The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. Add to that more than 3,000 tipsheets from our national conferences on how to cover specific beats or do specific stories and you have a resource that no reporter or editor should be without. These stories and tipsheets are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Logged-in members can view the tipsheets free online:
Search results for "donors" ...
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Analysis Tools at FollowTheMoney.org
Roth Barber highlights the many great tools at FollowTheMoney.org in this tipsheet. There's everything from an independent spending database to "A unique view of the top 10,000 donors to political campaigns at both the state and federal level—information that exists nowhere else."
Tags: campaign spending; donors; tracking the money; L-CAT; contributors
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Tracing Money In Federal Politics
Campbell details how to track federal campaign finance information. He identified the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as the "fountainheads of federal campaign data." Campbell gives an overview of the type of information available on these sites. And recommends searching the FEC site whenever you are backgrounding an individual.
Tags: campaign finance; federal elections; Federal Election Commission; FEC; Internal Revenue Service; IRS; backgrounding; money in politics; political contributions; campaign donations; donors
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Tracing Money in California Politics
Campbell details how to trace campaign finance information for the state of California, \"the ATM of national politics.\" The tipsheet aids in navigating information on the Secretary of State website, identifies the different ways you can search for candidates (since the 2000 primary), how to download the info into excel.
Tags: campaign finance; California; politics; donors; Secretary of State; money in politics; political contributions; campaign donations
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Campaigns and politics: Donors, expenditures and lobbyists
The combination of new laws and an increase in electronic filings leads to a whole new battlefield to negotiate when it comes to covering campaign finance. Willis explains how the new law changes coverage of this important area. He also gives out the differences between electronic filing data and FEC FTP data. There's lots more in this informative tipsheet.
Tags: CFIC; campaign finance; FEC; elections; contributions; electronic filings; FTP; data cleaning; legislation; campaigns; politics; donors; PACs; IRS
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Tracking campaign donors through City Hall
This tipsheet offers ideas how to get more knowledge about who is financing local campaigns in order to understand what is happening in local government or politics. Some pieces of advice are to create your own databases, join campaign finance listservs and run lists of contributors in the paper to evoke community sources' reactions.
Tags: elections; politics; Shays-Meehan bill; PACs; donors
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Legislative Reporting and CAR at Virginia Commonwealth University
This handout offers a few tips on how to identify the biggest donors to the state legislature, and how to match this information to the data on political spending. The tipsheet also explains how to create data on legislative gifts, and make it meaningful.
Tags: CAR; legislators; donations; ethics
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Campaign Finance Reporting: Humanizing the Story
Lynn Sweet provides five basic tips to help with campaign finance reporting.
Tags: fundraisers; donors; candidates; political organizations; campaign finance databases
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Campaign Finance in Local and State Government
This handout gives some ides for helping reporters convince candidates that "providing them with diskettes of their campaign donors is an expected part of running for office."
Tags: campaign finance; donors; money and politics
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Students mine political donations for stories
This tipsheet explains how Mr. South's legislative reporting class conducted a computer-assisted investigation, which assembled 42 stories and graphics that identified the biggest donors to the Virginia General Assembly.
Tags: campaign finance; investigative reporting; computer-assisted reporting
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Donors to McCall Campaign Got Pension Fund Contracts
This handout contains a story, complete with charts, about an L.A. investment firm that helped fund H. Carl McCall's re-election campaign.
Tags: campaign finance; H. Carl McCall