As soon as the campaign finance report for the City Council elections was released, five members of the public life beat started working on a web story.
We were interested in telling the citizens of Columbia who spent money on the candidates’ campaigns and why. Unlike many people think, that information is completely public.
For that said reason, and with the eagerness of building trust and transparency within our audience, we decided to post the raw documents too, so that people can see by themselves every penny invested in political campaigns.
As one of our editors likes to say in the newsroom, while writing a story we need to turn a cow into a steak, so that our readers can enjoy a nice, cooked meal instead of having an 1,800 pounds animal in their plate. For that, we decided to translate the numbers from a complex economic report to something everyone can easily understand.
This is how the story looked in the official website of the Columbia Missourian.
In my personal case, I interviewed three people: Art Jago, one of the candidates for First and Fifth ward seats on the Columbia City Council, and his two biggest contributors. I guess that the toughest part that first came up in the reporting process was to find the phone numbers of the people who were spending money in the campaign.
However, we were taught in our reporting lecture class a wide range of sources available to get contact information from citizens of Columbia. The Litofsky marriage, who contributed with $250 dollars, was the most important external contributor -Jago invested 92 percent of the total amount of money collected-. I later realized that Marybeth Litofsky is the treasurer of Jago’s candidacy, but my editor decided not to include it in the story.
I had trouble interviewing one of the contributors, who was annoyed by my late call (it was 6:30 PM in the evening), and thought it was totally inappropriate to call her, even though I explained why the citizens of Columbia might be interested in knowing what does Jago have that made her invest with $200.
She was the second biggest external contributor, and she encouraged me to call her in case she decided to spend $100,000. Unsurprisingly, she thought the information was private, which of course is not. We decided not to include her in the story since she didn’t add much, and we probably could save some angry calls.
Cabina Cero 