how the market for those roofs is evolving.

Don’t be afraid of the challenge. Rather, view “roofs” as a grand opportunity.

As a starting point, let’s look at the key constituencies you will likely serve and/or interact with to get the information you need to succeed. It’s an eclectic group – with changing opinions and tastes – so be prepared to have an ever-evolving database of sources.

This is also a beat where many sources create many reports tracking many of the intricacies of real-estate life. Yes, you better bone up on your math skills. But it also means there’s often a number to prove – or disprove – a given thesis. One of your goal is to make sure there’s a LOCAL number, too.

Let’s get busy.

HOMEOWNERS AND WANNABE HOMEOWNERS

It’s the American dream, but it’s oftly expensive. This prime audience relishes everything from market trends to news about property taxes to trends in home design and home repair to basic information about the process of buying and selling and how it may be changing. Don’t forget things like insurance and/or what the impact of new highways, flight patterns or shopping centers mean to local-home values. Yes, you find this audience can be myopic, often willing to tell you how your latest story doesn’t apply to your neighborhood. And sometimes they’re are actually correct. Treat them well, they will return the favor.

RENTERS

Not everyone owns, as roughly 40 percent of all American households are living in rental properties. Too much coverage ignores that. For example, falling home prices are often portrayed as bad. Well, don’t forget renters might want to buy at those “discounted” prices. Coverage opportunity with renters lies in the fact that rents and rent changes can vary widely by market. Yet it’s not easy to follow at the consumer level. Becoming an expert on how your rental market is moving can be vital information for renters looking for bargains. This group always needs fresh market trends. Remember, renters typically renew leases annually – and this demographic tends to move more frequently than homeowners.

REAL ESTATE AGENTS AND THEIR BROKERAGES

You can’t hide from the fact that the residential real-estate business is likely a major advertiser with your publication. If you didn’t know that, real estate agents will remind you – and think all your coverage should be “today is a great day to buy” positive. Once you can get past the natural friction, agents and brokerages can be great sources because they are in the trenches. You need them to know what’s going on the market. So fight the urge to scream and meet them on their turf – at their meetings and trade shows. Learn how they think and their quirky language. Eventually you’ll find real estate agents in your community willing to share truly valuable information. And it’s not because they’re looking to get their name out there. Rather, because they think a well-informed consumer is good for their business.

Start with lenders and people who handle transactions. This group can be subdivided into three categories:

• Employees of big banks and major lenders. They tend to work through traditional corporate methodology, so that means talking through public relations departments. Not that this information isn’t perfectly acceptable, it isn’t going to make a lot of exciting copy.
• Mortgage brokers: These are individuals and small entities helping consumers get home loans using various sources of funding. That breadth of view – and a willingness to talk frank to with good insight – offers opportunity to learn what’s going on the lender side as well as the borrower side.
• Professionals who help real-estate transactions get completed: In the private sector, jobs from real-estate attorneys and escrow agents to title company officials can get you interesting information about activity levels and deals in the works. Same can be said for government officials handling real estate bureaucracy, who also can keep you up-to-date about a key hot topic: property taxes.

CONSTRUCTION

Construction work helps drive the intriquing side of real estate. Photo by S and T Design

New homes may be a small slice of real estate, but it’s also one of the most intriguing. Homebuilders are in the business of selling homes. That’s somewhat different than a homeowner who’s trying to sell their own home. To succeed, builders have to be in touch with what consumers need and at what price. So often, new homes contain a good idea of what buyers’ wishes are — or at least what things people are willing to pay for. Plus, builders either directly or indirectly are big employers. Construction crews create from homes to streets to landscaping – plus all those new homes require suppliers concrete trucks, lumber yards, etc. Meet workers at ground level and it’s amazing how much you learn about the state of the real-estate economy.

BIG PROPERTY OWNERS

Commercial real estate stretches from apartments to office towers to shopping malls to factories, warehouses and self storage yards. Don’t be overwhelmed by the sheer scope of this niche. In many communities, commercial real estate brokerages handle many aspects of the business, buying, selling and leasing different types of properties. Obviously, the apartment niche has broad appeal, but don’t forget that office towers and shopping malls can make for great copy. Success or failure of office towers and shopping malls serves as an indicator of how your local economy is progressing. The companies and brands renting space – or leaving it — in local business parks and retail centers can broaden our audience as you report about evolving employment or shopping options.

GURUS

There’s really no such thing as a truly independent expert. Still, we’ll look at outside observers of real-estate markets in three distinct categories.

Academia: Good bet there’s a local university or college where professors track your local economy and its real estate. Their reports and commentary can be long-winded or esoteric, but the analysis is often based on long-term trends and forecasts.

Consultants: The real estate industry hires many outsiders to acquire fresh viewpoints. And these people like to get their names in the media. One edge consultants can have over academics is their constant contact with real estate industry insiders. One caveat to their comments: Remember who pays them.

Data crunchers: Real estate transaction creates oodles of paper trails – and numerous companies mining that data for analysis. To build their brands, these number crunchers frequently distribute the info for free – often along with analysis to help you interpret the trends. Frequently, this private data is better than government or industry-sponsored reports. Occasionally, the measures involved can be confusing.

SERENDIPITY

Not an audience or a source. Rather, a state of mind. Be prepared for the surprise. A star athlete or famous Hollywood type buying a home in your market — or losing one through foreclosure. A historic local home coming onto the market. A quirky design for a new home or an over-the-top remodeling job. A local apartment complex offering a dog washing spot.

Yes, real estate is important. Yes, these are serious times in the real estate industry. But it’s okay to have fun with real-estate story. Telling fun tales is a change of pace will serve your readers well. And may keep you sane.

Jonathan Lansner is The Orange County Register‘s business columnist and real estate blogger. Since 1986, he has covered the Orange County economy — and its real estate scene — as a reporter, editor and columnist for The Register. The “Lansner on Real Estate” blog was launched in March 2006. Jon is a New York City native, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and was the 2005-2006 president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. “Lansner on Real Estate” blog has won a “Best In Business” award from SABEW for work in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2011.

The passing of a bond issue will now enable this Colorado school district to build a new school. Photo: Denver Post

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. He writes:

“The Denver Post analyzed 15 successful Colorado bond campaigns backed by large contributions from investment banks. In every case, the bank that helped finance the campaign sold the bonds.

The Post found that individual school districts took as much as $137,500 from a single bond company, and that in six of the 15 campaigns, bond company donations amounted to a majority or nearly half of all contributions.

By comparison, no person can give more than $1,100 to a Colorado gubernatorial candidate, and corporate gifts to state candidates are forbidden.”

“This story could be told in a number of states, because I saw contributions to other states’ school bond campaigns from the same players,” David says.

Today’s Tips: Check campaign records to find connections between investment bank contributions and contracts.

For this story, David says he collected records from the Colorado secretary of state, which keeps campaign records that can be searched by contributor. He compared that information against bond issue data from the Municipal Services Rulemaking Board’s EMMA site. He says the bond’s official statement will provide the underwriting discount, or profit.

David Olinger

“Sometimes you can learn a lot by comparing information in two different databases,” David says. “The Bond Buyer had a very good story on this subject earlier this year, which found a perfect correlation between bond contributions and bond contracts in California school campaigns.”

The MSRB also collects data showing how much bond houses contribute to bond election campaigns, David says. He warns the data can be difficult to find.

Also check court records. David says a civil suit involving former Stifel Nicolaus political consultants who moved to Piper Jaffray “helped provide some insight into how these guys work.”

For more information about this free training by Main Justice, click the image above.

In the wake of Wal-mart’s alleged violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in Mexico,
Main Justice has pulled together some experts and is offering a free webinar to explain the FCPA.

Main Justice is a site run by Mary Jacoby, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Salon and the St. Petersburg Times among others. It covers insider news about the U.S. Department of Justice with a focus on white collar law enforcement.

The webinar, at 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday, May 24, is aimed at journalists or policy professionals and will be open to anyone who is interested. Registration is required: Registration details | More details about the webinar.

Organizers promise to cover:

The politics of the FCPA on Capitol Hill, why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce failed in its attempt to amend the law; primers on corporate prosecutions, deferred prosecution agreements, corporate monitors, and forensic accounting investigations; learning how the law works and understanding its global reach.

Panel members, who offer to be available as sources for reporters following the webinar, are:

Steven Tyrrell, partner at Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP
Former chief, U.S. Justice Department Criminal Division Fraud Section

Ellen Zimiles, managing director, Navigant Consulting Inc.
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York

Mary Jacoby, Editor-in-Chief of Main Justice
Former Wall Street Journal reporter

Again, registration is required and you can do that here: FCPA Training for Journalists and Policy Professionals

“An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an ‘unsafe environment’ after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor’s report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.

In a better economy, not as many people would line up for jobs that pay $11 or $12 an hour moving inventory through a hot warehouse. But with job openings scarce, Amazon and Integrity Staffing Solutions, the temporary employment firm that is hiring workers for Amazon, have found eager applicants in the swollen ranks of the unemployed.”

The story earned Spencer a spot among this year’s finalists for the Gerald Loeb awards that honor business journalism.

Today’s Tip: Don’t dismiss what people say about the workplace, Spencer says.

Spencer says he first got a tip about working conditions at Amazon after writing a story about the temporary staffing agency that helps Amazon recruit employees.

Spencer Soper

“The more we looked, the more we found,” Spencer says. “It wasn’t just a routine complaint about work, but a work environment that needed to be exposed.”

Corroboration from federal regulators and the emergency room doctor helped support the claims, he says.

The story notes the paper found 20 employees to talk about the workplace. Spencer says many people weren’t willing to talk because they still worked at the warehouse. But the stiff job market also made people wary of talking about the company – even anonymously – because they didn’t want to jeopardize their chances to find other jobs, he says.

For this story, Spencer says he found employees by calling people and visiting the warehouse. Last year, Mike Hudson offered additional tips on finding employees, including websites such as Ripoff Report.com, GlassDoor.com and Jobitorial.

By Amy Wilson

LEXINGTON, Ky. – What, exactly, do we cover that isn’t business ?

Linda Austin, executive director of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University, was explaining to a classroom full of journalists how business coverage has tremendous community impact and builds audience.

Then she turned it over to Miley Cyrus who, via YouTube, threw her hair and her hips around and asked, a la big hit, “Who’s Got Your Money Now?”

Indeed.

Austin asked the journalists gathered from Illinois, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky how much space, time and resources are devoted by their newspapers to business coverage.

The room seemed to universally recognize the gap. That’s why they were there at a Reynolds Center workshop on Uncovering the Best Local Business Stories.

With an assist from UK’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, the Reynolds’ Center and its associates took a day at the University of Kentucky to change that.

UNC Professor Chris Roush teaches at a Reynolds Center workshop at the University of Kentucky. Photo by Ralph Merkel.

A highlight of the day was Chris Roush, the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Scholar in business journalism at the University of North Carolina and the director of the Carolina Business News Initiative.

Roush pointed out that the U.S. has 22.9 million small businesses, which create 75 percent of the net new jobs to the economy and account for 99.7 percent of its employers. This sector represents more than half of the private work force, so news organizations neglect it at their peril.

Roush offered guidance on how to uncover public information on private companies:

• State records: Secretary of State offices have records of every business incorporated in their states, as well as every nonprofit and limited liability corporation. Search by company name, current officer or by registered agent. This will give you a listing of a business’ officers or executives, a mailing address and a phone number. Has a license expired? Check.

• Occupational licensing boards: Ranging from athletic trainers to teachers, these boards have websites where you can get information about businesses in these industries. You can see who is licensed and who is not.
• State occupational safety and health agencies conduct investigations of complaints made by workers of work-related accidents and deaths.
• Trade associations can give you industry-wide figures to put in context.

•  Federal records: Millions of companies register with the Small Business Administration. to get benefits or to qualify for contracts and business. Other resources include the Census Bureau, the regional Federal reserve banks, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which has detailed information about states and localities.

•  Banks may be federally regulated. Go to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for information.

•  Political records. Try www.followthemoney.org for contributions to federal candidates and committees. State agencies have information on state politics and lobbying. For federal lobbying, see  www.opensecrets.org/lobbyists/index.asp.

•  Hospitals are big business. Find financial information at www.ahd.com/freesearch.php3.

Roush urged the participants to work their business beats. “A knowledge of how to write business stories about private companies can be applied to any beat at a newspaper or any publication.” His final words were the most encouraging. “Good business writers are hard to find. Make a name for yourself writing business stories, and your career will take off.”

More resources on covering private companies:

• Video of Chris Roush’s lecture: Uncovering Public Information on Private Companies
• Chris Roush’s PowerPoint: Uncovering Public Information on Private Companies
• Self-guided training: Investigating Private Companies and Nonprofits
• Self-guided training: Cracking Private Companies

Amy Wilson works for the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which hosted this Reynolds Center workshop on April 13, 2012.

LEXINGTON, Ky. — The principles of covering business can also be applied to government, said John Cheves, investigative reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader. At a workshop presented by the Reynolds Center, he shared some of the proven tips for uncovering good stores in local government budgets, taxes and contracts:

•  Budgets: Follow the money. Get the records, data and numbers, and then ask your questions.  This leaves no room for non-answers and put-offs. Don’t apologize for asking. It’s our money. It’s helpful to use the “we” in your conversation, as in: “What did we buy with this money?”

John Cheves, Lexington Herald-Leader investigative reporter, teaches how to cover the business of government. Photo by Ralph Merkel.

Always get comparable data. Try for at least five years of past budget data. Look for what comparable-size cities spend or what the last guy in the job made.

Is spending is up or down? Always see who are the winners and losers.

How the biggest departments spending your money? What do outside agencies get? How much is debt service? Look at pools for discretionary spending – who has the discretion, and what is it paying for? How much comes from state and federal sources? How much is one-time spending on such things as land and projects? Don’t be shy in asking, “Is X (an employee, a piece of land, a service) worth Y?”

• Contracts:  Who are we paying to do what? Who approves? How and when? Is it really competitive bidding? Do we need this? At this price?
• Economic development: This is where government gets into bed with business. Cheves urged journalists to get the full terms of deals. What are we giving – tax breaks, tax refunds, grants or loans, worker training, land, buildings, roads? What are we getting? And do they add up? How much are we paying per job? What kind of jobs? What’s the big picture over time? Who wins, who loses, is it realistic?