Many companies emit carbon dioxide in the course of their normal business. The amount emitted may differ — an airline or fossil fuel-based energy producer will emit much more carbon than a textile manufacturer.

To offset those emissions, some companies purchase carbon credits through brokers or exchanges. Those credits are meant to fund projects that reduce or capture pollutants.

Companies can also buy credits from project developers. Forestry projects are common, since trees capture carbon during photosynthesis. Projects might aim to preserve a swath of trees from destruction, or plant new ones. The forests saved or replenished can be anywhere in the world.

Companies buy carbon credits for various reasons. They are often the cornerstone of company public relations statements that they are carbon neutral, or they have “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions.

A big question for journalists investigating the growing voluntary carbon market is whether claims of carbon neutrality are true.

Companies don’t necessarily have to buy offsets to help the environment. They can reduce emissions produced by one part of their business to make up for other parts where they can’t reduce them.

But changing business processes to reduce emissions can be difficult.

That’s a big reason why offsets are so commonly used in carbon neutrality claims. According to a 2021 study of such pledges from 35 large global firms, 66% of them used carbon offsets.

Another wrinkle in carbon neutrality claims: Products companies make may produce pollutants when consumers or other businesses use them. In gas fuel production, for example, there is carbon emitted to refine gas, and carbon emitted to make the energy that powers the refinery.

Then there is the carbon emitted when someone burns the fuel to drive their car. For firms working in those industries, more than 90% of greenhouse gas emissions don’t come from the company itself, according to the 2021 study, from the Columbia Center on Sustainable Development.

The growing voluntary carbon market

Though many companies purchase carbon offsets voluntarily there are two U.S. states, California and Washington, which regulate their biggest polluters using market mechanisms. Most states in the northeastern U.S. have binding regulations that do the same, but they focus on energy producers.

The voluntary market, valued at about $2 billion in 2020, could be worth $250 billion by 2025, according to a 2023 research memo from investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Companies access vital information about offset markets through registries, which are usually nonprofits. Registries record credit ownership, for example. Registries also have protocols, or rules, on how projects measure their carbon reductions. Protocols are meant to ensure carbon offsetting projects produce the environmental benefits claimed.

While records in states that regulate carbon emissions are likely to be subject to public record laws, records for voluntary carbon offsets are not. But the major registries make some data public.

Another question for journalists to ask is whether a carbon-saving project would have happened anyway without carbon credits being purchased.

Did carbon credits save that forest? Or was that forest in no danger of being cut down?

A major challenge in reporting on carbon offsets is disparate sources offer data in various formats — registries may use different phrases to note that a carbon credit has been issued, for example.

Those differences make market-wide analyses difficult and time consuming.

OffsetsDB from CarbonPlan

Enter OffsetsDB, a navigable and standardized repository of carbon offset data from five of the biggest registries operating in the voluntary carbon offset market: American Carbon Registry, ART TREES, Climate Action Reserve, Gold Standard and Verra.

The free tool is updated daily and produced by CarbonPlan, a nonprofit open data organization focusing on climate change solutions. Anyone can download the data and access documentation for carbon offset projects around the world.

To help journalists understand the offset market and get to know OffsetsDB, we recently hosted an hourlong webinar featuring Grayson Badgley, a research scientist at CarbonPlan, and longtime science journalist Maggie Koerth, editorial lead at CarbonPlan.

“I really genuinely believe that at the core of just about every single project there’s this nugget of truth,” Badgley said during the webinar. “There is this good thing that is happening. The real question is, is it being credited appropriately?”

Watch the video to learn more — and read four takeaways from the presentation and conversation.

1. Know these key terms before digging into offset data.

There are lots of specialized words and phrases in the world of carbon offsets.

Here are a few you need to know.

Additionality: This refers to whether a carbon-saving or carbon-reducing project funded by carbon credits is adding environmental benefits that couldn’t have existed without the credits.

Credit: A credit is a financial instrument that represents carbon-removing activities. Credits are often created by projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere, such as reforestation, or prevent it from reaching the atmosphere, such as landfills that capture and burn methane.

“Many [companies] buy credits,” Koerth said. “And that is, somebody else does the carbon removing activity and then sells the company the right to claim that removed carbon.”

Offsets: Credits become offsets when a company or other entity makes a claim, such as carbon neutrality, based on the credits they’ve purchased. The company is claiming that their carbon emitting activities are offset by the credits.

“The terms credit and offset are kind of used interchangeably because the majority of credits are ultimately used to make offsetting claims,” Koerth said.

Registry: A registry is an organization, typically a nonprofit, that tracks carbon credit markets, including the buying and selling, issuance and retirement of carbon credits.

“[Registries] keep a record of all the credits produced by a project when they’re sold, when the sold credits have officially been used,” Koerth said. “Basically, this whole system of the registries exists so that the same credits can’t be sold multiple times to different people.”

Issuance: When a credit has been created, registered, and a registry confirms it exists, the registry issues the credit.

Purchase: When a credit is bought, typically by companies seeking to offset their carbon-producing activities. While credit issuances and retirements are publicly available, purchase information is usually not public.

Retirement: When the buyer of a credit declares they have used the credit and put it toward an offsetting goal, the credit is retired. Retired credits can’t be used again.

Vintage: This is the year a carbon credit was created.

Carbon neutral or net zero: These are claims companies make that their carbon emissions are balanced, for example, by buying credits. Say a small coal plant emits 900 million metric tons of carbon each year. It then buys credits equaling 900 million metric tons in carbon offsetting activities. On net, the coal plant claims to be neutral in their emissions.

There are many more phrases to know in the world of carbon offsets. The U.K.-based news organization Carbon Brief offers an extensive glossary.

2. Understand additionality.

Additionality is a big word with a big question behind it: Would a carbon sequestration or reduction project have happened anyway without funding from carbon credits?

Journalists need a basic understanding of additionality, a crucial concept that carbon offset projects use to justify their existence.

“In practice, determining whether a proposed project is additional requires comparing it to a hypothetical scenario without revenue from the sale of carbon credits,” according to this explainer on additionality from the nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute.

In other words, is the sale of carbon credits adding environmental benefits by funding a carbon offsetting project that could not have happened without that funding?

“A lot of this is based around both trying to see what you have done and trying to estimate what would have happened if you hadn’t done that thing,” Koerth said during the webinar.

As Badgley and Freya Chay write in a 2023 analysis for CarbonPlan, “Rather than creating new climate benefits, non-additional credits simply reward a landowner for doing what they already planned on doing.”

While there are no hard and fast rules for determining whether a project is adding carbon benefits, journalists and others can use data in OffsetsDB to identify projects that potentially are not.

Think of a hypothetical landfill. Landfills produce methane, which scientists consider a worse air pollutant than carbon dioxide. But when methane is burned, it turns into carbon dioxide. So the landfill burns methane and receives carbon credits it can sell on the offset market because the carbon it is emitting is not as bad for the environment as methane.

Badgley and Chay recently analyzed 14 such carbon offset landfill projects. If a landfill stops receiving carbon credits to sell, the methane burns at those landfills should drop off or stop — if those projects are adding environmental benefits that wouldn’t be possible without the credits.

That’s not what Badgley and Chay found.

“By comparing crediting data from the Climate Action Reserve with landfill gas collection data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, we found that nearly 50 percent of the credits issued under this protocol are likely non-additional,” they write. “These credits do not represent high-quality outcomes for the climate.”

For example, the Resource Recovery Landfill project in Cherryvale, Kansas, received credits from 2006 to 2011 for its gas collection operations, including burning methane, according to the analysis.

In 2012, those credits stopped — the landfill didn’t file paperwork to keep them going, Badgley and Chay found. But the gas collection continued. Crediting began again in 2022. During those 10 years, the landfill’s gas collection didn’t disappear or slow down. It expanded, according to the analysis.

“To be clear, the fact that Resource Recovery’s gas collection system ran continuously is a good thing for the planet,” write Badgley and Chay. “In addition to reducing methane emissions, collecting and treating landfill gas can help reduce smells and other environmental side effects associated with operating a landfill. But offsets must be used to spur new climate action — not just reward existing actions.”

(CarbonPlan)

3. Know that parts of the carbon offset market aren’t disclosed in public registry data — but this information may exist elsewhere.

Offset credit purchases, for example, are not usually public information. Other transaction details are also missing in public data.

For example, OffsetsDB shows that Jaiprakash Hydro Power in India has issued 16.7 million credits and retired nearly 9 million since 2010.

But which entities bought and retired those credits is potentially unavailable.

Sometimes, companies will voluntarily disclose to registries that they have purchased or are retiring credits.

But that doesn’t always happen.

Company sustainability reports are one place to look for information on how many credits a company has retired, and why, Badgley said. A company might, for example, purchase carbon credits to offset executive travel and publicly disclose that for public relations purposes.

“What we’re hoping to do with OffsetsDB is start to pull in a lot of that information,” Badgley said, adding that it’s a manual process of gathering supplementary knowledge from places like sustainability reports and news articles. This appears as a timeline for individual carbon offset projects within the database.

(CarbonPlan)

Recent legislation passed in California requires that any company marketing or selling carbon credits in the state, or any company buying or selling credits, disclose much more information online.

This includes the type of offset project, where the project is located, whether a third party has verified the project, and more. (But it’s unclear when the law will take effect and how it will be enforced, Politico reports.)

“This is something that we’re really excited about,” Badgley said. “And we’re hoping to be able to sort of pull that paperwork and pull that information into OffsetsDB.”

4. Ask about registry buffer pools.

What happens when a carbon-emitting company buys credits from, say, a forestry project in northern California that later is subsumed by wildfire? The registry that issued the credits will likely dip into its buffer pool to make up for the loss.

A buffer pool is a sort of rainy day fund, made up of carbon credits reserved for emergencies. Usually a carbon offsetting project can’t sell all its credits, but has to put a fraction of them into the registry’s buffer pool, Badgley said.

While the practice “makes total sense,” Badley said, it also raises questions. What types of credits are in the buffer pool? Do replacement credits represent similar offsetting projects to the original ones?

Here’s a relevant question for journalists to ask of registries: “Is this buffer pool that this program is administering, is it designed to make good on the liabilities of the program for the next X years?” Badgley said.

Further reading

Another Forest Offset Project is Burning — If You Know Where to Look
Grayson Badgley. CarbonPlan, July 2024.

The First Offset Credits Approved by a Major Integrity Program Don’t Make the Grade
Grayson Badgley and Freya Chay. CarbonPlan, July 2024.

Reporter’s Guide to Investigating Carbon Offsets
Global Investigative Journalism Network. Toby McIntosh, March 2024.

Instead of Carbon Offsets, We Need ‘Contributions’ to Forests
Libby Blanchard, William R.L. Anderegg and Barbara K. Haya. Stanford Social Innovation Review, January 2024.

What Every Leader Needs to Know About Carbon Credits
Varsha Ramesh Walsh and Michael W. Toffel. Harvard Business Review, December 2023.

Glossary: Carbon Brief’s Guide to the Terminology of Carbon Offsets
Daisy Dunne and Josh Gabbatiss. Carbon Brief, September 2023.

In-Depth Q&A: Can ‘Carbon Offsets’ Help to Tackle Climate Change?
Josh Gabbatiss, et. al. Carbon Brief, September 2023.

Action Needed to Make Carbon Offsets From Forest Conservation Work for Climate Change Mitigation
Thales West, et. al. Science, August 2023.

The Voluntary Carbon Market: Climate Finance at an Inflection PointBriefing Paper. World Economic Forum, January 2023.

Corporate Net-Zero Pledges: The Bad and the Ugly
Jack Arnold and Perrine Toledano. Columbia Center on Sustainable Development, November 2021.

The post Carbon offsets: 4 things journalists need to understand appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Competition for audience attention is fierce in this era of infinite scroll, with a seemingly endless array of information sources for readers to filter.

But new research in Science Advances suggests editors and reporters can get more readers to click their stories using this strategy: Write simple headlines.

Based on more than 30,000 experiments conducted by the Washington Post and Upworthy, the finding is an important reminder for news organizations. Past research suggests mainstream news outlets tend to use more complex wording than hyper-partisan outlets, which use shorter sentences and less formal language.

“Extreme news has already gotten the memo,” says Todd Rogers, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

But headline preference can be in the eye of the beholder. In fact, the authors find in follow-up surveys that professional journalists do not favor simple headlines, “suggesting that those writing the news may read it differently from those consuming it,” the authors write. This in contrast to past research indicating that other professionals, such as lawyers, prefer simple writing.

Here’s how Rogers and co-authors — Hillary Shulman, an associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University and David Markowitz, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University — assess headline complexity:

• Whether the headline includes common words.
• Use (or not) of a formal, complex, analytic style.
• Readability, which accounts for words per sentence and syllables per word.
• Overall character count.

To measure common words and analytic writing the authors used statistical software called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. For readability and character count, they used text analysis packages in the statistical programming interface R.

The study doesn’t offer rules for headlines, such as writing at a particular reading grade level or staying below a certain character count.

But Rogers says the findings suggest a rule of thumb for journalists to consider: If you’re choosing between two headlines, where both make sense, are accurate and otherwise equal, choose the less complex one.

In the newsroom, gauging simplicity can be subjective. Rogers recommends journalists choose words that are shorter, more common and that they aim for simple grammatical construction when writing headlines.

Thousands of headline tests at the Washington Post and Upworthy

Readers may not be aware that the headlines they see on a news website could be different from what another reader sees. News outlets often test headlines to gauge which one audiences prefer. These are called A/B tests — a portion of site visitors get headline A, others get headline B.

The authors obtained all headline tests the Washington Post ran from March 3, 2021 to December 18, 2022. In total, they analyzed nearly 20,000 headlines, the popularity of which was determined by the click-through rate, or the percentage of people who clicked on that headline.

Some of the Washington Post headline tests included three or four headlines for a single story. Regardless of the content of the headline, the authors’ analysis links simpler headlines with higher click rates.

While Rogers notes that “the effect is not gigantic” he says crafting simpler headlines “will disproportionately help those who are not doing it, which is the non-extremist news.”

The authors note in the paper that because of the large size of the Washington Post’s readership, even a small percentage bump in click rates could mean tens of thousands more reads.

And simple headlines are not necessarily shorter, the research finds. While using common words, an informal style and better readability were associated with higher click rates, character count was not.

For example, this Washington Post headline, about Oprah Winfrey’s March 2021 interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, has 14 words:

“Meghan and Harry are talking to Oprah. Here’s why they shouldn’t say too much.”

The authors’ analysis finds it is less complex than this 13-word version:

“Are Meghan and Harry spilling royal tea to Oprah? Don’t bet on it.”

The authors did the same analysis with headline tests from Upworthy conducted January 2013 to April 2015 across more than 105,000 headlines.

The conclusion was the same.

“Thousands of field experiments across traditional (i.e., The Washington Post) and nontraditional news sites (i.e., Upworthy) showed that news readers are more likely to click on and engage with simple headlines than complex ones,” the authors write.

Audiences and journalists see headlines differently

In two follow-up surveys the authors aimed to explore whether the results of the headline tests held up in a controlled setting and whether professional news makers also prefer simple headlines.

In early May 2023, the authors recruited 524 people from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and assessed whether they more closely read simple or complex headlines. Participants were roughly equally split between men and women, with about 77% identifying as white, 11% Black, 7% Asian, 1% American Indian or Alaska Native and 3% multiracial.

They were shown 10 headlines and asked to pick one they’d click on a news site.

Within that set, participants saw four “target” and six “control” headlines. The target headlines were either simple or complex. All participants saw the same control headlines.

Participants were split into two treatment groups: either four simple or four complex headlines. Those who saw simple headlines picked one of them 34.8% of the time, compared with 15.3% for control headlines.

But when participants got the complex headlines, they picked one of them 22.2% of the time, compared with 27.7% for the controls.

Participants were also presented with a three-word phrase and asked to recall whether the phrase had appeared in the headlines. They were more likely to recognize the three-word phrase within simpler headlines.

“[T]he finding that readers engage less deeply with complex writing has important practical implications,” the authors write. “Specifically, writing simply can help news creators increase audience engagement even for stories that are themselves complicated.”

For the second survey, 249 participants were recruited from a September 2023 webinar about strategies for people writing for busy readers, which Rogers led and The Journalist’s Resource presented.

All participants identified as professional writers and most were current or former journalists with about 14 years of experience, on average. They were presented with the same headlines and asked the same questions as participants in the other survey.

The authors write that the findings of this survey represented a “notable departure” from the other findings. The writers and journalists surveyed did not prefer simpler headlines over complex ones, and they were much better at recalling whether the three-word phrase appeared in both simple and complex headlines.

“They’re not deterred by cognitive complexity,” Rogers says. “They don’t have the same intuitions or experiences reading as normal news readers.”

That, Rogers adds, is a main takeaway for journalists: Be aware that your experience and your audiences’ experience when interpreting headlines may be leagues apart — and lean into simplicity.

The post Readers of online news prefer simple headlines, research suggests. Journalists? Not so much. appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Threats against poll workers made national news following false claims from former President Donald Trump and supporters that Joe Biden had fraudulently won the 2020 presidential election.

For example, in Georgia “two local election workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss were pressured to make false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election,” write the authors of a 2022 essay on local political violence, published in the State and Local Government Review. “After refusing to lie, a far-right media outlet spread conspiracies about the two women that resulted in a mob surrounding their house.”

In April 2024, a federal judge upheld a $148 million judgment for Freeman and Moss from a civil case against former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who admitted to making false claims about the poll workers.

Poll workers perform fundamental tasks in democratic societies, ensuring citizens can safely and freely cast their ballots for measures and candidates, often working long hours on Election Day for low pay.

More than 900,000 poll workers staffed early voting sites and Election Day polling places during the 2016 national elections in the U.S., according to the federal Election Assistance Commission. That number dipped to about 775,000 for 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed in-person voting.    

Poll workers are often temporary government employees hired to help on Election Day, though they almost always undergo training beforehand. They greet voters, remind them of their voting district, verify their eligibility, help them use voting equipment, assist voters with disabilities and register voters in states that allow same-day registration, among other tasks.

While poll worker job titles vary by election district, districts may hire a clerk in charge of overall operations on Election Day along with assistant clerks, equipment operators, inspectors who verify that voters are registered, and deputies who greet voters.

Pay varies by election administration jurisdictions, which usually align with county boundaries. In Miami-Dade County, for example, poll workers are paid between $200 and $346 including training, pre-election setup and Election Day duties.

Most poll workers in New York City get $250 for Election Day and are expected to work from 5 a.m. to after 9 p.m., when polls close. In rural Coffee County, Alabama, Election Day pay maxes out at $185.

Election officials, by contrast, are government employees who work on Election Day but also during the rest of the year to prepare for and administer elections.

Journalists can reach out to election officials or visit election office websites to find poll worker duties and job titles. The nonpartisan U.S. Vote Foundation offers this election official directory by state.

Poll worker intimidation and threats

Poll workers are often motivated by civic duty, according to research and reporting featured in the tipsheet below. Despite their commitment to democracy, poll workers have recently been increasingly concerned about threats and violence while doing their jobs.

More than one-third of election officials — 38% — have experienced “threats, harassment, or abuse” specifically because of their job, finds a 2024 survey of 928 local election officials conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

That’s up from 30% who reported the same the year prior. More than half of the officials surveyed in 2024 by the Brennan Center said they are worried about the safety of their staff in future elections and 92% have enacted measures to protect voters and poll workers since 2020.

Some 28% indicated they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about harassment or threats aimed at their family or loved ones while 27% were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about being assaulted at home or work.

Looking to November

The 2024 presidential race is poised to be a rematch between Trump and Biden.

The ongoing potential for threats to poll workers and election officials is real enough that the U.S. Department of Justice has launched a task force to address those threats.

But some election officials don’t think the task force is doing enough. National Association of State Election Directors Executive Director Amy Cohen in June told reporter Zachary Roth with the nonprofit Oregon Capital Chronicle that it is “very clear that we are not seeing a deterrent effect.”

At the same time, threats do not always come to the attention of police — 45% of local election officials surveyed by the Brennan Center who reported being threatened did not file a report to law enforcement.

We put together this tipsheet, mostly based on recent academic research, to bolster your coverage of threats and violence against election workers in advance of Election Day 2024.

1. Understand the social forces that tend to lead to political violence.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow with the nonpartisan think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, identifies four risk factors for political violence in an October 2021 paper in the Journal of Democracy. Kleinfeld defines political violence broadly as “physical harm or intimidation that affects who benefits from or can participate fully in political, economic, or sociocultural life.”

To identify social and political situations that increase the risk for political violence, she draws from examples of political violence abroad, such as anti-Muslim attacks during the political rise of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the early 2000s.

The risk factors, according to Kleinfeld, are:

• A contested election with high stakes for the balance of power. “For much of U.S. history, one party held legislative power for decades,” Kleinfeld writes. “Yet since 1980, a shift in control of at least one house of Congress was possible — and since 2010, elections have seen a level of competition not seen since Reconstruction.”
• Partisanship based on broad groups. “Up to the 1990s, many Americans belonged to multiple identity groups –for example, a union member might have been a conservative, religious, Southern man who nevertheless voted Democratic,” Kleinfeld writes. “Today, Americans have sorted themselves into two broad identity groups: Democrats tend to live in cities, are more likely to be minorities, women, and religiously unaffiliated, and are trending liberal. Republicans generally live in rural areas or exurbs and are more likely to be white, male, Christian, and conservative.”
• Election rules, such as winner-take-all, that let candidates exploit partisanship. “Winner-take-all elections are particularly prone to violence, possibly because small numbers of voters can shift outcomes,” Kleinfeld writes. “Two-party systems are also more correlated with violence than are multiparty systems, perhaps because they create us-them dynamics that deepen polarization.”
• A lack of institutional checks on political violence. “The United States suffers from three particularly concerning institutional weaknesses today — the challenge of adjudicating disputes between the executive and legislative branches inherent in presidential majoritarian systems, recent legal decisions enhancing the electoral power of state legislatures, and the politicization of law enforcement and the courts,” Kleinfeld writes.

Kleinfeld concludes: “Although political violence in the United States is on the rise, it is still lower than in many other countries. Once violence begins, however, it fuels itself. Far from making people turn away in horror, political violence in the present is the greatest factor normalizing it for the future.”

2. Know that a small but notable segment of the U.S. population thinks political violence is sometimes justified.

To capture a snapshot of Americans’ views of political violence, nine scholars affiliated with the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, conducted a nationally representative survey with 8,620 participants during the summer of 2022. Results were published in September 2023 in the journal Injury Epidemiology.  

Nearly 20% of those surveyed strongly or very strongly agreed that having a “strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.” About 14% strongly or very strongly agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.” And nearly 8% reported that in the future they would be very or extremely likely to be “armed with a gun” in a situation where political violence is justified.

The researchers define political violence as “the use of physical force or violence to advance political objectives.” When they asked participants to imagine a scenario in which they believed political violence was justified “to advance an important political objective,” nearly 22% responded that political violence is never justified.

But, given the same scenario, 4.5% responded that they would be sometimes, very or completely willing to use violence against a poll worker and 6.1% reported the same for using force or violence against an elected local official.

The authors estimate 8 million adults in the U.S. think violence in general can be justified to make political gains, though they emphasize caution since their survey is small compared with the overall population. 

“Our extrapolations also suggest that millions of Americans would be very or completely willing to engage in violence themselves to advance a political objective that they support; between 5 and 6 million people would threaten or intimidate someone, injure them, or kill them,” the authors write.

3. Remind audiences of the long history of electoral violence in the U.S.

While recent violence and threats toward poll workers may seem startling to audiences, they should be made aware of the long history of electoral violence in the U.S.

For example, Black politicians faced violent attacks from white individuals and mobs following the Civil War. This violence formed the foundation for Jim Crow laws that segregated public facilities for white and Black Americans and sharply curtailed Black voting rights for generations.

“The pursuit of legalized voter suppression by Southern Democrats only became possible once violence had been successful enough to put Democrats back in power, Southern state governments (re)developed electoral institutions, and national Republicans abandoned black voters,” write the authors of a March 2019 paper in Perspectives on Politics.

Before and after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s outlawed Jim Crow era segregation, Black voters attempting to register in the south faced physical threats and violence, including from white individuals, mobs and law enforcement.

“Sporadic violence to discourage black political participation persisted as late as the 1960s and lynching continued to be a tool to limit black civil rights, repress black labor, reinforce white racial solidarity, and punish blacks for alleged crimes for many years,” write the authors of the Perspectives on Politics paper.

4. Interview poll workers about what motivates them.

Despite sometimes facing threats to their safety, many poll workers remain resilient in their commitment to facilitating free and fair elections in the U.S. In reviewing recent research, the authors of a chapter in a 2024 book on lessons learned from the 2020 presidential race, published by academic press Springer Link, relay that civic duty and social engagement are top motivators for poll workers.

The authors also conduct their own survey on what motivates poll workers — specifically, 1,729 poll workers in Miami-Dade County during early 2021. Those surveyed were most motivated by being part of the democratic process, performing their civic duty or wanting “to make a difference.”

They were least motivated by financial considerations, such as making some extra money, a finding that tracks with a quarter of participants being retired and despite large job losses at the time stemming from COVID-19 business closures.

But, the authors note, returning poll workers were more interested in pay than first-time poll workers, suggesting that “financial motivations may be less important for recruitment of new poll workers but may become increasingly important for retaining poll workers from election to election.”

The poll workers in Miami motivated by a sense of civic duty are not alone. For example, a poll worker near Seattle received an envelope of white powder while counting mail-in ballots during November 2023. But the elected official in charge told Stateline reporter Matt Vasilogambros that after the fire department arrived, “everybody marched right into that building, and said, ‘Oh, heck no, you are not disrupting the democratic process.’”

5. Understand how election officials try to manage the emotional burden of intimidation, for themselves and their staff.

Poll workers are often steadfast in their commitment to the democratic process, but intimidation and violence can take an emotional toll on them.

Experts and journalists who have researched and worked with trauma survivors say trauma-informed journalism is a good way to tell better, more accurate stories and help protect survivors from further harm.

“Most election workers come to the job with a strong sense of patriotism and pride in their work,” write the authors of a November 2022 article in the journal Administration and Society. “The enthusiasm election workers have for their job is crucial to maintaining trust in the system and creating a connection with the citizen-customer.”

For many citizens, the voting experience and interactions with poll workers “can shape voter perceptions of the government in a broader sense,” the authors write. For poll workers, greeting citizens in a friendly way and doing their best to ensure a smooth voting experience is part of what the authors call “emotional labor,” borrowing a phrase from past research.

For example, the burden of emotional labor might be high for a poll worker who is tired at the end of a long Election Day but is still expected to be helpful and courteous to voters.

The authors of the Administration and Society article identify three ways election administrators have recently tried to relieve or limit the emotional labor of poll workers in the face of violence or violent threats. Some are leaning into more public outreach, while others are making their election offices and workers less accessible to the public.

• Administrative strategies “focus on changes to the way the job is done to avoid burnout from emotional labor,” the authors write. This may include administrators investing in public education campaigns and offering tours of poll sites to build trust with voters they serve. Strategies may also include establishing election associations for officials to share best practices for combating misinformation and ensuring poll worker safety.
• Security strategies “may encompass tactics to protect and manage any direct and indirect attack or threat,” the authors write. Some election officials have put bulletproof glass in their offices and have decreased public outreach. Training for some poll workers now includes “deeper security instructions and quick ways to contact the main election office in the case of incidents.”
• Personal protective strategies, such as those used by the city clerk of Detroit, who “took firearms training and now carries a concealed weapon after receiving threats, including one outside of her home,” the authors write. Other officials, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have requested more police presence at polling places and election offices following threats.

6. Note the difference between poll watchers and poll workers.

Poll workers and poll watchers sound similar but they’re very different. While poll workers are employed by election administration offices, poll watchers, sometimes called “election observers,” are members of the public or partisan groups interested in observing parts of the Election Day process.

States have different rules for people interested in observing voting. In certain jurisdictions they may be able to arrive early to polling sites and verify that voting machines are empty of ballots, watch election officials testing voting machines and other routine but important parts of setting up on Election Day.

Poll watchers are often members of partisan groups or political parties that may favor or oppose certain candidates or ballot measures. Election administration agencies may offer guides detailing poll watcher rights and rules.

They generally are allowed only to ensure that the voting process appears fair. No one watching an election may disrupt the process. States also restrict electioneering — trying to influence voters by handing out pamphlets or partisan apparel, for example — near polling sites.

But poll watchers too have a fraught history. During Reconstruction and again during the 1950s and 1960s, poll watchers intimated racial minorities attempting to exercise their right to register and vote. More recently, before the 2020 presidential election, Trump called on supporters to volunteer as poll watchers and “watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” none of which happened.

Other resources

Academic

Georgetown University Law Center | What to do if armed groups are near polling or registration places

MIT Election Data + Science Lab | Opting Out? Recent Challenges in Recruiting and Retaining Poll Workers

Election Law Journal | What Do We Actually Know About Poll Worker Recruitment in the United States?

Federal government

U.S. Department of Justice | Public Integrity Section annual reports

U.S. Election Assistance Commission | Election Administration and Voting Survey reports | Election Official Security

Nonprofit

Brookings Institution | The Americans on the front lines of elections

U.S. Vote Foundation | Election Official Directory

National Association of State Election Directors | State voter information

National Association of Election Officials | Board of Directors

News coverage

NBC News | Election worker turnover has reached historic highs ahead of the 2024 vote, new data shows

Oregon Capital Chronicle | Election workers worry that federal threats task force isn’t enough to keep them safe

Stateline | In face of threats, election workers vow: ‘You are not disrupting the democratic process’

The New York Times | Election Workers Face Flood of Threats, but Charges Are Few

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Over the past two years dozens of newsrooms around the world have crafted policies and guidelines on how their editorial staff can or should — or cannot or should not — use artificial intelligence tools.

Those documents are tacit acknowledgement that AI, particularly generative AI like chatbots that can produce images and news stories at a keystroke, may fundamentally change how journalists do their work and how the public thinks about journalism.

Generative AI tools are based on large language models, which are trained on huge amounts of existing digital text often pulled from the web. Several news organizations are suing generative AI maker OpenAI for copyright infringement over the use of their news stories to train AI chatbots. Meanwhile, The Atlantic and Vox Media have signed licensing deals allowing OpenAI access to their archives.

Despite the litigation, some news organizations have used generative AI to create news stories, including the Associated Press for simple coverage of company earnings reports and college basketball game previews.

But others that have dabbled in AI-generated content have faced scrutiny for publishing confusing or misleading information, and the utility of generative AI in journalism is not obvious to everyone.

“The reality is that AI models can often prepare a decent first draft,” Julia Angwin, longtime tech reporter and newsroom leader, wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed. “But I find that when I use AI, I have to spend almost as much time correcting and revising its output as it would have taken me to do the work myself.”

To gain insight on what the future of AI and journalism might look like — and where the industry’s biggest challenges are — I reached out to Angwin, who has reported for The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica and in 2020 launched the award-winning nonprofit newsroom The Markup, which, among other things, covered recent AI developments.

In early 2023 Angwin left The Markup and founded Proof News, a nonprofit news outlet that uses the scientific method to guide its investigations. Angwin is also a 2023-2024 Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

Social media creators and trust in news

During her time at the Shorenstein Center, Angwin interviewed a panel of social media creators to find out what journalists can learn from how creators and influencers share information and build trust with audiences. This summer, Angwin will publish a discussion paper on the findings.

One important way social media creators build trust is by directly engaging with their audiences, she found.

At the same time, some news organizations have turned away from direct audience engagement online.

“Newsrooms have, for all sorts of legitimate reasons, turned off the comments section because it’s hard to moderate,” Angwin says. “It also does mean that there’s a feeling from the audience that traditional news is less accountable, that it’s less responsive.”

AI in journalism

Angwin is not optimistic that generative AI will be useful to journalists, though AI tools are “totally legit and accepted” for reporting that includes statistical analysis, she says. But Angwin points to several concerns for the future, including that the use of copyrighted content to train generative AI systems could disincentivize journalists from doing important work.

Here are a few other highlights from our conversation about journalistic trust and the future of AI in journalism:

• The news business isn’t ready. Competing in an information ecosystem with generative AI that creates plausible sounding (but sometimes untrue) text is a new frontier for news organizations, which will have to be even more attentive in showing audiences the evidence behind their reporting.
• To gain trust, journalists need to acknowledge what they don’t know. It’s OK for journalists not to know everything about a topic they’re covering or story they’re pursuing. In published work, be upfront with audiences about what you know and areas you’re still reporting.   
• When covering AI tools, be specific. Journalists covering AI topics need to know the types of AI tools out there — for example, generative versus statistical versus facial recognition. It’s important to clearly explain in your coverage which technology you are talking about.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Clark Merrefield: Some commentators have said AI is going to fundamentally change the internet. At this point it would be impossible to disentangle journalism and the internet. How would you characterize this moment, where AI is here and being used in some newsrooms? Is journalism ready?

Julia Angwin: Definitely I’d say we’re not ready. What we’re not ready for is the fact that there are basically these machines out there that can create plausible sounding text that has no relationship to the truth.

AI is inherently not about facts and accuracy. You’ll see that in the tiny disclaimer at the bottom of ChatGPT or any of those tools. They are about word associations. So for a profession that writes words that are meant to be factual, all of a sudden you’re competing in the marketplace — essentially, the marketplace of information — with all these words that sound plausible, look plausible and have no relationship to accuracy.

There’s two ways to look at it. One is we could all drown in the sea of plausible sounding text and lose trust in everything. Another scenario is maybe there will be a flight to quality and people will actually choose to go back to these mainstream legacy brand names and be like, “I only trust it if I saw it, you know, in the Washington Post.”

I suspect it’s not going to be really clear whether it’s either — it’s going to be a mix. In an industry that’s already under a lot of pressure financially — and, actually, just societally because of the lack of trust in news.

[AI] adds another layer of challenge to this already challenging business.

CM: In a recent investigation you found AI chatbots did a poor job responding to basic questions from voters, like where and when to vote. What sorts of concerns do you have about human journalists who are pressed for time — they’re on deadline, they’re doing a thousand things — passing along inaccurate, AI-generated content to audiences?

JA: Our first big investigation [at Proof News] was testing the accuracy of the leading AI models when it came to questions that voters might ask. Most of those questions were about logistics. Where should I vote? Am I eligible? What are the rules? When is the deadline for registration? Can I vote by text?

Or, in one ZIP code, it said there’s no place for you to vote, which is obviously not true.

Llama, the Meta [AI] model, had this whole thing, like, here’s how you vote by text: There’s a service in California called Vote by Text and here’s how you register for it. And it had all these details that sounded really like, “Oh, my gosh! Maybe there is a vote-by-text service!”

There is not! There is no way to vote by text!

Having experts involved made it easier to really be clear about what was accurate and what was not. The ones I’ve described were pretty clearly inaccurate, but there were a lot of edge cases where I would have probably been like, “Oh, it seems good,” and the election officials were like, “No.”

You kind of already have to know the facts in order to police them. I think that is the challenge about using [AI] in the newsroom. If you already knew the answer, then maybe you should have just written the sentence yourself. And if you didn’t, it might look really plausible, and you might be tempted to rely on it. So I worry about the use of these tools in newsrooms.

CM: And this is generative AI we’re talking about, right?

JA: Yes, and I would like to say that there is a real difference between generative AI and other types of AI. I use other types of AI all the time, like in data analysis — decision trees and regressions. And there’s a lot of statistical techniques that sort of technically qualify as AI and are totally legit and accepted.

Generative AI is just a special category and made of writing text, creating voice, creating images, where it’s about creation of something that humans used to only be able to create. And that is where I think we have a special category of risk.

CM: If you go to one of these AI chatbots and ask, “What time do I need to go vote and where do I vote?” it’s not actually searching for an answer to those questions, it’s just using the corpus of words that it’s based on to create an answer, right?

JA: Exactly. Most of these models are trained on data sets that might have data up until 2021 or 2022, and it’s 2024 right now. Things like polling places can change every election. It might be at the local school one year, and then it’s going to be at city hall the next year. There’s a lot of fluidity to things.

We were hoping that the models would say, “Actually, that’s not something I can answer because my data is old and you should go do a search, or you should go to this county elections office.” Some of the models did do that. ChatGPT did it more consistently than the rest. But, surprisingly, none of them really did it that consistently despite some of the companies having made promises that they were going to redirect those types of queries to trusted sources.

The problem is that these models, as you described them, they’re just these giant troves of data basically designed to do this are-these-words-next-to-each-other thing. When they rely on old data, either they were pulling up old polling places or they’re making up addresses. It was actually like they made up URLs. They just kind of cobbled together stuff that looked similar and made up things a lot of the time.

CM: You write in your founder’s letter for Proof News that the scientific method is your guide. Does AI fit in at all into the journalism that Proof News is doing and will do?

JA: The scientific method is my best answer to try to move on from the debate in journalism about objectivity. Objectivity has been the lodestar for journalism for a long time, and there’s a lot of legitimate reasons that people wanted to have a feeling of fairness and neutrality in the journalism that they’re reading.

Yet it has sort of devolved into what I think Wesley Lowry best describes as a performative exercise about whether you, as an individual reporter, have biases. The reality is we all have biases. So I find the scientific method is a really helpful answer to that conundrum because it’s all about the rigor of your processes.

Basically, are your processes rigorous enough to overcome the inherent bias that you have as a human? That’s why I like it. It’s about setting up rigorous processes.

Proof is an attempt to make that aspect the centerpiece. Using the scientific method and being data driven and trying to build large sample sizes when we can so that we have more robust results will mean we will do data analysis with statistical tools that will qualify as AI, for sure. There’s no question that will be in our future, and I’ve done that many times in the past.

I think that is fine — as I think it’s important to disclose those things. But those tools are well accepted in academia and research. Whenever I use tools like that, I always go to experts in the field, statisticians, to review my work before publishing. I feel comfortable with the use of that type of AI.

I do not expect to be using generative AI [at Proof News]. I just don’t see a reason why we would do it. Some of the coders that we work with, sometimes they use some sort of AI copilot to check their work to see if there’s a way to enhance it. And that, I think, is OK because you’re still writing the code yourself. But I don’t expect to ever be writing a headline or a story using generative AI.

CM: What is a realistic fear now that we’re adding AI to the mix of media that exists on the internet?

JA: Generative AI companies, which are all for-profit companies, are scraping the internet and grabbing everything, whether or not it is truly publicly available to them.

I am very concerned about the disincentive that gives for people to contribute to what we call the public square. There’s so many wonderful places on the internet, like Wikipedia, even Reddit, where people share information in good faith. The fact that there’s a whole bunch of for-profit companies hoovering up that information and then trying to monetize it themselves, I think that’s a real disincentive for people to participate in those public squares. And I think that makes a worse internet for everyone.

As a journalist, I want to contribute my work to the public. I don’t want it to be behind a paywall. Proof is licensed by Creative Commons, so anyone can use that information. That is the best model, in my opinion. And yet, it makes you pause. Like, “Oh, OK, I’m going to do all this work and then they’re going to make money off of it?” And then I’m essentially an unpaid worker for these AI companies.

CM: You’re a big advocate of showing your work as a journalist. When AI is added to that mix, does that imperative become even more critical? Does it change at all?

JA: It becomes even more urgent to show your work when you’re competing with a black box that creates plausible text but doesn’t show how it got that text.

Trust is declining — not just in journalistic institutions but in government, in corporations. We are in an era of distrust. This is where I take lessons from the [social media] creators because they don’t assume anyone trusts them. They just start with the evidence. They say, here’s my evidence and put it on camera. We have to get to a level of elevating all the evidence, and being really, really clear with our audiences.

CM: That’s interesting to go down to the story level, because that’s fundamentally what journalism is supposed to be about. The New York Times of the world built their reputation on the trust of their stories and also can lose it based on that, too.

JA: A lot of savvy readers have favorite reporters who they trust. They might not trust the whole institution, but they trust a certain reporter. That’s very similar to the creator economy where people have certain creators they trust, some they don’t.

We’re wired as humans to be careful and choose with our trust. I guess it’s not that natural to have trust in that whole institution. I don’t feel like it’s a winnable battle, at least not for me, to rebuild trust in giant journalistic institutions. But I do think there’s a way to build trust in the journalistic process. And so I want expose that process, make that process as rigorous as possible and be really honest with the audience.

And what that means, by the way, is be really honest about what you don’t know. There’s a lot of false certainty in journalism. Our headlines can be overly declarative. We tend to try to push our lead sentences to the max. What is the most declarative thing we can say? And that is driven a little bit by the demands of clickbait and engagement.

But that overdetermination also alienates the audience when they realize that there’s some nuance. One of the big pieces of our ingredients label is the limitations. What do we not know? What data would we need to make a better determination? And that’s where you go back to science, where everything is iterative — like, the idea is there’s no perfect truth. We’re all just trying to move towards it, right? And so we build on each other’s work. And then we admit that we need someone to build on ours, too.

CM: Any final thoughts or words of caution as we enter this brave new world of generative AI and journalism, and how newsrooms should be thinking about this?

JA: I would like it if journalists could work a little harder to distinguish different types of AI. The reality is there are so many kinds of AI. There’s the AI that is used in facial recognition, which is matching photos against known databases, and that’s a probability of a match.

There’s then the generative AI, which is the probability of how close words are to each other. There’s statistical AI, which is about predicting how a regression is trying to fit a line to a data set and see if there’s a pattern.

Right now everything is conflated into AI generally. It’s a little bit like talking about all vehicles as transportation. The reality is a train is really different than a truck, which is really different than a passenger car, which is really different than a bicycle. That’s kind of the range we have for AI, too. As we move forward journalists should start to distinguish a little bit more about those differences.

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Sports venue construction in the U.S. tends to happen in waves, roughly every three decades. Sports economists suggest another wave is happening now, with numerous proposed or approved venue construction projects around the country seeking or having secured public dollars, from Tennessee to Wisconsin to Nevada to Florida.  

Professional sports owners often justify asks of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars for new or revamped stadiums with estimates of huge economic returns for communities. It’s important that journalists covering these projects understand how public dollars are raised to pay for them and how to interrogate economic impact claims that teams produce.

Across the four biggest sports leagues in the U.S. — Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League — there have been eight new venues built since 2020 at a total construction cost of roughly $3.3 billion, according to a September 2023 paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. About $750 million in public funds went toward those construction projects, not including bond interest, the paper finds.

Research conducted over decades indicates these investments almost never lead to massive economic gains for host cities. Legislators have since pushed the recent public contribution figure even higher. This includes $500 million to renovate the Milwaukee Brewers ballpark, more than $1 billion in bonds toward a new stadium for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans and $380 million for a new ballpark for the A’s, which are poised to move from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2028.

We recently published two pieces on public financing of sports venues: A research-based primer and research roundup and a short tipsheet for covering the topic.

To give journalists an even stronger foundation for their coverage of sports venue financing, The Journalist’s Resource co-hosted an hourlong webinar May 16 with Econofact, a nonpartisan, online publication out of The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

I co-moderated the panel discussion with Michael Klein, the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at Tufts and founder and executive editor of Econofact. The panelists were:

• Andrew Zimbalist, the Robert A. Woods Professor Emeritus of Economics at Smith College.
• Victor Matheson, a professor of economics and accounting at the College of the Holy Cross who specializes in sports economics.
• Alan Snel, the publisher of LVSportsBiz.com, a news outlet that covers the convergence of sports, business, stadiums and politics.

One takeaway: There are numerous examples of professional sports franchises that built their venues with little or no public investment.

“We have the Golden State Warriors playing in an entirely privately financed stadium in San Francisco,” Matheson said during the webinar. “We have SoFi stadium in [Los Angeles], almost entirely privately financed there, and that’s about a $5 billion stadium. I think one of the most important things to take from this hour is that public financing is not required.”

Here are 7 key tips from the webinar.

1. Ask these three questions about economic impact estimates. If team officials can’t explain their numbers, don’t report them.

Who commissioned the study?

“If it is a study that is paid for by the league or the team, that is not an economic impact study,” Matheson said. “That is a press release.”

Can I see a copy of the study?

While teams or municipalities may or may not release lengthy economic impact reports, public officials and journalists sometimes cite big number estimates from teams without scrutiny of the underlying analysis.

“You would be amazed by how many people say, ‘There is a study that says [the economic impact] is a billion dollars,” Matheson said. “But you can never get your hands on that study.”

What do economists think?

“Call an economist,” Matheson said. “You can find lots of us. Whatever your local jurisdiction is, there’s a sports economist there who teaches in your state or your local region who understands these issues who has a good local feel. Most of us have a good national feel as well.” 

If team representatives can’t justify estimates of economic growth, or show than an independent analysis exists, don’t report those estimates.

“The big problem with these gigantic economic impact numbers is that the methodology is not explained,” said Snel.

He noted that LVSportsBiz will not publish economic impact estimates unless team officials explain how they did their analysis. 

2. Note that when people spend money at a sports venue and nearby businesses, this often means they don’t spend that money elsewhere.

A new or revamped sports venue tends to shift economic activity, not create new spending, economic research shows.

Interview an economist or two to help explain to audiences how this works. The basic idea is that spending shifts within communities, or from one community to another. The underlying reason has to do with household budgeting.

“Most of the money spent at a sports facility is money that is part of people’s leisure budgets, and they have a certain amount of money that they can spend on various kinds of leisure,” Zimbalist said. “When they spend $200 or $500 taking their family to the ballpark, that’s $200 or $500 they don’t have to spend at the local bowling alley, at a local theater, at a local restaurant. That’s money being displaced, from spending in one part of the city to spending in another, and the net impact can be very close to zero.”

3. Ask hotel owners and rental car firms how they incorporate tax rate changes into their pricing. If public money is raised through hotel and rental car taxes, proponents may claim the tax burden will fall on tourists. But local businesses and franchises may bear some of the burden, too.

Tourists do not necessarily pay hotel and rental car taxes. Why? Because of something called tax incidence, which is how the burden of a tax is divided among consumer and producer — essentially, who pays the tax and at what proportion.

“It’s not always the person who buys the product who pays the tax,” Matheson said. “It can also be the person who sells the product.”

When legislators increase a hotel tax or pass a new one, hotel owners typically respond by adjusting their pricing in one of three ways:

• Raise prices and pass on the entire cost of the tax to consumers. That can hurt their ability to compete for convention and tourism business, Matheson said.
• Hold prices steady and pay the tax burden entirely, reducing profits.
• Some combination, where they pass some of the cost of the tax to consumers and eat the rest.

The same goes for rental car taxes, another sales tax commonly used to help finance stadiums. Local economic conditions will determine how the tax burden shakes out. In extremely competitive markets, businesses may be able to pass on the entire cost to consumers. Point is, it’s important to ask hotel owners and rental car firms how they incorporate tax rate changes into their pricing.

While officials may claim visitor taxes are a way to pass the cost to out-of-towners, the authors of the September 2023 paper note that local people also rent cars. And residents with lower incomes are more likely to use extended stay hotels and potentially have to pay the higher taxes.

4. Don’t forget that team owners stand to benefit most from these projects.

Teams seeking public financing naturally focus public statements on their estimates of community benefits, typically in the form of jobs created and consumer spending.

But team owners, by far, have the most to gain.

“The bottom line is, it’s the pro teams that are garnering the benefits of the revenues from the stadiums,” Snel said. He recommended journalists also report on how new or improved stadiums affect team valuations.

He pointed to the National Football League’s Raiders, which moved from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020. The team was valued at $2.2 billion in 2019. That figure nearly tripled to $6.2 billion by the end of 2023.

There are a variety of reasons for the increase, Snel reports, including TV deals that generate tens of billions of dollars yearly across the NFL, and the sale of the Washington Commanders in 2023 for more than $6 billion, which set the market for premium franchises. But according to Forbes, $1.4 billion of the team’s current value is tied to the stadium itself, which was heavily subsidized with public dollars.

5. Learn about “leakage” and how it can affect economic impact estimates.

When people spend money at local businesses, there is less of what economists call “leakage” than when people spend with mega corporations like sports franchises.

This means every dollar spent at a local café has a better chance of staying within the local economy than money spent at a sporting event, which tends to “leak” out of the economy and into the savings accounts of team owners. The café owner, by contrast, uses revenue to, for example, pay staff, who also live and spend in the community, or for laundry services provided by another local businesses, or any number of other things.

“The proprietor of the local restaurant or bowling alley or theater tends to have a more moderate income and tends to live almost 100% of the year in that town,” Zimbalist said. “When you spend money at the restaurant, it tends to circulate and stay in the town more. When you spend money at a ballpark, it’s going to millionaires and billionaires. They generally don’t live in the town year-round.”

This ties back into those economic impact estimates. They’ll sometimes include a simple multiplier equation, suggesting money spent at sporting events “multiplies,” or circulates within the local economy, just like spending at the local café.

But sporting event spending tends to have less chance of staying in the local economy, compared with other types of entertainment spending.

Zimbalist explained that team owners “generally have much, much higher savings rates, so they take the money and they put it into the world’s money markets and the money doesn’t stay in the town for these and other reasons. So the leakages are much, much greater and, therefore, the multiplier, the sports multiplier, is much lower than a typical entertainment multiplier.”

6. Keep track of lease deals. When they expire, teams may come asking for more public money.

When covering a city that has a major professional sports franchise, or several of them, review lease agreements to figure out when team owners might ask taxpayers for help revamping their venue, or building a new one.

The National Sports Law Institute of Marquette University Law School has obtained dozens of lease agreements for professional baseball and football franchises, most of them from the 1990s and early 2000s.

The institute has summarized these agreements, available here. The summaries detail, among other things, the yearly rent the franchise owes the municipality, which may be set below market rates. They outline how much the public contributed toward sports venue construction and how much came from the team, along with whether the team or municipality is responsible for regular operating expenses and repairs.

“We had this huge wave of stadium construction in 1992,” Matheson said. “Most of those stadiums are associated with a 30-year lease deal. And because of that, these teams are tied to the stadiums for 30 years, which means that they really can’t start asking for a new stadium, start asking for new public subsidies, until those lease deals expire. But as soon as those lease deals expire, all of the bargaining power shifts to the teams and away from the taxpayer.”

7. If you don’t have time to do a deep dive, at least include these two “boilerplate necessities” in your reporting.

Journalists may not have time to do a deep investigation into how public money is being used to finance sports venue construction or renovation — especially broadcast journalists, who might only have a minute or two to cover a lot of ground.

Snel recommends reporters at least include these two “boilerplate necessities” in their coverage.

• Report the principal and interest on debt. If public money is raised through bonds, tell audiences about the interest on the principal that the city, county or state will have to repay. For example, Clark County, Nevada, took on debt of $750 million toward building the Raiders’ stadium. With interest, that number will grow over the next quarter century. The final tally will actually be north of $1.3 billion, Snel recently reported.
• Remind your audience that economic activity related to sporting events by and large goes back to team owners. “The beneficiaries are the teams,” Snel said. “They’re garnering the lion’s share of all the revenues.”

The post Public financing of sports venues: 7 reporting tips from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Former Congressman Tip O’Neill famously said “all politics is local.”

The same applies to election administration in the U.S., which is markedly decentralized. On Election Day, county- and city-level poll workers are the people who make sure voters can smoothly cast their ballots for measures and candidates vying for offices spanning all levels of government.

But this fundamental democratic function isn’t free, and election administrators often say they have a lot to do on limited budgets, research shows. State and local governments — not the federal government — are usually responsible for election administration costs.

Some of the biggest ongoing costs are related to statewide voter registration rolls, which can cost millions of dollars a year to build and maintain, according to to a 2022 report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart III.

Costs associated with individual elections include staffing, supplies for polling places and postage for mail-in ballots. Local election agencies have to pay for return postage in 19 states, plus Washington, D.C., but the U.S. Postal Service will typically deliver any ballot that lacks enough postage, billing the appropriate election agency later, according to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.

Longer-term costs include upgrading equipment such as scanners that process paper ballots.

Nearly 80% of voters used paper-and-scanner technology during the 2020 election. Most of the remaining voters used direct-recording electronic machines. With those devices, voters use touch screens or push buttons to record their votes digitally, which may or may not include a paper trail.

Nationally, equipment costs would run $100 million to $300 million yearly if each scanner were replaced at the end of its useful life, around ten years, according to the MIT report. As of 2022, the voting equipment used in 24 states was over a decade old, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

“Election officials are used to ‘making do’ with what they have,” Stewart writes. “They often express pride in pulling off the complicated logistical maneuvers necessary to conduct elections on a shoestring budget.”

Revenue from sales and property taxes are one major source of funding for elections, according to the 2022 MIT report. While federal grants have sporadically been available since 2002, “there is no ongoing federal mechanism for funding the general expenses of administering elections,” according to a September 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service.

The question of who pays to run elections gained national news attention during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were, for example, sudden additional costs related to widespread mail-in voting and personal protective equipment for election workers and volunteers.

And there’s not solely government money involved.

For the 2020 election cycle, “private individuals funded grant programs for state and local election administration that were particularly notable in their scale and sources,” according to the CRS report.

Philanthropist Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Meta, were the leading donors, committing up to $419.5 million for election administration, including for personal protective equipment.

That commitment was roughly 20% of one estimate of the typical cost of administering elections across the U.S. and about half the $825 million Congress appropriated for state and local election administration in 2020. (That federal appropriation was atypically large due to the pandemic-era challenges — by comparison, Congress appropriated nothing for state and local elections during the 2016 cycle, according to the CRS report.)

A raft of misinformation about the Chan-Zuckerberg funding followed President Joe Biden’s November 2020 win over former President Donald Trump. At the same time, Republican state legislators and conservative groups pushed to remove private dollars from election administration.

There are now 28 states that limit, regulate or prohibit private or charitable funding for elections, according to the NCSL. In 2020, the electoral votes from 22 of those states went to Trump while five went to Biden. Nebraska, which allocates its electoral votes differently from nearly every other state and often splits its electoral votes, sent one to Biden and four to Trump in 2020.

All legislation related to private funding of elections has been passed since 2020, according to the NCSL.

With the new legislation and a variety of election financing systems across the country, it can be confusing to know where to begin to help audiences understand how their elections are funded. These research-based tips will give you a solid base for reporting on election administration funding in your coverage area.

1. Get to know state rules on how localities can finance elections.

Start with this list, compiled by the NCSL, of states that have passed laws about private funding of elections. Note whether your state prohibits all private funding, or limits such funding in some cases.

Alabama, for example, prohibits state and local election officials from soliciting or accepting “any donation in the form of money, grants, property, or personal services from an individual or a nongovernmental entity for the purpose of funding election-related expenses or voter education, voter outreach, or voter registration programs.”

But Alabama election officials can accept a donation of physical space for voting provided by private entities, such as a brick-and-mortar business donating its store for use as a polling place. If there is a state public health emergency, election officials in that state can accept “the donation of items for the preservation or protection of the public health.”

In South Carolina, by contrast, state and county election agencies cannot accept “gifts, donations, or funding from private individuals, corporations, partnerships, trusts, or any third party not provided through ordinary state or county appropriations,” without exceptions. And in Texas, local election officials cannot accept financial contributions over $1,000 without written notice from the secretary of state, who must first obtain unanimous approval from key state leaders, including the governor.

2. Ask election officials if they have enough funding. If not, how much do they need and for what?

Legal scholars have described adequate election funding as a fundamental pillar of the right to vote. “Unlike most other rights, the right to vote relies on governments to build, fund, and administer elections systems,” write law professors Joshua Sellers and Justin Weinstein-Tull in a 2021 New York University Law Review article. “This obligation is not ancillary to the right to vote; it is foundational to it.”

Ask local election officials if they have enough funding for 2024. If not, how much do they think they need and what specific outcomes would additional funding help achieve? What tradeoffs would there be — would more funding for elections mean less funding for other needs?

While election administrators will likely say they would gladly take more funding, there is scant research that provides points of comparison to assess outcomes of increased funding — for example, whether election agencies serving similar constituencies do their jobs differently depending on funding levels.

3. Don’t assume localities with high tax revenues spend more on election administration.

Recent research has focused on parsing the local costs of elections. In a 2021 Vanderbilt Law Review article, Sellers and law professor Roger Michalski seek to correct what they call the “shamefully inadequate amount of information about how much our elections cost.”

Sellers and Michalski use a “novel and painstakingly hand-coded dataset,” on election costs at the local and state levels from 2010 to 2017 across four states that make up nearly one-third of the national population: California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Part of the challenge in analyzing election spending data across and within states is that agencies record their election-related expenses differently. The authors found that some agencies provide detailed expenditures down to the cost of postage, while others more broadly record costs.

They do not find connections between election funding and demographic factors such as race, poverty and educational attainment.

“Election spending in majority-minority communities seems largely indistinguishable from spending in predominantly white communities,” Sellers and Michalski write. “In short, basic assumptions one might have about resource allocation are brought into question.”

Sellers and Michalski also estimate that election spending in the four states is typically in the range of $4.50 to $8.50 per capita. This is in line with other research, including a 2018 data collection project on elections held in more than half of states from 2009 to 2016, led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That research estimates an average U.S. cost per voter of $8 per election, but substantial variation across states, with costs as high as $15 per voter in Florida and as low as $2 per voter in Michigan.

Sellers and Michalski also find wide variation in election spending. For example, in California many cities “spend less than a dollar per person per year on election expenditures, while others spend many multiples more,” they write. Those findings hold for the other states in the study, and, generally, wealthier cities do not necessarily spend more per capita to administer elections than cities with lower tax revenues.

Spending tends to be higher in areas where governments overlap: “In many places, municipalities and counties work in concert to organize, run, and fund elections,” Sellers and Michalski write.

Election administration spending can vary even within counties. Someone living in a large city that is part of a county with sprawling suburbs might take part in elections funded at both the city and county levels, while a suburban voter might only have elections funded by the county.

4. Explain why election administration funding matters.

One big reason funding matters: Election officials need to be able to purchase technology and ballot designs that accurately records voters’ choices.

For example, the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was notably affected by punch card ballots, with so-called “hanging chads” making voter intentions unclear and directly leading to the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which provided federal funding to upgrade local voting systems.

Scholars who study elections use something called the residual vote rate to measure the relative ability of election agencies to perform their fundamental task of recording voter intentions. As Stewart writes in a 2018 MIT Election Lab blog post, “the number of residual votes is usually calculated by taking the number of people who turned out and subtracting the number of votes cast for candidates.”

In other words, a residual vote is when a ballot is cast that includes votes for some but not all races on the ballot. The authors of a 2020 paper in the Public Administration Review explore residual vote rates in North Carolina by dividing the number of ballots cast in presidential election years from 1996 to 2012 by the number of votes for president.

Presidential ballots often also include races for local or state offices, and ballot measures. For example, a residual vote would be counted when a ballot includes a vote for a senate race and a ballot measure, but is missing a vote for president.

“Though some proportion of residual votes might be the choice of the voter (some people choose not to vote for particular offices), scholarship revealed that residual votes were systematically related to the type of voting equipment and ballot design,” the authors write.

Sufficient funding generally allows people running and working for organizations to develop expertise and “provide for better technology and assistance,” the authors write, citing past research. The authors further explain in the paper that “the residual vote rate is an important managerial outcome of election administration.”

Although the authors analyze only one state, they note that, over time, they are able to explore residual voting in the same local administration organizations, which differ in their ability to run elections but have the same funding mechanisms.

“We find that both managerial capacity and better technology significantly reduce the residual vote rate as would be predicted by theory and literature,” the authors conclude.

5. Know that the health of the U.S. economy may affect election administration spending.

Research has found that how the broader economy is doing can affect spending on election administration.

A 2020 paper in American Politics Research examines county-level spending on elections from 2005 to 2016 in Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina and Ohio. This timeframe overlapped with the Great Recession, which began in late 2007 and ended in mid-2009. The authors note they chose those states based primarily on the availability of detailed financial data for county election offices.

During and after the recession, election-related spending in these states fell sharply, and stayed lower than before the recession, even as the economy slowly began to recover.

“Unfortunately, just because democracy may need significant funds to conduct an election, it does not always mean that election administrators have sufficient resources,” the authors conclude.

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When sports franchises want a new or revamped stadium, they often turn to taxpayers for help with financing. For example, in June 2023, Nevada legislators approved $380 million in public funding for a 30,000-seat ballpark for the Oakland A’s, who are expected to make the move to Las Vegas in 2028.

Proponents estimate the A’s stadium in Las Vegas will create thousands of jobs and have an annual economic impact of $1.3 billion — more on that in the video below.

But economic research for decades has found that, by and large, the fiscal returns for residents — in the form of increased economic activity and job growth — are far smaller than public expenditures, which have recently approached or exceeded half a billion dollars per stadium.

Learn about the research in our companion explainer and research roundup.

Journalists should look closely at the political context around these major financial commitments, and question estimated fiscal returns. This is not just a topic for sports or business journalists covering major professional teams — even minor league teams have meant financial hardship for towns that took on debt to attract them. Here are 4 tips to help you get started in your reporting.

1. Interrogate economic impact statements or fiscal estimates from franchise owners.

Teams often produce economic impact statements or fiscal estimates claiming that building new stadiums or revamping existing ones will result in a fiscal and jobs boom for a city or region.

What assumptions do these economic impact statements or fiscal estimates make? Do they fully explain how they arrived at their numbers? If not, will the team publicly provide those behind-the-scenes details? Know that franchises may not make their analyses public.

For example, reporter Jon Styf at digital news outlet The Center Square obtained a two-page document showing economic impact estimates from the state of nearly $1 billion per year from a proposed retail and housing development around a new stadium for the National Football League’s Tennessee Titans.

The document also included economic impact estimates of around half a billion dollars from other cities hosting major events, such as the Super Bowl. Styf reached out to economists to find out whether those estimates were reasonable — the economists questioned their credibility.

In short, avoid reporting team-published estimates at face value. Run them by an economist or two who study this topic. Reach out to the North American Association of Sports Economists for help finding experts. FieldofSchemes, a blog run by journalist Neil deMause that covers sports economics, is another place to look for informed perspectives on economic impact estimates.

2. Know that public financing for a sports stadium can happen either through a legislature or through a direct decision by voters.

The Las Vegas funding happened via lawmakers, for example.

While Kansas City voters in April 2024 voted down public funds for a new stadium for MLB’s Royals, 7 in 10 voters in Oklahoma City who cast ballots in December 2023 said yes to $900 million for a new arena for the NBA’s Thunder. (Dozens of local economists had urged Oklahoma Cityans to reject the measure.)

Public votes may go either way, and can be influenced by campaigns from local groups in favor or opposed — but the legislative pathway is almost always successful, says Kennesaw State University economist John Charles Bradbury.

3. Understand how states and localities finance stadium construction.

These may include municipal bonds or taxes, such as sales taxes, sin taxes on things like alcohol and tobacco, and visitor taxes on hotels and rental cars.

Officials may claim visitor taxes are a way to pass the cost to out-of-towners. As Bradbury and co-authors note in a September 2023 paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, local people also rent cars. And residents with lower incomes are more likely to use extended stay hotels and have to pay the higher taxes.

Hotel owners may also draw lower revenues as they reduce pre-tax prices in order to retain customers — or, they may raise prices, passing the tax to customers but deterring future bookings.

4. Scrutinize smaller localities issuing bonds for minor or major league stadiums.

Pearl, Mississippi, issued tens of millions of dollars in bonds to build a new ballpark for an Atlanta Braves minor league affiliate in the early 2000s.

But, due to lack of attendance and lower economic impact than boosters estimated, the city had trouble paying the debt.

Credit agencies reduced the city’s bonds to junk.

(They’ve since rebounded.)

Bonus viewing: Healthy journalistic skepticism of economic impact claims

Alan Snel, publisher of LVSportsBiz.com, expressed healthy journalistic skepticism about economic impact numbers from sports franchises on the Dec. 29, 2023 edition of public affairs show Nevada Week, which is produced by Vegas PBS.

Host Amber Renee Dixon asked Snel about economic impact estimates for a new ballpark for the A’s that representatives from economic advisory firm Applied Analysis had presented to state lawmakers.

“They said they expect a $1.3 billion economic impact per year from the stadium and generating about $17 million in total tax revenue each year,” Renee Dixon said. “Those numbers don’t sit well with you. Why is that?”

Snel explained those estimates were “based on certain expectations” about attendance. He then said he had recently interviewed Michael Crome, Chief Financial Officer of the Las Vegas Raiders, which moved from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020. “And they came out with a press release saying that the stadium and the visitorship, thanks to the Raiders events and also the stadium events, generated $2.29 billion,” Snel said. “That’s nearly $2.3 billion in revenue.”

Snel continued, “And I said to the Raiders, if you want to sit down and explain the math, we will report that. And I think that’s responsible journalism. But just putting these broad, general multibillion dollar figures out there without explaining the math is just — it’s just not an accurate portrait of what’s going on.”

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In June 2023, Nevada legislators approved $380 million in public funding for a 30,000-seat ballpark for the Oakland A’s, who are expected to throw their first pitch in Las Vegas in 2028 after Major League Baseball owners approved the franchise move in November.

It’s the latest public commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars for a professional sports stadium. In the U.S., most franchises in the four major sports leagues — MLB, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League — are valued at over $1 billion.

Across those leagues there have been eight new stadiums or arenas built since 2020, at a total construction cost of roughly $3.3 billion, according to a September 2023 paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. About $750 million in public funds went toward those construction projects, the paper finds.

When government dollars are allocated it’s usually through a legislature passing a law, or by public vote. Voters in Kansas City, for example, in April 2024 widely rejected a sales tax bump to pay for a new downtown stadium for MLB’s Royals.

“I like to say that you can fit a majority of the city council in the owner’s box but you can’t fit a majority of the electorate,” says Kennesaw State University economist John Charles Bradbury.

The approved public funding in Las Vegas represents about one quarter of the total cost of the planned stadium, pegged at $1.5 billion. Proponents estimate the A’s stadium in Las Vegas will create thousands of jobs and have an annual economic impact of $1.3 billion, news outlets have reported.

Economic research for decades has found that, by and large, the fiscal returns for residents — in the form of increased economic activity and job growth — are far smaller than public expenditures, which have recently approached or exceeded half a billion dollars per stadium.

This primer will help journalists understand the history of public financing for stadium construction and empower them to use academic research to interrogate claims that these projects mean big bucks for communities.

The research also finds:

• Journalists often report figures from press releases and economic impact statements without questioning the assumptions of those analyses.
• Of the dozens of stadiums built in the past two decades for the four largest American sports leagues, about 4 in 10 were financed at least in part with municipal bonds exempt from federal taxes — which places part of the financial burden of stadium financing on residents nationwide.
• Football and baseball stadiums may increase foot traffic to nearby businesses, but basketball and hockey arenas do not.
• Overall, stadiums tend to shift economic activity, not create new spending.
• Expansion teams are likely to favor markets that already have strong employment and business growth.

A coming stadium construction boom?

Las Vegas is hardly alone. Economists have found that every 30 years or so there’s a wave of public financing for building stadiums or revamping existing ones.

A construction boom may already be under way in the U.S.

For example, Wisconsin will provide $500 million to renovate the Milwaukee Brewers ballpark, and more than $1 billion in public bonds will go toward a new stadium for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. And the MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays have asked St. Petersburg city councilors to approve more than $400 million for a new ballpark along with nearby infrastructure improvements.

If you’re covering public financing for sports franchises, you’ll want to know what the research says about this topic. This is critical to providing thorough coverage to audiences.

A brief history of public financing for sports stadiums

Modern stadiums were first constructed during the early and mid-1900s, around the two world wars.

“Sports venues were almost exclusively privately financed until the 1930s, when they became largely public ventures,” write the authors of a recent paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, featured in the research roundup below.

More stadiums were built as leagues expanded and teams moved cities throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Another construction boom came in the 1990s, with many new stadiums replacing older ones, along with new venues for expansion franchises.

“The median public share of venue construction costs declined from 70% in the 1990s and 2000s to approximately half of construction costs in the 2010s,” write the authors of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management paper. “Newly opened and planned venues in the 2020s have received roughly 40% of funding from taxpayers.”

While the share of public financing has fallen, the authors find that the amount of public money has risen, from a median of $168 million in public funds per stadium in the 1990s, to $350 million in the 2010s, to $500 million in the 2020s across the four major U.S. sports leagues.  

Even stadiums ostensibly built with private funds can come with public costs.

For example, the New England Patriots built Gillette Stadium in 2002 without direct public dollars, but the franchise benefitted from at least $70 million in state money for nearby road, sewer and other infrastructure improvements, according to the Boston Globe, which the paper authors cite.

Economic activity and stadiums: ‘A transfer of wealth’

While Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field and Soldier Field in Chicago have stood for around 100 years, many stadiums built in the past 50 years have already been replaced for a variety of reasons, despite better construction materials and methods.

For example, the Texas Rangers’ ballparks have been replaced every 27.5 years, on average, while Atlanta Braves’ ballparks have been replaced after 26 years, on average. Among the major sports leagues, 31 stadiums and 31 arenas will be 30 years old or more by 2030, according to Bradbury and co-authors in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management paper.

Journalists covering asks of public money for private sports projects should be aware of the large body of research on these public investments.

Despite perennial claims from team owners that building new stadiums or revamping existing ones will result in a fiscal and jobs boom for a city or region, research consistently shows that the hundreds of millions of public dollars that are often outlaid are not typically a sound investment.

“You might see a little bit of a resurgence in the area right around the stadium, but it comes at a cost to less commerce in the outlying area, which is exactly what we’d expect,” says Bradbury, who is the current president of the North American Association of Sports Economists. “This is just a transfer of wealth within the community.”

This transfer of wealth may indeed be the point for some city officials, as College of the Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson explains in an October 2018 essay, also in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

For example, when the taxpayers of Arlington, Texas, finance local stadiums, such as for the Dallas Cowboys and the Rangers, the games those teams play move consumer dollars from other parts of the state to Arlington.

“While, again, regional economic activity is unchanged, Arlington’s economy benefits at the expense of other cities and towns in the area,” Matheson writes. He also notes that fiscal reports produced by sports franchises “have been shown to suffer from significant theoretical flaws that make their conclusions suspect at best, and simply false at worst.”

But Matheson argues that while the current level of public spending on sports stadiums is out of balance with the returns on those investment, in certain circumstances some level of public funding may be appropriate.

He points to the 2004 Athens Olympics as a catalyst for infrastructure development there, and a minor league baseball stadium in Worcester, Massachusetts, as providing the political impetus for $35 million in transportation funding from the state, including to make a particularly dangerous intersection near the ballpark safer.

“Obviously, it would be better for local taxpayers to get the needed infrastructure improvements without the wasteful expense of hosting the Olympics or building a baseball stadium, but government activities are not always without friction, and using a stadium project to spur other more useful infrastructure projects may be a second-best solution,” Matheson writes.

The cost-per-taxpayer of a stadium partially financed through public funds may be small in some cases, but it can also be relatively large. Oklahoma City Thunder ownership, for example, is contributing $50 million to build their new arena, compared with the public outlay of $900 million, which comes out to thousands of dollars per adult in the city.  

“People often ask me, they’ll say, ‘Well, you’re always against stadiums.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, yeah, my guess is most pulmonologists are against smoking,’” says Bradbury. “I mean, the evidence is clear. And I think that journalists feel a need to cover all sides of an issue, and I totally understand that. But it’s about accurate coverage, not equal-balance coverage.”

Research roundup

Public Policy Toward Professional Sports Stadiums: A Review
John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, September 2023.

The study: The authors break down a range of policy considerations for public funding of stadiums. They provide a history of stadium funding since the 1900s, examine research efforts to quantify intangible social benefits of sports teams, describe prominent public funding mechanisms and cast a critical eye toward news reporting.

The findings: With many large U.S. cities facing fiscal crises in the 1980s, government officials began to push the narrative of sports stadiums as economic drivers, “where each dollar spent generates more than one dollar of economic activity as it is recirculated within the community — thereby growing employment income, property values and tax revenues,” the authors write.

Economists began to study the issue around this time. By the turn of the century, “economists were largely in agreement that stadiums were poor public investments,” in terms of tangible benefits, like jobs and spending, “and more recent studies continue to confirm these findings.” Economists then began to explore whether there were intangible benefits to residents of a city with a professional sports franchise — the cultural pride from living in a “big league” city, for example.

One way economists do this is through something called the contingent valuation method, which surveys residents on what they would personally pay for their city to host a sports team. These individual values are then extrapolated to a wider population to put a dollar value on the intangible factors residents enjoy from simply having a professional franchise, whether they go to games or not. Based on results from seven studies conducted in the 2000s and 2010s, “non-use values” amount to “13% of total capital construction costs and 16% of public contributions,” suggesting that “intangible social benefits of hosting professional sports teams are well below levels needed to justify typical subsidies.”

In looking at news coverage of public subsidy proposals for sports franchises, the authors note that “economic impact estimates from advocacy reports may be repeated without external validation of credibility, and press release statements from stadium boosters are quoted in stories without critical assessment.”

The authors write: “As a potential institutional reform, communities should assess all stadium proposals through referendums and initiatives, a once-common practice which has declined over the last few decades. Public votes ensure that subsidies are congruent with voter preferences and allow time for careful consideration of all relevant costs and benefits, so that voters can make informed decisions.”

Growth Effects of Sports Franchises, Stadiums and Arena: 15 Years Later
Dennis Coates. Chapter from The Economic Impact of Sports Facilities, Franchises, and Events, October 2023.

The study: The author, who conducted foundational research with Brad Humphreys starting in the mid-1990s into how sports stadiums affect per capita income, returns to this question with another 17 years of data, from 1969 to 2011. This analysis adds hockey and soccer franchises in addition to MLB, NFL and NBA — along with the American Basketball Association, which merged with the NBA in 1976 — and covers all urban areas in the U.S., including those without a professional team.

The findings: Average personal income grew about 1.4% per year over the period studied, regardless of whether there was a sports stadium in the area. The economic effects of sports franchises account for less than 1.5% of local economic activity, measured by personal income, wages and salaries, and wages per job.

The author writes: “The results of this exercise are largely consistent with the findings of Coates and Humphreys and of numerous other studies that have found that the effect of sports franchises and stadium and arena construction on local economies is weak or nonexistent. Indeed, franchises, stadiums, and arenas may be harmful rather than beneficial to the local community.”

Do Local Businesses Benefit from Sports Facilities? The Case of Major League Sports Stadiums and Arenas
Timur Abbiasov and Dmitry Sedov. Regional Science and Urban Economics, January 2023.

The study: The authors explore a single economic consequence of sports stadiums — foot traffic to nearby retail and food establishments — in a single year, 2018, for MLB NBA, NFL and NHL franchises. Precise foot traffic for 92 sports facilities and surrounding businesses is from SafeGraph, a company that tracks “location data of mobile devices with installed participating applications,” the authors write.

They acknowledge that “the grounds for subsidizing professional sports are weak,” based on past research, but also cite news reports suggesting businesses near sports stadiums suffered curtailed revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings: Every 100 visits to a baseball stadium generates 29 visits to nearby restaurants and similar establishments, and six visits to retail stores. The authors find similar results for football stadiums, but little business sale spillover for basketball and hockey arenas. The authors note that professional football and baseball games typically draw much larger crowds than basketball and hockey games.

Basketball and hockey games have a slight negative effect on foot traffic to health, finance and education-related businesses. The authors note that these sports often have arenas located in central business districts, which may lead people who are not going to a game to avoid those areas during game time.

The authors “find that a median sports facility generates approximately $11.3 million of annual additional spending for food and accommodation and retail businesses, with the aggregate spillovers varying substantially across facilities and sports.”

They do not account for negative effects of sports stadiums — such as increased crime, as explained in the next paper — or the revenue of nearby businesses compared with the public costs of building a stadium or improving an existing one.

The authors write: “Our results indicate that the chances of a community economically benefitting from a sports facility via the spillover channel are higher if the facility hosts a popular team and is visited frequently.”

The Impact of Professional Sports Franchises and Venues on Local Economies: A Comprehensive Survey
John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys. Journal of Economic Surveys, September 2022.

The study: The authors review the findings of more than 130 studies on economic outcomes of sports stadiums published between 1974 and 2022, the bulk of them published since 2000.

The findings: Local economic activity is by and large unaffected by sports stadiums, “and the level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefits,” the authors write. There is “deep agreement in research findings” that “sports venues are not an appropriate channel for local development policy,” they add.

Sports stadiums can lead to positive effects for communities, such as improved amenities, like pedestrian-friendly zones. But they also come with negative effects. For example, research links sports events with crime. The “positive association between crime and sporting events is perhaps the most robust empirical finding in the economic effects of sports literature,” the authors write.

Why do sports stadiums continue to garner public subsidies? Among other reasons, such as team owners threatening to relocate, the authors note that the benefits of sports stadium subsidies are concentrated in a few hands — namely and primarily the owners.

Costs, meanwhile, are spread across taxpayers. The public cost of Camden Yards in Baltimore came to $15 per local household per year, according to research from the Brookings Institution that the authors cite. They suggest this creates a situation in which wealthy beneficiaries have great incentive to lobby politicians and advertise in favor of subsidies, with little incentive to mobilize opposition because each taxpayer’s individual cost may be low.

The authors write: “Though findings have become more nuanced, recent analyses continue to confirm the decades-old consensus of very limited economic impacts of professional sports teams and stadiums. Even with added nonpecuniary social benefits from quality-of-life externalities and civic pride, welfare improvements from hosting teams tend to fall well short of covering public outlays.”

Tax-Exempt Municipal Bonds and the Financing of Professional Sports Stadiums
Austin Drukker, Ted Gayer and Alexander Gold. National Tax Journal, March 2020.

The study: Of the 57 stadiums built in the past two decades for the four largest American sports leagues, about 4 in 10 were financed at least in part with municipal bonds exempt from federal taxes. State or local governments issue the bonds, then the interest bond buyers earn is exempt from federal taxes, meaning “tax-exempt municipal bonds confer an indirect federal subsidy to the issuers,” the authors write. Bond buyers accept lower interest rates — saving interest payment dollars for states and localities — because they know they will get a tax break on their investment return.

NFL stadiums are the most expensive, with an average cost of $1 billion. But baseball stadiums are most heavily financed through tax-exempt bonds. On average, $466 million of baseball stadium costs are financed through such bonds. The authors examine the estimated value of those bonds issued since 2000.

The findings: The value of the federal tax exemption is $3.6 billion across the $16.7 billion worth of bonds issued to finance stadium construction, the authors estimate. But the estimated loss in federal tax revenue is considerably higher: $4.3 billion. The authors explain that the reason for the difference is that a portion of bond buyers would still buy those bonds at a lower return rate than the subsidy offers.

The authors write: “Most residents of, say, New York, Massachusetts, or California — unless they are avid fans — gain nothing from the Washington-area football team’s decision to locate in Virginia, Maryland, or the District of Columbia. Yet, under current federal law, taxpayers throughout the country ultimately subsidize the stadium, wherever it is located … Ultimately, the problem is one of rent seeking, since professional sports leagues are able to extract local and federal subsidies by exerting concentrated power while the costs of the subsidies are diffuse.”

Economic Development Effects of Major and Minor League Teams and Stadiums
Nola Agha and Daniel Rascher. Journal of Sports Economics, November 2020.

The study: The authors explore whether new stadiums for major and minor league teams affect economic development, measured by employment and business growth. They use Census Bureau data from 2004 to 2012 covering 871 markets. There were 65 new teams, 67 teams that departed a city and 68 new stadiums built during the period studied. The included top-tier professional leagues and their development affiliates are MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, Major League Soccer, and the Women’s National Basketball Association. The WNBA saw three teams join and five leave the league but was the only professional league without a new arena during the period studied.

The findings: The authors note that much research has focused on the economic effects of major league venues. Stadiums and arenas built between 2000 and 2018 cost more than $40 billion total. Spending on minor league venues account for a sizeable chunk over that time — $9.6 billion, according to the authors, and many of those developmental team venues are in the same market as major league teams.

On the whole, new major league teams and new stadiums do not affect economic development, and the findings suggest teams tend to enter markets with strong employment and business growth. New minor league sports teams also do not tend to affect employment, but for markets between 100,000 and 499,000 people, the findings suggest that new minor league sports stadiums can lead to a slight uptick in new businesses.

The authors write: “Overall, we find no substantial evidence that entry of a new team or stadium is associated with any net gains related to economic development, other than for minor league team entry in smaller markets and employment effects limited to the period of construction.”

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“For over 20 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

He goes on cruises in far-flung locales on Crow’s yacht, flies on his private jet and keeps company with Crow’s powerful friends at the billionaire’s private resort.

The extent of Crow’s largesse has never been revealed. Until now.

-Lede to “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

In April 2023, ProPublica published the first story in its investigative series exposing a lack of ethics oversight for U.S. Supreme Court justices, some of whom received expensive gifts and worldwide vacations from well-heeled individuals — which meant private access to justices for those wealthy benefactors and their friends. The series provided rare, behind-the-scenes details of those interactions and prompted historic reforms on the nation’s high court.

The series begins covering the personal relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a real estate billionaire Thomas met three decades ago, according to ProPublica reporters Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski.

Those trips meant Thomas was in contact with powerful corporate executives, including from Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and political activists, such as “Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right,” the reporters write.

“By accepting the trips, Thomas has broken long-standing norms for judges’ conduct, ethics experts and four current or retired federal judges said,” the reporters write.

Crucially, those trips were not listed among Thomas’ annual financial disclosures, even though gifts worth over $415 usually must be reported, the reporters found. Despite such disclosure rules, before the ProPublica investigation the Supreme Court did not have a formal ethical code of conduct.

The private jet flights and yacht trips in particular should have been disclosed, the investigation finds. Thomas’ “failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts,” according to two ethics experts the reporters spoke with.

Crow “has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends,” the reporters write.

Among other findings from the investigation:

• Crow paid for boarding school tuition running more than $6,000 a month for a boy Thomas said he was raising “as a son.” According to a former school administrator, “Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student here, which was about a year,” the reporters write.
• A July 2008 “luxury fishing vacation” Justice Samuel Alito took with GOP billionaire Paul Singer, ProPublica reports, who paid for Alito’s private jet and whose firm later had cases before the Supreme Court. Alito did not report the jet flight in annual disclosures, according to the investigation.
• Alito’s lodging during that trip was covered by Robin Arkley II, owner of a mortgage company who had “recently acquired the fishing lodge,” the reporters write. Alito did not report the lodging in annual disclosures, they found.
• Thomas attended two donor summits hosted by the Koch network, the political organization founded by billionaires Charles and David Koch, which put Thomas in “the extraordinary position of having helped a political network that has brought multiple cases before the Supreme Court,” the reporters write.
• Crow and wife Kathy paid for a 7-foot-tall bronze statue of Thomas’ eighth-grade teacher, unveiled at an October 2021 ceremony in a New York City suburb at which Thomas spoke.

As a result of the yearlong investigation:

• The Senate Judiciary Committee last May held a full hearing on Supreme Court ethics reform and, in November, subpoenaed Leo and Crow to obtain information.
• The Supreme Court adopted its first-ever code of conduct in November 2023.
• Nonpartisan ethics watchdogs, including the Campaign Legal Center and the Project on Government Oversight, have called on the Department of Justice to investigate Thomas for failing to disclose the trips Crow provided.
• Another 40-plus watchdog groups have called for Thomas and Alito to recuse themselves from cases relating to big-time political donors. The justices have rejected such recusal.

For Kaplan, Elliott and Mierjeski, a big takeaway from the investigation is that courts at all levels need more scrutiny from journalists.

“One of the lessons of this has been that the courts are just totally under-covered as an institution, both at the federal level all the way down to local and state [levels],” Elliott says. “One piece of advice would just be to start adding judges and courts, at whatever the relevant level is, to the mental list of things that should be covered.”

Here are seven more tips for covering courts the ProPublica reporters shared with The Journalist’s Resource.

1. Think of a public figure’s entourage as a huge source pool.

It takes a village to move a public figure from point A to point B.

“It’s not like a normal person going on a trip to Europe or something,” Elliott says.

This is especially true if the public figure travels on private planes and boats, which require specialized crew to operate. For example, Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, often operates with a staff of a couple dozen, the ProPublica reporters found.

“We decided to try to talk to some of those people,” Elliott says. “So we started just sort of cold calling.”

2. Being an outsider can be an advantage, but be ready to play a ‘numbers game’ with cold calls.  

Kaplan says there are “extremely talented court reporters” with well-connected sources who focus on explaining Supreme Court decisions — but the ProPublica reporting team “did not start with any sources at all,” he says.

That wasn’t necessarily a detriment. To a reporter who regularly covers Supreme Court decisions, the staff of a yacht a Supreme Court justice had boarded might not have much to offer. But it was those seemingly tertiary sources, not directly involved with the regular functioning of the court, who were critical to telling the story of who the justices were spending time with while off the bench.

“We had to kind of start from scratch and get creative with the sort of people we were talking to,” Kaplan says. “We were talking almost exclusively to people that were very far removed from Washington, very far removed from the halls of national politics. And that brought us, over the course of the year, to some kind of relatively novel places.”

Those service workers — on the yacht, at the Adirondacks resort, at the Alaskan fishing lodge and other places — were “the absolute backbone of this,” Kaplan says. “It wasn’t a situation where any one person had the keys to the castle and were able to tell us everything that had happened, but a lot of people had some really valuable piece of the puzzle.”

Kaplan estimates that over the course of reporting the series, the team placed over a thousand phone calls.

“It really is a numbers game,” adds Elliott. “Many, many, many, many people said no to us, or just didn’t return our calls.”

3. Build trust with sources by articulating the big vision of your investigation, and by making sure they understand the concepts of “on the record,” “off the record” and “on background.”

Building trust is key when interviewing sources who don’t have experience talking with reporters. The ProPublica team found the sources they spoke with were by and large persuaded by the bigger picture of the investigation.

“Regardless of where any particular source might fall in the political spectrum, there’s, I think, a very clear public interest case that we should know who is getting access to some of the most powerful government officials — Supreme Court justices —  in the country,” Elliott says.

He adds “it would have been the same case that we were making if we were writing about Elana Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor,” referring to two justices usually regarded as being more ideologically liberal than conservative.

Likewise, being patient and explaining journalistic concepts that define how the information they share will be used — on the record, on background, or off the record, for example — is a great way to get sources to open up.

“Most people, when they get a call, they’ve never spoken to a reporter before,” Kaplan says. “They don’t understand the seriousness with which one takes protecting anonymity. And so, just taking the time to get to know people and to earn that trust, I think it’s critical.”

4. Take advantage of teamwork by divvying the labor.

When embarking on an investigation that will involve hundreds of phone calls and reading reams of records, dividing the work among a small group can save time and allow for collaborative strategizing along the way.  

“The benefit of the dynamic was that while these guys were making calls, I had time to kind of noodle around,” Mierjeski says. “Some of the findings in those stories just came from the ability to spend time searching and fishing.”

With Elliott and Kaplan focusing on contacting sources, Mierjeski was able to track down, for example, coverage in Catholic Cemetery magazine of the statue of Thomas’ teacher, which Crow and his wife paid for, the reporters found. 

There can also be mental health benefits to teamwork, in terms of reporters encouraging each other to press ahead in the face of obstacles.

“For me it would be difficult, as a psychological proposition, to not be sort of paralyzed by the crushing disappointment of failure if you’re just sitting at home alone having seven people in a row ask you how you got their number and then hang up on you,” Elliott says. “It’s sort of like going to the gym — it works better if you have a partner.”

Elliott, Kaplan and Mierjeski were continually communicating, Kaplan says, which was hugely helpful for real-time brainstorming. One example: The realization that polo shirts with the logo for Crow’s yacht could lead to more information about when and where Thomas was on the yacht.

“I remember it was like Friday night at 10 p.m. that one of us realized the Michaela Rose, the yacht logo on the shirts, could be a way to find other potential trips,” Mierjeski says. “The Signal chat was just blown up.”

Elliott adds, “We started looking for every single picture we could find of Justice Thomas wearing a polo shirt to see if there was a logo on it.”

5. Seek visual evidence, especially if a key source won’t talk.

The photos the reporters obtained of Thomas on trips with Crow and Alito holding a fish in Alaska were “very helpful in establishing things, but also, I think, really resonated with people and helped these stories get a wider reach,” Kaplan says.

The photographs were “more powerful than probably any prose we could come up with,” Elliott adds. The reporters found some of them on social media sites, like Instagram and Facebook. The pictures were not just illustrative but were important evidence of places the justices had been.

Alito responded to questions from the ProPublica reporters indirectly — in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Thomas, however, was silent until the first story in the series published.

“It wasn’t like Justice Thomas was going through our very detailed questions that we sent and saying, ‘You have this right, you have this wrong,’” Elliott says. “It was just like, ‘No comment.’ Which can be a sensitive position to be in as a reporter because if you’re getting no engagement, you just have to be right.”

6. Tap into university archives.

The ProPublica team examined numerous archival documents while reporting the series, including from congressional and judiciary archives.

Also among them: university archives, which are often collections of documents and pictures by and about public figures produced throughout their careers. The team early in reporting the series visited the collection of former Justice Antonin Scalia, donated to the Harvard Law School Library after Scalia died in 2016. Many parts of the Scalia archive remain sealed — but photographs weren’t sealed, Kaplan says.

“From the chicken scratch scrawl on the back of some of these photos, we started learning about some of the people that had taken Scalia to an Alaska trip — reporting those out brought us to Alito,” he says.

Kaplan adds: “Figuring out what past or present officials have archives that are at least partially in a university, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be the first reporter to have ever looked at them. And they might have some gold in there.”

Start by looking for archives from universities a public figure has attended or has some other longstanding affiliation with, such as a professorship.

7. Search court documents, which are likely to be public record, for evidence.

When covering a story that deals with private interactions or a government entity not subject to public records laws, look for court cases. Unless a judge seals a case or portions of it, such records often are subject to public inspection.

That’s how the ProPublica team was able to show in their reporting that Crow had paid tuition on behalf of the boy Thomas was raising. The private school had been involved in a bankruptcy and later dissolved, but for a time was required to file financial statements to a federal court. The reporters found those statements through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, or PACER, an online federal courts document repository.

“Whoever was filing those statements seems to get sloppier and sloppier about redacting them as the case was going on,” Elliot says. “We came across a financial statement from the school that actually showed a wire of money from one of Crow’s companies to the school.”

In July 2009, the company “wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition,” the reporters write.

Read the stories

Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition.

Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court

Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events

A ‘Delicate Matter’: Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resign

The Judiciary Has Policed Itself for Decades. It Doesn’t Work.

The post How they did it: ProPublica investigation unveils ethics scandals at the Supreme Court appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

“In some respects, there was nothing unusual about the killing of Walter Gonzalez.

Eighty-six pedestrians had already died in car crashes in New York City last year by October 23, when a driver slammed a pick-up truck into Gonzalez in Brooklyn. It was not out of the ordinary that the driver was speeding, nor that his license had been revoked months prior.

But there was one thing that stood out about the crash: the paper license plate hanging from the back of the truck.”

-The lede to “Ghost Tags: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates,” by Jesse Coburn

In April 2023, online news outlet Streetsblog NYC published the first story in a four-part investigation exposing a vast black market for temporary license plate tags, the massive scale of which was not publicly known.

Temporary tags are legal when someone buys a car. In New Jersey, for example, a dealer issues the buyer weatherized paper tags to display until metal plates come in the mail.

But it is illegal for dealers to issue temporary tags absent a car sale. It is also remarkably easy for dealers to sell those tags on the black market. And when dealers were caught, the penalties were small — before the series from Streetsblog investigative reporter Jesse Coburn.

Further, “Drivers were using them to mask their identities while evading tolls and traffic cameras, or while committing more serious crimes, authorities said,” Coburn writes.

At the time the Streetsblog investigation was published, auto dealers fraudulently selling authentic tags could fetch $100 to $200 apiece, while the maximum violation for a first-time offense in New Jersey was $500, Coburn found. One dealer in New Jersey issued tens of thousands of tags in 2021, and “could have made millions of dollars,” if all those were sold on the black market, Coburn writes.

Coburn’s seven-month investigation was built upon nearly 50 public records requests he filed, particularly from motor vehicle authorities in New Jersey and Georgia, for information on dealers illegally issuing temporary tags. Those tags, Coburn found, were being issued by dealers who appeared by and large not to be engaged in any legitimate business.

“The data really tells the story because it’s like, here’s this dealership that has no online presence, none whatever, no listing on Google Maps — none of the trappings of a successful car dealership — issuing tens of thousands of temp tags every year,” Coburn says.

Since the Streetsblog series, New Jersey has imposed tougher restrictions on temporary tags, including potential prison time and fines up to $10,000 for violators. A lawmaker in Georgia has also introduced legislation aimed at curtailing the market for fraudulent temporary tags there.

“New Jersey and Georgia have also shut down dozens of dealers for temp tag fraud since the series came out and proposed $150,000 in fines,” Coburn says. “Seven of the dealers that I sort of flagged to these states as possible temp tag violators are now under criminal investigation.”

Keep reading for four tips from Coburn based on his investigation, including how it came about, how he got people buying and selling temporary tags to talk to him, and the types of sources he thinks are most compelling.

1. Stay alert — is there something weird in your neighborhood?

Being an investigative reporter isn’t necessarily about having deep government sources or getting your hands on an incendiary tip, Coburn says. Sometimes, a strong investigation can come from staying alert to changes in the places you frequent.

“During the pandemic, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I started seeing tons of these paper license plates on cars from out of state — Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland,” Coburn says. “And, you know, I’m sort of wondering what this is about.”

Coburn says he saw some local news coverage of illicit temporary tags in New York City, but those stories were driven mostly by police reports and press conferences.

“It just seemed inconceivable to me that so many people had just bought cars in Texas or Georgia,” he adds.

So, he began filing public records requests for data on temporary tags issued by auto dealers in New Jersey.

“What I saw was that there were these dealerships that were issuing massive numbers of tags — 10, 20,000 tags in a single year,” Coburn says. “Which should mean that that dealership is selling that many cars.”

He started digging into one dealer, F&J Auto Mall in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and learned it “issued 36,000 temporary license plates in 2021 — more than any other dealership in the state, including the used-car juggernauts Carvana and CarMax combined,” Coburn writes in Part 1 of the series.

Coburn recalls that when he looked up the publicly available address for F&J, Google Maps images showed a “warehouse in the middle of nowhere, with no big sign out front. A giant parking lot that was totally empty. That was the moment I was like, ‘There’s something really crazy going on here.’”

2. To ‘find your Virgil,’ try old-fashioned cold calling.

Cold calling may not feel like the most natural thing in the world, but if you don’t otherwise have good sources for your story, a few dozen unsolicited calls can work.

That’s what Coburn did when he realized he needed reputable auto dealers to walk him through what the data indicated about F&J. He searched for dealerships in northern New Jersey, close enough to his home base to potentially visit in person.

Initially, the response from auto dealers was “chilly” and “people were very skittish,” Coburn says. But before long, he struck journalistic gold.

“It took me about a dozen dealerships,” he says. “But, eventually, I got this guy on the phone named Abdul Cummings.”

As an émigré from Palestine running a legitimate used auto dealership, Cummings was troubled by the illegal activity happening in his industry, Coburn says. Cummings immediately began describing to Coburn how the paper tag fraud worked. Coburn recalls that Cummings was “very candid, and smart” with “a lot of integrity.”

“Find your Virgil,” Coburn advises, referring to the ancient Roman poet, a fictional version of whom shepherds Dante through hell in the Divine Comedy. “Someone who can kind of guide you through.”

Coburn found many other key sources through cold calls, such as Jose Cordero, who told Coburn he made $18,200 selling temporary tags before New Jersey authorities caught him.

3. Use court calendars to find sources involved in active cases.

Coburn identified temporary tag buyers through cold calls, but also by looking at WebCriminal, the online criminal court portal for New York.

“It’s extremely Web 1.0 — it’s very hard to use,” Coburn says. “But there is a wealth of information if you kind of know how to find it. And so eventually, I figured out how to search the court calendars for every day, and to search by violation.”

The violation for possessing illegal temporary tags is called “criminal possession of a forged instrument.” Coburn would search for people being arraigned on that charge and potentially related charges, such as driving with a suspended license.

“I would just sit in court and wait for their hearing to be called,” he says. “You know, I just had this list of names. And then after they were arraigned, I approached them and tried to talk to them — and was once again amazed at how candid people were.”

That’s how Coburn got the story of Adrian Mocha, who had his license suspended. In the span of one year, Mocha went through “eight or nine” temporary tags, according to Part 3 of the investigation. Coburn simply approached Mocha and interviewed him following one of Mocha’s court dates.

4. Seek sources outside the spotlight for interesting anecdotes.

Politicians and other high-profile officials are often used to interacting with members of the news media. They may be guarded and self-aware in what they publicly convey. But people who have less or no experience talking with reporters provided some of the more interesting details in Coburn’s story — such as Ali Ahmed, manager at Zack Auto Sales, which is registered in New Jersey, according to Coburn’s reporting.

Coburn visited Zack Auto Sales and asked Ahmed about the 999 temporary tags the dealership issued in 2022, despite having no presence online. Ahmed said, “If you’re going to go deep, and I find it, and you go to ask about my company in Trenton and New Jersey, you’re going to get trouble with it, believe me,” Coburn writes in Part 2 of the series. Ahmed said they “retail and wholesale [cars] online, like a broker,” according to Coburn’s reporting.

“Streetsblog did not find evidence that Zack Auto Sales illegally sells temporary license plates,” Coburn writes. “But one car wholesaler and one car broker based in New Jersey told Streetsblog that wholesalers and brokers have no reason to issue large numbers of temp tags.”

Coburn also recalls the compelling story of how Kareem Ulloa-Alvarado discovered he had been unknowingly delivering temporary tags for a dealership for a few weeks in December 2022 and January 2023, after finding the gig on Craigslist.

In Part 4 of the series, Coburn reports that Ulloa-Alvarado didn’t realize he was doing anything illegal until he was attacked at knifepoint during a delivery in the Bronx. When he went to police, a detective told Ulloa-Alvarado that he could be arrested for delivering fake tags if he filed a report about the assault. “Kareem was shocked,” Coburn writes.

“They were very interesting, original people,” he says. “I like stories where I’m not just speaking to media-trained government officials.”

Read the stories

Part 1: The Dealers

Part 2: The Landlords

Part 3: The Buyers

‘Duped’: A Harlem 20-Something Blows the Whistle on an Illegal Temporary License Plate Business

The post How they did it: Streetsblog exposes underground sales of illicit temporary license plates in New York City appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The U.S. central banking system, the Federal Reserve, is a data-heavy organization. Economists at the bank regularly crunch numbers to inform national decisions, such as setting target interest rates. Meanwhile, economists at the Federal Reserve’s district banks — there are 12 across the country — analyze local and regional data to provide research insights on specialized topics, such as economic inequality.

The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book offers a high-level, anecdotal glimpse of current economic sentiment in each of the central bank’s 12 regions. For journalists, it can serve as an extensive tip sheet with insights on local, regional and national story angles.

The Beige Book is valuable for journalists reporting on economic issues, because national and regional economic conditions can change rapidly. The March 2024 edition offers story ideas for reporters covering business as well as those covering elections, education, health care and criminal justice.

The Beige Book was first publicly published in the 1980s with a beige colored cover. Find the archives here.

The book is compiled from reports from Federal Reserve district directors and interviews and surveys of business owners, community groups and economists.

The authors of the book refer to individuals surveyed as “contacts,” and they are quoted anonymously. There’s no particular number of contacts needed to produce the Beige Book, but each release is based on insights from hundreds of contacts culled from surveys and wide-ranging conversations among “a diverse set of sources that can provide accurate and objective information about a broad range of economic activities,” according to the book.

Economists and analysts at district banks seek to cultivate contacts who can give a broad economic view — think the head of a trade group who regularly talks with many company owners — along with contacts representing a variety of industries and company sizes.

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests the anecdotes in the Beige Book accurately reflect what’s happening with employment and inflation the U.S. economy. After performing a simple textual analysis of every Beige Book from 2000 to April 2022, those authors find, for example, that mentions of rising prices tend to closely track with official inflation data.

“Of course, the Beige Book — with its emphasis on qualitative and anecdotal information — is written with the belief that those anecdotes provide a deeper understanding of the economy, which simple word counts cannot capture,” write St. Louis Fed senior economist Charles Gascon and research associate Devin Warner in their June 2022 analysis.

The Beige Book published on March 6 includes information gathered during January and February. Across districts, inflation has moderated in recent weeks, but firms overall are increasingly reticent to pass higher transportation and health insurance costs on to customers, “who became increasingly sensitive to price changes.”

In several districts with major metropolitan areas, a spate of commercial real estate loans are coming due this year and over the next few years. Lenders worry mortgage holders, particularly those who borrowed money to buy office buildings, could default because some companies that closed their offices or moved to smaller ones at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic no longer need large downtown offices.

Keep reading for quick summaries and story ideas from the latest Beige Book release.

District 1, Boston

Dry January slump

Contacts from staffing agencies reported fewer sign-on perks for new hires and fewer retention bonuses for existing employees “as well as a trend away from remote work arrangements.” These could indicate that bargaining power is shifting from workers, who have benefitted in recent months from a tight labor market, to employers.

The office lease market is “expected to stay tepid,” and there is “ongoing uncertainty over the fate of office loans maturing in 2024.” In other words, commercial office mortgage lenders with maturing loans will expect to be paid back this year, or have borrowers refinance at higher rates. Are office owners going to meet those obligations, considering the relative dearth of leases?

According to other recent research from the Boston Fed, big banks are expected to feel more pain than small banks from mortgage defaults linked to expiring leases in central business districts.

Story idea: How does “Dry January” affect food and beverage sales in your area? Dry January is an annual public health initiative, started in the United Kingdom, in which people take a monthlong holiday from alcohol. One restaurant industry contact from Massachusetts blamed Dry January and New Year’s resolutions for “an exceptionally weak January.” Later this year, reach out to restaurants and bars to ask how they are gearing up to weather Dry January 2025. Do bars plan to expand their suite of non-alcoholic libations? Are they going to hold more events, like trivia nights or live music, to get customers through their doors?

District 1 covers Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and most of Connecticut.

District 2, New York

‘Loss prevention measures’

Wages in District 2 grew at a “moderate pace” while statewide minimum wage increases — including a jump from $15 to $16 an hour in New York City, Long Island and Westchester at the start of the year — “caused some business to raise pay more substantially for some employees.”

Meanwhile, input prices — the costs of materials used to make products — also “picked up at a moderate pace.” Specifically, contacts “noted outsized increases in the prices of raw materials such as cocoa, copper, plastic and textiles amid ongoing sharp increases in insurance and freight costs.” This matters because higher input prices often result in higher consumer prices, if a firm thinks moderately higher prices won’t dissuade buyers.

As in District 1 hubs, New York City is facing a spate of office mortgages coming due in 2024, with “financial strain” in the office leasing sector “foreshadowing further increases in defaults in the coming year.” Outside of the city, however, office markets “remained more resilient” due to better balance between supply and demand.

Story idea: Public safety is a concern among business owners and community leaders in District 2, particularly given “a rise in hate crimes and ongoing high rates of retail theft,” which have “reduced the sense of security in public spaces, such as on public transit and in stores.” Some retail owners have tried to deter theft and now face “increased costs due to loss prevention measures.” What specific measures have local business taken? How are chain stores addressing loss prevention differently from mom-and-pop stores? How do longstanding businesses perceive current crime and theft levels compared with higher crime eras during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in New York City? For example, crime rates for violent crimes, including murder and rape, and other serious crimes, such as grand larceny, are down 72% over the past three decades, according to data from the New York City Police Department. Certain types of violent crime have risen, however. Felony assault, for example, is up 75% compared with 14 years ago in New York City. There is a story to explore about which crimes are being committed at higher rates, when the increase began and how business owners predict crime levels will affect their economic prospects over the months ahead. (Note that police departments occasionally change their definitions of crime categories, which can affect historical comparisons.)

District 2 covers New York, western Connecticut, northern New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

District 3, Philadelphia

Moving out of the moving business

While supply chain issues among contacts “large and small” were “no longer a concern” in District 3, many contacts are still worried about labor shortages, along with “payment problems among low-income households.” Despite supply chain problems being largely abated, one large manufacturer “noted that shipping disruptions in the Red Sea and the Panama Canal would likely add to costs.”

Fully electric vehicles were unpopular in District 3, “selling slowly and piling up on dealer lots,” although “other models were selling well.” New car sales were also lower after seasonal adjustments, with auto buyers generally hampered by high vehicle prices and high interest rates.

Meanwhile, leisure travel was down across the district, “hurt by poor skiing conditions.” Residential real estate inventory remains “extremely low” and existing home sales fell from levels that were also “extremely low.” Construction activity, generally, also slowed.

Story idea: Sometimes downstream effects are as interesting as upstream ones. With high interest rates and high costs, home sales are “weak” in District 3. Those typically affected by weak home sales would include real estate brokers, buyers, sellers and builders. One overlooked group? Movers. One contact that does household moves reported that slow home sales had led to the shuttering of businesses in that industry, with conditions being “the worst they have ever been in my career, which dates back to 1968.” See if a moving company will let you shadow their drivers and operational employees for a day or two — there could be an interesting narrative to tell about the downstream effects of an upstream problem.

District 3 covers most of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware.

District 4, Cleveland

Trained gig workers

In contrast to other districts, commercial construction firms in District 4 have been “increasing staffing levels to ramp up for new capital projects,” according to contacts in the industry, who report “strong demand for manufacturing space.”

In the restaurant business, some contacts “noted a recent uptick in the cost of chicken, beef and produce.” For now, restaurants seem be absorbing those costs rather than passing them onto guests, according to two contacts.

As in District 3, auto dealers in District 4 have seen sales suffer due to “high interest rates and high vehicle prices,” but one contact said there were more new vehicles available to sell, with new vehicle supply better than it had been in recent months. Some auto dealers were hopeful that spring would bring new customers, but most were not optimistic about improved sales in the coming months.

Story idea: Why are younger workers taking gig jobs, even after completing training for employment in other fields? That’s the situation in District 4, according to one workforce development contact. Check out this recent report, “The Gig Workforce isn’t just Delivering Dinner,” from Cuyahoga Community College and Team NEO, an economic development organization, to understand the types of jobs that make up gig work and the educational investments more likely to lead people into gig work. In Greater Cleveland, for example, about one-in-three gig workers come out of liberal arts and sciences programs while about one in ten come from nursing or business administration programs. The report is also a good place to start building a source list, such as Team NEO CEO Bill Koehler.

District 4 covers Ohio, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia.

District 5, Richmond

Election economics

How’s the labor market in District 5? Depends on who you ask. An outdoor goods retailer said they were having a hard time finding workers, but added that’s not abnormal in retail. Meanwhile, one advertising firm “reported a complete [180-degree turn] from last year, and candidates are finding them now and not the other way around.” Finally, an engraver and an aluminum welder reported trouble finding qualified workers. The engraver finally found good help after a lengthy search, “which felt like finding a needle in the haystack.”

Shipping contacts reported more consumer goods coming through ports, and overall demand for water freight “was good this period despite disruptions in the Panama and Suez canals impacting schedules.” Spot rates were up quite a bit — those are one-time shipping rates to move a volume of goods without a longer-term contract — because “carriers were trying to offset higher costs associated with the longer transit times.”

Story idea: One “design firm” — no further details given — expected less demand for the coming year because bigger companies that usually solicit their services “become more conservative with their budgets” during election years “until the election is decided.” There is a potentially interesting explainer-style business-to-business narrative about the decisions big firms make affecting small companies that do contract work for them. Start by looking into the firms that employ large numbers of people — in the Richmond area, this includes CarMax, Altria Group and Dominion Energy. Ask whether they are cutting back on certain services this election year due to uncertainty over who will be president in 2025, along with outcomes of local races. From there, interview principals at smaller companies that could see decreased revenue to find out how they are planning to make it through 2024. If workers who have been laid off due to cutbacks are willing to talk, then so much the better — from a storytelling perspective.

District 5 covers Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, most of West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

District 6, Atlanta

Location, location, location

The end of household financial help that began during the pandemic, such as extended child tax and SNAP benefits, “continued to weigh heavily on many households,” with housing costs in particular representing “an acute burden for both consumers and providers of affordable housing.”

Many consumers remain “price conscious,” as they have been in other recent Beige Books, with retailers describing it as “an ongoing normalization of consumer behaviors.” But leisure business has been robust, with cruise lines in South Florida reporting “strong demand,” along with “a solid lineup of events for the second quarter” in New Orleans, such as conferences and festivals.

Story idea: District 6 home sales “in most major markets ended the year well below seasonal norms and remained significantly behind pre-pandemic levels.” Existing homes are hard to come by, particularly those owned by people who had locked in low mortgage rates prior to recent Federal Reserve hikes. This means demand for new homes is high, but home builders “indicated higher lot costs as a significant impediment moving forward.” Are lot prices in your coverage area much higher now than in recent years, even after accounting for regular inflation? Experts at realtor.com can help you gather data to assess the current state and recent history of lot prices.

District 6 covers Alabama, Florida, Georgia, eastern Tennessee, southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi.

District 7, Chicago

Pandemic business struggles

A cold January hurt consumer sales in District 7, and a more temperate February “was not enough to offset the earlier decline.” Firms in general were willing to invest in their physical assets, “with contacts noting renovations or expansions of existing structures.” Keep in mind that capital expenditures represent a tangible investment in a company’s future and are often a sign that business owners are optimistic about the future.

But high interest rates deterred some firms from outlaying capital expenditures. Inventories were “comfortable” for many retailers, meaning those contacts think they have roughly an appropriate amount of goods to sell to meet demand.

Prices for corn, wheat and soybeans were down, though “the outlook for livestock producers improved.” Dairy farmers benefitted from lower feed prices in recent weeks, but profit margins “remained tight” amid higher labor costs.

Story idea: Organizations that support small business development reported that firms seeking help tended to be established, rather than start-ups. In particular, businesses that were founded during the pandemic “struggled with sustainability.” Take a look at which businesses were founded in your coverage area during the pandemic. Is there something specific about how they serve customers — entirely online, for example — that is making it difficult to adjust to the post-pandemic economy?

District 7 includes Iowa, most of Indiana, northern Illinois, southern and central Michigan and southern Wisconsin.

District 8, St. Louis

Pass the buck

Similar to District 3, an auto dealer in District 8 reports having to reset expectations on electric vehicle sales due to a lack of buyer interest. General retailers in downtown Louisville chalk up declining sales to “continued sluggish foot traffic.” Restaurants in St. Louis and Louisville likewise saw sluggish sales, “which they attributed to continued price increases.”

Real estate contacts in Arkansas and Tennessee reported strength in the lower end of the housing market, while the higher end was doing better in Mississippi and southern Indiana. As is the case across the country, businesses that want office leases can get them. Problem is, they don’t seem to want them. “In Louisville, two large tenants announced plans to vacate their downtown offices.”

But on the rosier side of commercial real estate, a contact in Memphis “reported that demand for retail space remains strong.”

Story idea: A contact in the District 8 theater industry “reported increasing costs and difficulty in determining if and how to pass those increases on to patrons.” Consumer prices rise or fall in relation to elasticity of demand, which simply refers to whether consumers still buy something when its price goes up. How do small businesses running on a shoestring — say, a theater — make practical decisions, like whether to eat higher costs or pass them onto consumers? What data do they use to inform price changes? How good is that information? What data do they wish they had but don’t? Or do they use experience and intuition as a proxy for good data?

District 8 includes Arkansas, southern Illinois, southern Indiana, western Kentucky, northern Mississippi, central and eastern Missouri and western Tennessee.

District 9, Minneapolis

Localizing climate change

Most workers looking for jobs in District 9 were confident they would find one within three months. Recent hires who had weathered a spell of unemployment found jobs primarily in health care, education and manufacturing. Still, food costs during the day are eating into some workers’ budgets, with one worker lamenting that “I wish my $20 [sandwich] lunch went back to [costing] $10. It instead keeps going up.”

Unseasonable warmth hampered winter sports ventures, with ski hills in Montana and Michigan shuttering “due to lack of snow.” There was good underlying demand for winter leisure, though, with hotel bookings “20% higher to start the year,” according to one contact in the upper peninsula of Michigan, who added that “most guests cancel due to lack of snow. We are now showing a 25% decline. This is having a devastating effect on all local businesses.” Still, hope springs eternal for better tourism revenues during the coming season.

Story idea: Per the unseasonable warmth, there is an opportunity for journalists to localize the effects of climate change. While particular weather and climate patterns are often not attributable solely to climate change, overall warming across the planet is. Who are the workers affected by ski hill and other seasonal closures? Are they younger, older, experienced, first-timers, or all of the above? Where else do they turn for seasonal work? Have such closures become more frequent in recent years?

District 9 includes Minnesota, Montana, the Dakotas, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin.

District 10, Kansas City

Rising household medical debt

The labor market remained tight in District 10, though many firms “also indicated the quality of applicants and recent hires improved recently.” Firms are also focusing on retraining existing workers — likewise, “wage increases were focused primarily on workers who expanded their capabilities, responsibilities and productivity.”

Prices were up “moderately” for goods and services, along with the costs of dining out and hotel rooms. “Amid the rising price sensitivity of consumers, several contacts indicated their emphasis on protecting price margins over coming months.”

There have been “very few property transactions” recently in commercial real estate, which makes it harder to estimate the value of properties that are for sale. Recent appraisals have been met with “skepticism” from buyers “not wanting to be in a position of trying to ‘catch a falling knife’ early in a [commercial real estate] downturn.”

Story idea: Households with low incomes had trouble accessing credit, and they also experienced increasing defaults on credit cards and payday loans. Meanwhile, defaults on medical debt also rose. While medical debt has been covered extensively by national news outlets, reporters covering District 10 regions can localize the issue. Recent consolidation of health systems in Kansas City and St. Louis “could mean bigger medical bills,” according to recent reporting from Spectrum News. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s 2022 report, “Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households,” the most recent available, finds roughly one-third of adults would not be able to pay for a $400 emergency event. What challenges do people face in understanding and using financial assistance programs offered by health systems and clinics?

District 10 includes Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, western Missouri and northern New Mexico.

District 11, Dallas

Office leasing twist

Cold winter weather slowed output at oil refineries along the Gulf Coast, in North Dakota and other areas of the Midwest, resulting in “modest upward pressure on fuel prices.” Though oilfield output in District 11 “held steady,” looking ahead “contacts expect U.S. oil production growth to slow notably this year.”

Capacity issues due to drought in the Panama Canal region were “impacting container volumes at Gulf Coast ports.” But drought problems in Texas improved. “Recent rainfall improved pasture conditions, refilled ponds and boosted crop prospects.” Some farmers turned toward cotton and away from grain due to higher prices for the textile crop.

Story idea: As in other districts with major metropolitan hubs, office leasing “remained weak,” with “elevated” vacancies and “widespread” concessions. Also, in bit of a narrative twist, some prospective tenants are assessing the credit of their potential landlords instead of the other way around. Staff at the North Texas Commercial Association of Realtors and The Real Estate Council may be willing to answer questions about how prevalent this practice is, along with other questions on the state of the commercial real estate market in District 11.

District 11 includes Texas, northern Louisiana and southern New Mexico.

District 12, San Francisco

Double-dip jobs

The local economic boost from Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas “exceeded expectations” and was “in line with that of the Formula 1 race held in the city last November.” But leisure and hospitality business abated across most of District 12 “due to expected seasonal fluctuations.”

Contacts in the health and agriculture sectors turned to automation and other “emerging technology solutions” to “boost productivity and improve efficiency.”

Wages were up a bit across District 12, in line with inflation. To retain workers in a tight labor market, “some employers fully absorbed recent increases in health insurance premiums and continued to offer hybrid or fully remote work.”

Story idea: Are people seeking remote work so they can get second jobs? One contact in Nevada reported “that employees preferred remote work because it allowed them to more easily take a second job,” but the report does not indicate the industry those employees work in. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last updated its state-by-state report on multiple jobholders nearly a decade ago. But experts at the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center may be able to provide recent data, insight on whether this is a regional trend and help journalists find employees who work remotely and have second jobs.

District 12 includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

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U.S. citizens ages 18 and older who are registered to vote can cast ballots in local, state and federal elections. But states, which conduct and administer many elections, including federal elections, can also take away individuals’ right to vote for certain reasons.

A felony conviction, either in state or federal court, is one common way people lose the right to vote in the U.S. This process is commonly referred to as felony disenfranchisement. Because laws on felony disenfranchisement vary by state, there are a range of outcomes when it comes to the voting rights of those convicted of felonies. While nearly every state curtails voting for people convicted of felonies while they are incarcerated, not every felony conviction results in prison time.

Convictions can result from jury trials or plea deals, and the vast majority of criminal convictions in the U.S. are obtained by guilty plea, according to a 2023 report from the American Bar Association. Most people in jail for misdemeanor offenses or while awaiting court hearings can vote, but they face challenges, such as a lack of opportunities to register, according to reporting from Matt Vasilogambros of Stateline, a nonprofit news organization.

Felony disenfranchisement laws by state

“In 11 states, felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes, or require a governor’s pardon for voting rights to be restored, face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) or require additional action before voting rights can be restored,” according to research from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

• Those 11 strictest states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming, according to the NCSL. Florida “disenfranchises more returning citizens than any other state,” write the authors of a January 2023 paper in the Vanderbilt Law Review.
• There are 14 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote while incarcerated, as well as while completing probation or parole, according to the NCSL. These states are Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
• There are 23 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote only while incarcerated, according to the NCSL, with the right automatically reinstated after time served. These states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington.       
• People convicted of felonies in the District of Columbia, Maine and Vermont do not lose their voting rights and can vote while incarcerated.
• In some states, people convicted of a felony can vote in the state where they live even if they wouldn’t be eligible in the state where they were convicted. Journalists covering this topic should consult legislation and reach out to legal experts to understand their state rules for restoring voting rights. For a quick look at restoring voting rights for people with criminal convictions, check this U.S. Department of Justice state-by-state guide.

Brief historical context of felony disenfranchisement

More than 4 million people in the U.S. are barred from voting because of a felony conviction, according to estimates from The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for “effective and humane responses to crime.” News outlets commonly cite reports and policy briefs from The Sentencing Project, and their data is used in academic research, including in one of the papers featured below.

Over the past quarter century, about half of state legislatures have moved to restore voting rights to those disenfranchised due to a felony conviction.

“Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights to people living with felony convictions,” according to an October 2023 report from The Sentencing Project. “As a result, over 2 million Americans have regained the right to vote.”

State felony disenfranchisement laws arose during the post-Civil War era, when the Reconstruction Act of 1867 affirmed universal suffrage for all men.

“At that point, two interconnected trends combined to make disenfranchisement a major obstacle for newly enfranchised Black voters,” according to a 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “First, lawmakers — especially in the South — implemented a slew of criminal laws designed to target Black citizens. And nearly simultaneously, many states enacted broad disenfranchisement laws that revoked voting rights from anyone convicted of any felony.”

Mississippi is something of an outlier among the strictest states in that people convicted of felonies in federal court do not lose voting rights there, but people convicted of felonies in state courts for a range of crimes do lose the right to vote, according to the U.S. Department of Justice guide on voting rights for people with criminal convictions. The right to vote in Mississippi can only be restored by pardon or legislative action, according to the guide.

Rules for restoring voting rights in states that allow it can also vary. Even if the right is “automatically” reinstated, often individuals must still proactively re-register to vote, according to the NCSL.

Below, we have gathered and summarized six studies that explore demographic trends in felony disenfranchisement as well as how felony disenfranchisement affects political engagement and electoral democracy in U.S. states. The research roundup is followed by story ideas and interview questions for journalists.

The findings show …

• Public health outcomes tend to be worse in states where democratic processes are affected by policies such as felony disenfranchisement.
• People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia and when they support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs.
• Felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher where Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms.
• Restoring voting rights to people convicted of felonies is unlikely to meaningfully affect election results — but those who have their voting rights restored tend to feel they personally have more of a say in how their state governments operate.

Research roundup

Electoral Democracy and Working-Age Mortality
Jennifer Karas Montez, Kent Jason Cheng and Jacob Grumbach. The Milbank Quarterly, May 2023.

The study: The authors explore the relationship between the democratic health of a state and the physical health of people aged 25 to 64 in that state. They use the State Democracy Index, which measures the health of each state’s democratic processes based on 51 indicators, such as felony disenfranchisement, the availability of absentee voting and voter registration requirements. (The index was developed by Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.) The authors of the paper also use mortality rates for working-age people from the National Center for Health Statistics.

The findings: Working-age mortality and electoral democratic health are strongly associated, the authors find. States that improve their electoral democracy rating from “moderate” to “high” could see their working-age mortality rates fall 3.2% for men and 2.7% for women, according to estimates from statistical models the authors developed. The authors further estimate that state improvements to electoral democracy are associated with lower drug poisoning deaths for men and women, along with deaths from infectious diseases and homicides.

In the authors’ words: “According to historians … real improvements in population health in the mid- to late 1800s in industrializing countries such as England came about largely because of increased voting power of the public and, partly as a consequence, the rise of government interventions such as sanitation and clean water systems to improve social conditions for everyone. The historical association between rising democratic functioning and declining mortality is the flip side of today’s association between declining democratic functioning and rising mortality.”

Exclusionary Citizenship: Public Punitiveness and Support for Voting Restrictions
Cecilia Chouhy, Peter Lehmann and Alexa Singer. Justice Quarterly, August 2022.

The study: The authors explore links between individual support for “anti-welfarism, anti-immigrant attitudes and symbolic racism,” and support for disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies. Symbolic racism refers to “an apathy toward racial inequalities and a rejection of efforts to mitigate them,” the authors write. Specifically, the authors analyze results from 7,453 adults who took the 2020 American National Election Survey, a public opinion poll conducted during the weeks before and after presidential elections, operated by collaboration of several major universities.

The findings: People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia or symbolic racism. They also tend to support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs such as social security, education and aid to people with low incomes.

Support for the death penalty, likewise, is associated with support for felony disenfranchisement, the authors find. This association is strongest among Republicans, compared with Democrats. Among Democrats, attitudes aligned with symbolic racism are more likely to lead to support for felony disenfranchisement, compared with Republicans and independents.

In the authors’ words: “Our findings suggest that racial animosities, as well as xenophobia and support for immigration restrictions, not only are correlated with attitudes favoring punitive criminal justice policies but also explain differences in public support for punitive and non-punitive forms of voting restrictions.”

Sick And Tired of Being Excluded: Structural Racism in Disenfranchisement As A Threat To Population Health Equity
Patricia Homan and Tyson Brown. Health Affairs, February 2022.

The study: Does felony disenfranchisement affect health during middle and later life? The authors seek to shed light on this question. They use data from The Sentencing Project and the U.S. Census Bureau to assess whether Black people in each state are over- or under-represented among those disenfranchised due to felony convictions. Then, they compare that information with results from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan, a nationally representative survey of adults over age 51 that is “the most widely used dataset for studying health and well-being in later life,” the authors write. The datasets are from 2016, the most recent available.

“This study focused on Black and White people because they have the highest and lowest rates of disenfranchisement, respectively,” the authors explain in the paper. The final analysis excludes 15 states that have relatively small populations of Black people. The 35 states included account for 92% of the U.S. white population and 99% of the Black population, the authors write.

The findings: During the year studied, Black people were proportionally disenfranchised at a higher rate than white people in all 35 states, but particularly in states in the North, Mountain West and West. States in the South tended to have lower rates of proportional Black disenfranchisement. The authors find that felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher in states where older Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms and difficulty performing everyday tasks, such as using a telephone, shopping, bathing, dressing and getting in and out of bed. There was no association found between disenfranchisement among Black people and these health outcomes among white people.

In the authors’ words: “Consistent with the growing recognition that social policies are health policies, enacting laws to dismantle racialized felony disenfranchisement would likely improve the health of Black people and make progress toward achieving health equity.”

How Often do People Vote While Incarcerated? Evidence from Maine and Vermont
Ariel White and Avery Nguyen. The Journal of Politics, January 2022.

The study: The authors begin with data from the 2018 elections across 17 states that disenfranchise people while they are incarcerated for felony offenses and explore what the turnout rates would have to have been for those individuals to swing elections if they were granted the right to vote while incarcerated. The highest was Massachusetts, where the closest race in 2018 was decided by 654,161 votes — if the 8,870 people in that state who were disenfranchised due to felony incarcerations had been able to vote, they would have had to vote at a rate of 8,090%, an impossibility, and all would have had to have voted against the winning candidate. The lowest was Nevada, where those incarcerated for felonies would have had to vote at a rate of 36%, and all against the winning candidate, to swing the closest election held there that year.

The authors note that “studies of people who have regained their right to vote after incarceration find that they participate at much lower rates than other votes,” and then turn to whether the question of whether people incarcerated for felonies vote in the two states, Maine and Vermont, where they are never disenfranchised. They use prison records and state voter files to explore this question.

The findings: About one-in-three people serving time in Vermont for felony crimes were registered to vote during the 2018 election, while 8% of all people incarcerated for felonies voted. Similarly, in Maine, about one-third of those incarcerated for felony crimes were registered in 2018, while around 6% of people incarcerated for felonies cast ballots.

In the authors’ words: “This conclusion — that from-prison voter turnout is low even in Vermont and Maine and would be unlikely to affect state elections elsewhere — does not imply that we think states should avoid such policies. Rather, we suggest that policy makers should consider moral arguments rather than casual predictions about how these laws might change elections. People have made moral claims both for and against re-enfranchising people with felony convictions, highlighting ideas about paying one’s debt to society, the racist history of disfranchisement laws, and the meaning of citizenship. Our findings suggest that such normative debates are at least as relevant as the possibility of imprisoned voters changing election outcomes.”

Neighborhoods and Felony Disenfranchisement: The Case of New York City
Kevin Morris. Urban Affairs Review, September 2021.

The study: Morris explores whether voter turnout rates by neighborhood during the 2017 New York City mayoral election are linked to the proportion of people disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, by neighborhood. In particular, Morris identifies “lost voters,” which he defines as people with a history of voting before their disenfranchisement due to felony conviction. The data Morris analyzes includes felony incarceration and parole records since 1990, which he obtained via public records request from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Morris also uses a snapshot of publicly available, statewide voter data from April 2018, which includes whether individuals voted in the past as well as those who lost eligibility and were removed from the active voter file. He identifies 2,518 “lost voters” during the 2017 election.

The findings: Neighborhoods with lost voters also had lower average turnout rates in the 2017 election than the overall average neighborhood. In addition, neighborhoods without a lost voter during the 2016 general election that then lost at least one voter by 2017 also had lower turnout rates.

Morris identifies clear demographic differences between neighborhoods with lost voters and those without. The median income for a neighborhood with lost voters was $47,806, on average, compared with $65,495 in the overall average neighborhood. The percentage of Black people in neighborhoods with lost voters was 41%, on average, compared with the overall average of 22%. The percentage of Latino people in neighborhoods with lost voters was also higher than the overall average — 36% to 29%. Registered Democrats made up 77% of the electorate in neighborhoods with lost voters, on average, compared with an overall average of 68%.

In the author’s words: “Individuals who live in neighborhoods where police activity is relatively limited may interpret the incarceration of a neighbor as a largely individual phenomenon … In the neighborhoods where policing is most prevalent — often, lower-income Black communities — the incarceration of a neighbor might not be interpreted so individualistically. It may, rather, be interpreted as another reminder of the government’s unfairness. If a would-be voter finds herself soured on political participation because of her neighbor’s incarceration, she may be less likely to cast a ballot.”

Restoring Voting Rights: Evidence that Reversing Felony Disenfranchisement Increases Political Efficacy
Victoria Shineman. Policy Studies, December 2019.

The study: Shineman explores what happens to the political efficacy of people who have been convicted of felonies and disenfranchised after their right to vote is then restored or made eligible to be restored. Political efficacy refers to “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process,” according to foundational political science research from the mid-1950s.

Shineman conducted a survey of people with felony convictions eligible to have their voting rights restored, before and after the 2017 statewide elections in Virginia. In 2016, an executive gubernatorial order and subsequent court ruling allowed people convicted of felonies in Virginia to have their voting rights restored, one at a time, by executive order. By the 2017 election, more than 150,000 people had their right to vote restored, according to the paper.

Those who had their voting rights restored were notified by mail at their last known residence. But people convicted of felonies are “a particularly transient population,” Shineman writes, meaning many of those now able to vote did not know it.

Shineman convened a panel of 98 people convicted of felonies, divided into three groups, to assess their political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle. The first group was told the state sought to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies, and Shineman offered to look up their registration status. The second group received the same treatment, plus they were told about the upcoming election, how to register and where to vote. The third was a placebo group that was encouraged to engage in civic activity by volunteering in their neighborhoods, but not told that they could potentially register to vote, or about the election. Participants were surveyed about their feelings of political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle.

The findings: Among participants in the first two groups, about 21% learned from Shineman that their right to vote had been restored. Shineman notes that the sample size is small, which somewhat limits the strength of the results. With that caveat in mind, the treatment groups exhibited higher rates of political efficacy than the placebo group. For example, about 90% of people in those groups agreed with the statement “my vote makes a difference,” compared with 73% in the placebo group. Some 81% of participants in the treatment groups said they felt qualified to serve in a jury, compared with 76% of those in the placebo group. And 68% of the treatment participants said they “feel politically empowered,” compared with 57% of the placebo group.

In the author’s words: “Regardless as to whether citizens choose to exercise their voting rights, the act of restoring rights alone causes citizens to feel more empowered, more capable, and to be more likely to seek out opportunities for participatory engagement in the future.”

Suggested story ideas and interview questions

• When telling the stories of people affected by felony disenfranchisement, including family members and community members, delve into the consequences of losing the right to vote. Try to move from abstract (“losing the right to vote”) to concrete effects, such as financial, physical health and mental health outcomes.
• If there are local conflicts between people advocating for and against felony disenfranchisement, use research to inform or question each side’s arguments.
• Use census data and information from organizations like The Sentencing Project to report local or statewide demographic differences in felony disenfranchisement. Who is the practice disproportionately affecting?

The post Felony disenfranchisement in the US: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In 2022, 30 public radio stations across 25 states asked listeners for their biggest questions in advance of that year’s election. What they learned: People really want to know how to judge the judges on their ballot.

The effort was part of the Midterm Election Project from America Amplified, a nationwide community journalism engagement initiative for public media, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Voters are often confronted at the polling booth with a list of judicial candidates. For civil court judge. Appellate court judge. Surrogate’s court judge. These positions are important because local and state judges, by the nature of the job, hold massive sway over people’s lives every day. Yet many voters have no idea who the candidates vying for these positions are or what kinds of work the various judges do. 

“When it comes to the public’s interaction with the government, with public spaces, lower courts are really where the rubber meets the road,” says Douglas Keith, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a founding editor of State Court Report. “If someone has to go to court for some reason, whether it’s as a party in a case or because of jury duty, these are the courts they are most likely going to interact with as citizens.”

Voters are often interested in the judicial philosophy of candidates running, particularly those running for state high courts, which “are increasingly being asked to decide the highest profile legal fights of today,” Keith adds. For example, on June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion afforded by its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Since then, abortion legality has returned to the states, where lawsuits over legislation or constitutional language allowing or prohibiting abortions could end with decisions by state high courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court only accepts around 2% of the roughly 7,000 cases brought for its consideration yearly, meaning on many legal matters state courts have the final say. One philosophical area where judges often differ is whether foundational legal documents, such as constitutions, are or are not open to interpretation given current cultural contexts and case precedents.

News audiences are also interested in what candidates are or would be like on the bench — courteous or belligerent? — often referred to as their judicial temperament.

Finally, news audiences also need a basic understanding of the hierarchy of their local and state legal systems and how cases move through the courts.

In advance of the 2024 U.S. general elections, we’re offering eight tips to empower newsrooms to create judicial election guides, which, as of now, are few and far between.

To help develop this guide to creating your judicial election guide, we reached out to journalists at three news outlets that have done it before: Spotlight PA, LAist and The Nevada Independent.

• For last year’s election cycle, Spotlight PA created more than a dozen voting guides on a variety of topics, from how to vote by mail to state Supreme Court races to how voters can check their registration or change parties.
  
  “There’s no one way to run a court system in this country, and I think voters get confused about how these elections work, through no fault of their own, because they’re often the elections that get the absolute least attention,” says Katie Meyer, government editor at Spotlight PA, an independent nonprofit newsroom focusing on state government and policy, founded in 2019 by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
  
  
• Brianna Lee is an engagement producer with LAist, part of Southern California Public Radio. Lee, with reporter Caitlin Hernández, put together that outlet’s 2022 guide to judicial candidates running for Los Angeles Superior Court. She notes that the more public information that is available on judicial candidates, the better equipped voters are to “put responsible people in positions of power.”
  
  “And the less informed you are, and the less information is out there, the more that the people in power get to be put into those seats of power by a shrinking number of people,” Lee adds.
  
  
• For its 2022 guide, The Nevada Independent, a nonprofit news outlet founded by veteran political journalist Jon Ralston, convened and sought insight from a panel of twelve experts from various legal disciplines, including attorneys who had appeared before many of the candidates running for judgeships in that state.
  
  “Our mission should be, as journalists, to keep the populace as fully informed as possible,” Ralston says. “This is one area where people are woefully uninformed, and it’s not their fault. But if you haven’t had experience in front of a judge, you won’t know much about judging.”

With insights from Meyer, Keith, Lee and Ralston, here’s how to get started creating your own judicial election guide in 2024 and beyond.

1. Get to know how your state and local court systems operate.

Before creating a voter guide, it’s important to thoroughly understand the hierarchy of the court system in the state or region you cover, as well as how judges end up on the ballot.

In many states, there are trial courts that hear cases about alleged crimes, specialized courts, such as family courts, which hear civil cases, appellate courts that hear appeals to criminal or civil verdicts, and a high court, often but not always called the supreme court, that has the final say on cases at the state level.

Court systems differ state to state. For example, in New York, judges of the Supreme Court are not the last but the first to hear certain felony cases, followed by intermediate appellate courts. The hierarchy of criminal and civil cases in New York ends at the Court of Appeals.

These resources from the Brennan Center are a great place to start understanding judicial systems:

Significant Figures in Judicial Selection | Judicial Selection: An Interactive Map

The Brennan Center has distilled high level trends of how judges gain office, across the country and at various court levels. In 39 states, voters choose judges in public elections or choose whether to retain previously appointed judges. These latter elections happen in 16 states and are called retention elections. A governor makes an initial judicial appointment, then, after a term, these judges run unopposed in a simple yes-or-no vote to keep their jobs.

In yet another example of why it is important to understand how judges gain office, consider the system in New Mexico, where “judges are initially appointed by the governor, must then compete in a partisan election during the next general election, and then are reselected in unopposed retention elections,” according to the Brennan Center.

State rules often, but not always, require that candidates at least be licensed to practice law in the state to become a judge.

Ballotpedia offers a rundown of qualification requirements by state here.

Finally, it is a good idea to interrogate how much of a choice voters really have in competitive elections. Do judges in your area often run unopposed? If so, how did that name end up on the ballot and why are there no other options?

“New York is a good example of this, the process to get on the ballot is more opaque,” says Keith of the Brennan Center. “Many voters will show up to vote for judgeships in New York and what they will see when they look at the ballot is that the decision has actually already been made for them. There is no alternative choice.”

2. Make a plan you can realistically execute, and remember that something is better than nothing.

The guides from Spotlight PA, LAist and The Nevada Independent are different and were produced in different ways, reflecting the editorial judgment, staffing abilities and audience needs of each organization.

One big thing they have in common: they got done.

“Honestly, if you have anything, that’s better than nothing,” Lee says.

Consider the scope of your project and the effort required. There’s more than one way to create a good guide, even with a small team.

Spotlight PA dedicated several reporters and editors to creating their multi-topic guides and interactive tool.

“You’ve got to put the manpower behind it,” Meyer says. “But if this is the kind of thing you care about, I can’t recommend it enough, because our readers really found it useful.”

For its 2022 guide to the Los Angeles Superior Court Judge race, LAist repurposed a 2018 on-air interview with Stuart Rice, a former president of the California Judges Association, who provided useful context on what the court does and how best to evaluate judicial candidates. Lee and Hernandez then compiled and listed information on each candidate, including their websites and candidate ratings from a local bar association.

The Nevada Independent sent a detailed questionnaire to each candidate, asking for their specific areas of legal expertise, whether there were legal areas they were less confident in presiding over, how the context surrounding a case could affect sentencing decisions, and other information that could affect how candidates would perform.

The panel of legal experts also provided editors with snippets of their personal perspectives on the judges. For example, one panelist described Judge Deborah Westbrook, who won a six-year term on the Nevada Court of Appeals, as “probably one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever interacted with.”

3. Enlist outside support if staffing is a challenge. Local law schools and bar associations can help.

Spotlight PA is specifically focused on government and policy, so it makes sense they would devote significant staff time to their guide.

“But I’ve also done it as a single reporter who doesn’t have that kind of support,” Meyer says. “There are resources. I really recommend your state bar association.”

The General Bar has links to state bar associations here.

This is essentially what LAist did for their 2022 guide, compiling the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s publicly available ratings — “well qualified,” “qualified” or “not qualified” — of attorneys running for judgeships. Those ratings are “based on a lot of interviews and personal recommendations and references that a whole panel of the bar association does every single election,” Lee says.

But reporters should be aware there may be elements of the ratings process that are not transparent. If possible, ask bar association officials for clarity on the step-by-step process behind their ratings. Still, Lee notes that such ratings are often one of the best gauges available for assessing candidates.

In addition to legal associations that can give a sense of a candidate’s qualifications and potential temperament on the bench, lean on local law schools for research help. This is what The Nevada Independent did for its 2022 guide, turning to students at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Setting up the arrangement was straightforward.

“We went to them and said, ‘We want to partner with you on this,’” Ralston says.

The law students researched the cases the candidates had handled either as judges or attorneys, producing a report on each candidate for the Nevada Independent editors. If, on the questionnaire, a candidate pointed to a case they were proud of having argued or presided over, the law students would research that case to assess whether the candidate was accurately describing it.

For The Nevada Independent, the biggest resource lift was not editorial but technical, in creating web templates and pages. The students benefit too, Ralston says.

“There’s been a couple of deans now that we’ve gone through, but both have been enthusiastic in saying, ‘This is a great exercise for the law students,’” he says.

4. Ground your reporting in real cases having to do with well-known people.

As you explore the ins and outs of how the judicial system works in your coverage area, take note of highly publicized cases involving well-known people. Grounding the legal process with names audiences are familiar with is a useful way to present the information. “It kind of tethers it to reality,” says Meyer.

Spotlight PA, in its interactive tool, used the example of a drug and weapons case against rapper Meek Mill, who was born and raised in Philadelphia. Mill was arrested in 2007 then sentenced to jail in the Philadelphia Court of Commons Pleas, according to Spotlight PA. Over the intervening decade, judges on the state Supreme Court, the highest court, and the Superior Court, one of the state’s appellate courts, granted Mill bail and eventually vacated the conviction.

“Mill’s high-profile case illustrates the circuitous path cases can take through the commonwealth’s justice system — and also, the ease with which convicted offenders can find themselves back in prison thanks to long parole terms,” writes Spotlight PA democracy editor Elizabeth Estrada.

5. Dig into the case history of judges running for office.

Another daunting part of creating a judicial voting guide: wading through and understanding years, potentially, of decisions across multiple candidates.

These decisions are likely to be most informative among higher court judges. Keith notes that lower courts often do not write lengthy opinions. Judges on higher courts may or may not offer such writings, which often comes down to the “legal culture” of the state, he says.

Look online for high court opinions, and even lower court decisions. Many states, including California, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Florida make appellate and high court opinions, and sometimes lower court decisions, available online.

Still, when these opinions do exist, they can provide valuable insight into a judge’s jurisprudence, or legal philosophy, which is something voters choosing high court judges especially want to know about.

Reading through past decisions is “a little easier than a lot of people think it’s going to be, even if you’re not a lawyer,” says Meyer, who adds that, in her experience, judges often write using plain language. “And if you do get lost, which I have so many times, call a lawyer. Have a lawyer kind of walk you through.”

Wondering if a candidate has faced judicial misconduct allegations in the past? States typically have independent commissions that investigate allegations of judicial misconduct. Decisions are often readily available online.

6. Talk to recently retired judges for insights on how the judicial system works, as well as the ideal temperament of potential judges.

Judges are unlikely to comment on pending cases, but sitting judges and recently retired judges can help journalists and audiences understand how courts function day-to-day while providing insight into the judicial temperaments that tend to do well within a system.

Ask questions like, “What personality characteristics are necessary for someone to do a good job at the job you yourself did for years?” But also know that some retired judges may be guarded against inviting public scrutiny to the courts where they spent their professional careers.

“You will find former judges who chafe at the [public] attention a bit,” Keith says. “We will hear judges who say, ‘You can’t assess the quality of a judge based on a few data points.’ There might be some truth to that. But it also might just be that judges are comfortable in the system that they came up in, and increased attention and accountability can make some of them nervous.”

The Nevada Independent’s panel of legal experts, which included several attorneys who had appeared before the candidates running for judgeships in 2022, brought insight into the judicial temperament of those candidates. Published comments from panelists about the candidates included things like, “very prepared, very smart,” “fair minded” and “the type of person that is going to pick things up quickly.”

7. Follow the money. There is more of it than ever in judicial races.

The groups and individuals funding candidates’ races can say a lot about the candidates themselves and can even influence decisions, Keith says. To learn more, Keith recommends the research of Michael Kang at Northwestern University and Joanna Shepherd at Emory University, collected in their 2023 book Free to Judge: The Power of Campaign Money in Judicial Elections.

Elections where the ideological balance of the court is at stake tend to attract the most money, according to the latest Brennan Center report on money in judicial elections, covering the 2021 to 2022 cycle. Total spending on judicial races topped $100 million, twice any other midterm cycle. In 2023, donors spent more than $50 million on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race alone, the report notes.

“The decision eliminating the federal right to an abortion crystalized the reality that as federal courts limit the protections provided by the U.S. Constitution, state courts will increasingly decide today’s highest-stakes legal fights,” Keith writes.

Use campaign finance watchdog FollowTheMoney to start understanding and reporting on the flow of money into individual campaigns. Janet Protasiewicz, for example, raised $16.7 million during her winning race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023, according to FollowTheMoney.

8. Remember: Your audience wants and needs information on judicial candidates.

Lee, Meyer and Ralston all say that the guides their outlets produced have been well received by their audiences. Voters want information about judicial candidates, they say, and audiences are grateful for any amount of information news organizations are able to publish.

Audience feedback can also inform future judicial election guides. Spotlight PA, for example, began creating guides on retention elections because they heard from readers asking for more about those elections.

“People generally will only tell you when they don’t like something when you’re in the business we’re in,” says Ralston, the Nevada Independent founder. “‘You made this mistake. You’re biased,’ all the rest of that. But I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of positive feedback we got from people saying, ‘I’m taking this guide into the voting booth with me. Thank you for doing this.’”

Additional resources

The Politics of Judicial Elections, 2021–2022
Douglas Keith. The Brennan Center for Justice, New York University, January 2024.

Why Judges Matter
Elizabeth Estrada. Spotlight PA, October 2023.

Free to Judge: The Power of Campaign Money in Judicial Elections
Michael Kang and Joanna Shepherd. Stanford University Press, August 2023.

Significant Figures in Judicial Selection
The Brennan Center for Justice. New York University, April 2023.

Judicial Selection: An Interactive Map
The Brennan Center for Justice. New York University, October 2022.

LA Superior Court Judges
Brianna Lee and Caitlin Hernández. LAist, October 2022.

The Indy 2022 Judicial Race Project
The Nevada Independent, 2022.

Judicial Temperament, Explained
Terry Maroney. Judicature, Summer 2021.

Originalism Versus Living Constitutionalism: The Conceptual Structure of the Great Debate
Lawrence Solum. Northwestern University Law Review, April 2019.

The People’s Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America
Jed Shugerman. Harvard University Press, February 2012.

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Pop quiz: Which of these headlines appeared atop a real news story?

(A) Zelenskyy pleads to US Congress: ‘We need you right now’

(B) Biden signed bill to mandate climate change curriculum in all K-8 classrooms

If you answered A, you’re correct — and not alone.

About 3 in 4 adults in the U.S. can discern real political news headlines from fake ones, finds a new paper, “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are About Political News,” forthcoming in the American Economic Review.

The findings are based on a dozen quizzes completed by a total of nearly 8,000 participants representative of the national population, conducted by Charles Angelucci, an assistant professor of applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Andrea Prat, an economics professor at Columbia University, from June 2019 to March 2022.

Angelucci and Prat find participants selected the real headlines 75% of the time, on average. While participants overall were much more likely than not to pick the true headline, demographic factors, not partisanship, were a stronger predictor of avoiding fake news, according to a subsequent statistical analysis the authors conducted. For example, younger, less educated people are less likely to pick true headlines, compared with those who are older and have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

And if you answered B above, don’t worry. That headline was written by a real journalist and meant to be plausible — but it never happened. President Joe Biden did not sign a bill mandating that educators teach climate change in elementary schools.

Both answers are from a quiz Angelucci and Prat conducted in March 2022. Participants had one minute to record which headlines they thought were true and which were fabricated.

“The average person is very well capable of distinguishing mainstream real news,” says Angelucci.

The findings “cast doubt” on media narratives that objective truth is dying, write Angelucci and Prat.

“It’s a really impressive paper, and the most comprehensive and rigorous study I’ve seen that assesses the level of knowledge, the level of news knowledge, in the mass public,” says Andy Guess, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, who was not involved with the research but provided early feedback.

Angelucci and Prat recruited four journalists to create the fake headlines. The journalists came from television, radio and local newspapers. They also selected the real headlines used in the surveys, drawn from Reuters wire articles on U.S. politics and based on the journalists’ judgment of their editorial significance.

(The last survey, conducted in March 2022, was drawn from Associated Press stories, because Reuters went behind a paywall in April 2021.)

Specifically, Angelucci and Prat instructed the journalists to put on their editor-in-chief hats: Pick the most important stories in U.S. politics to cover in a given week. The paper succeeds in creating a procedure that can be used in future research, Guess says, in relying on journalists to select a sample of newsworthy, real articles published by a global news outlet that covers nearly every notable political and policy event.

Coming up with a well-defined, replicable procedure to sample articles has been “one of the key challenges,” in analyzing news knowledge, Guess says.

Trouble identifying truth across socioeconomic groups

The three most recent survey rounds, conducted in October 2020, February 2021 and March 2022, included two quizzes each. One quiz offered three real headlines and three fabricated headlines created by the journalists. The other quiz had three real headlines and three fake headlines that circulated online, provided by fact checking site Snopes.

The real headlines appeared between May 2019 and March 2022, and were presented to participants within weeks or days of publication. Overall, the average fake headline, whether created by the journalists or from Snopes, was selected by participants 25% of the time, on average.

Angelucci and Prat then used the data they collected to build statistical models to explore differences in people’s ability to evaluate news across socioeconomic and partisan lines. Survey participants were drawn from panels convened by polling firm YouGov, which provides participants’ demographic information, such as age, family income, education and race or ethnicity, along with political party affiliation.

Statistical modeling is a fairly common way social scientists analyze survey results. It allows them to control for what are called latent characteristics — things researchers cannot observe, such as how plausible individual participants perceived the true and fake news headlines to be.

Based on the model, white, college-educated men under age 52, with relatively high incomes, had the highest odds, 89%, of choosing the correct answer when presented with a true and a false headline. Women under age 52 with lower incomes and education levels who were racial or ethnic minorities had the lowest odds, 71%, of selecting the true headline.

Despite the stark difference between some socioeconomic groups, even those more likely to select the fake headline still had a good chance of picking the true headline.

“They’re still more likely to get it right than wrong,” Angelucci says.

Those more politically engaged and likely to vote, who also tend to be older and have a college education, are more likely to choose the true headline, according to the model.

“We don’t know why young people are not as well informed as older people,” Angelucci says. “But age is the single most important predictor of knowledge.”

Angelucci notes, however, that social media confounds this trend, because “people who go on social media tend to be less informed than the general population,” he says.

The analytic results suggest partisanship is not a major factor in discerning true headlines. Overall, the model indicates people presented with one true and one fake headline have an 83% chance of picking the true headline when the news was positive about their political party — that ticked down just two percentage points, to 81%, when the news was unfavorable to their party.

Recognizing truth in a ‘post-truth’ world

The idea that Americans are living in a “post-truth world” gained some immediate currency during the second half of the 2010s, though the idea has existed since at least the 1990s. Angelucci and Prat write that the phrases “death of truth” and “post-truth world” have become “commonplace” in popular books and other media, “and are often accompanied by calls for immediate action to counter this risk.”

The post-truth narrative rose amid a tempest of political upheaval, exemplified by the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, and technological upheaval, in the form of proliferating social media allowing unfettered self-publishing of dangerous conspiracies.

While it is difficult to narrow down a precise and widely accepted definition of “post-truth,” the phrase “especially refers to a sociopolitical condition perceived as rifer than ever before with dishonesty and distrust, inaccuracies or false knowledge, all corresponding to a crisis of shared trusted adjudicating authorities,” writes Jayson Harsin, an associate professor of communication, media and culture at the American University of Paris, in a December 2018 paper in the journal Communication.

The post-truth world that fascinated many in the news media during the waning years of the 2010s was aptly captured by Barack Obama during the waning days of his presidency. In a November 2016 article, Obama told New Yorker editor David Remnick that “the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

In her 2018 book, “The Death of Truth,” former New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani likewise wondered: “How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance?”

When Kakutani’s book was released, Trump was making nearly six misleading claims per day, according to a Washington Post tally. Those misleading claims were being shared to varying degrees across social media.

One literature review, published in November 2021 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, identified several analyses indicating that the proliferation of social media has contributed to political polarization.

While the new paper does not eliminate questions on what it means to live in a post-truth society, it does suggest, at some basic level, that many Americans are yet able to agree on the truth and falsity of political news.

Angelucci doesn’t dispute that polarization is real. What’s interesting for future research, and troubling at the same time, he says, is what truth means.

“It must be that we just — it’s not so much interpret the information differently, though that, too,” he says. “We literally think about the world differently. And so, throwing information at people, unfortunately, will not solve the problem.”

3 tips for covering political misinformation online

Guess, the Princeton professor, has extensively studied how social media use influences the U.S. electorate, including how algorithms and reshares affect political polarization in recent papers published in Science.

For journalists covering online misinformation, he offers three tips based on his research and other studies on misinformation.

1. Be specific about who is exposed to misinformation and avoid overplaying the extent to which misinformation affects all voters.

Certain segments of the voting population are “awash” in misinformation or, at least, are readily exposed to “news content that is produced by untrustworthy sources that lack standards of journalistic verification,” he says.

For example, fake news tends to circulate most among people over age 65, as well as those who are more politically conservative. While these trends are not fixed and could change in the coming years, they have held since around the mid-2010s.

“The misinformation problem is often stated in very general terms,” Guess says. “In other words, as if misinformation is equally likely to be seen by anyone on social media.”

2. Think of misinformation as a supply and demand equation, and not necessarily the end of the world as we know it.

There is clearly demand among some individuals and groups for false information, Guess says. Why do people seek out information that aligns with their politics, even if that information is untrue?

There are also clearly a host of people and groups willing to produce it.

“Every time there’s a new technological development, like generative AI, the tendency is to frame it as a sort of, all-encompassing technology that’s going to manipulate a passive public without their awareness,” Guess says. “I’m not ruling out that something like that could happen, but I think often the assumption that will happen is sort of baked into the coverage, as opposed to just looking at the nuts and bolts of, who is producing it, what the reach is, and what the impact will be on real people’s news diets?”

3. Give context and remember that denominators are your friend.

Numbers are often reported without context, Guess observes. Say a piece of misinformation created by a Russian troll farm was shared on X, formerly Twitter, a million times. How does that compare with the total number of shares on X over a given time frame, or to shares of real news across the platform?

“You need to take the denominator into account,” Guess says. “And think about also the perspective of individual users. What proportion of their daily news diet are we talking about? And it’s probably just a miniscule fraction. If journalists think these numbers are important, then context is really critical.”

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The U.S. economy is in good health, on the whole, according to national indicators watched closely by economists and business reporters. For example, unemployment is low and the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows stronger than expected hiring at the end of 2023.

Yet news reports and opinion polls show many Americans are pessimistic on the economy — including in swing states that will loom large in the 2024 presidential election. Some recent polls indicate the economy is by far the most important issue heading into the election.

Journalists covering the economy in the coming months, along with the 2024 political races, can use academic research to inform their interviews with sources and provide audiences with context.

The studies featured in the roundup below explore how people filter the national economy through their personal financial circumstances — and those circumstances vary widely in the U.S. The top tenth of households by wealth are worth $7 million on average, while the bottom half are worth $51,000 on average, according to the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

We’ve also included several questions, based on the research, which you can use in interviews with policy makers and others commenting on the economy, or as a jumping off point for thinking about this topic.

The economic state of play

Similarly, 78% of people who responded to a December 2023 Gallup poll rated current economic conditions as fair or poor. Gallup pollsters have reported similar figures since COVID-19 shutdowns began in March 2020.

Explanations and insights

The tone of news coverage is one possible explanation for the disconnect between actual economic performance and how individuals perceive it, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis. Since 2018 — including during and after the recession sparked by COVID-19 — economic reporting has taken on an increasingly negative tone, despite economic fundamentals strengthening in recent years, the analysis finds. The Brookings authors use data from the Daily News Sentiment Index, a measure of “positive” and “negative” economic news, produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The six studies featured below offer further insights. All are based on surveys and polls, some of which the researchers conducted themselves. Several also explore economic perception in other countries.

The findings suggest:

• Economic inequality tends to lead people into thinking the economy is zero-sum, meaning one group’s economic success comes at the expense of others.
• In both wealthy and poorer countries, belief in conspiracy theories leads people to think the economy is declining — things were once OK, now they are not.
• In the U.S., political partisanship may be a more accurate predictor of economic perception than actual economic performance.
• Households at higher risk of experiencing poverty are less likely to offer a positive economic assessment, despite good macroeconomic news.

Research roundup

Economic Inequality Fosters the Belief That Success Is Zero-Sum
Shai Davidai. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, November 2023.

The study: How does economic inequality in the U.S. affect whether individuals think prosperity is zero-sum? A zero-sum outlook indicates that “the gains of the few come at the expense of the many,” writes Davidai, an assistant professor of business at Columbia University, who surveyed 3,628 U.S. residents across 10 studies to explore the relationship between inequality and zero-sum thinking.  

In one study, participants answered questions about how they experience economic inequality in their personal lives. In another, participants read about the salaries of 20 employees at one of three randomly assigned hypothetical companies. The first company had a range of very low and very high salaries. The second had high salaries with little variation. The third had low salaries with little variation. Participants were then asked if they interpreted the distribution of wages as equal or unequal, as well as about their political ideology. Davidai uses several other designs across the 10 surveys.

The findings: Participants who read about the company with highly unequal salaries were more apt to report zero-sum economic beliefs. Overall, when controlling for factors including income, education and political ideology, the perception of the existence of economic inequality led to more zero-sum thinking. Davidai also suggests that while people with higher incomes may not perceive their own success as having resulted from others experiencing loss, the existence of inequality could lead them to think generally about economic gains in zero-sum terms.

The author writes: While “the belief that the rich gain at the expense of the poor helps explain why perceived inequality fosters a view of the world as unjust,” Davidai notes that “zero-sum beliefs may also have some positive implications. Since perceived inequality fosters a view of ‘the rich’ as gaining at others’ expense, it may bolster support for disparity-mitigating policies.”

Multinational Data Show that Conspiracy Beliefs are Associated with the Perception (and Reality) of Poor National Economic Performance
Matthew Hornsey, et. al. European Journal of Social Psychology, October 2022.

The study: Using survey data from 6,723 university students across 36 countries, the authors investigate the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and negative views of current and future national economic success, measured by GDP.

Participants were from Turkey, Colombia, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, Canada, China, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., among others. The same conspiracy can have different levels of meaning to people in different countries. For example, “conspiracy theories about the death of Princess Diana might have different cultural relevance in the United Kingdom than they do in China.” For this reason, the authors kept their questions high-level and asked about participants’ willingness to believe that government actors collude in a systematic way to “hide the truth” from the public.

The findings: People were more likely to believe in conspiracies in countries with relatively low GDP per capita. Conspiracy beliefs were also higher among participants who thought their nation was in poor economic health. Individual financial circumstances among participants were not related to a greater propensity to believe in conspiracies, though the authors note this finding is not generalizable, as their sample consisted of young, mostly middle-class university students. In other words, their sample was not representative of overall national demographics.

The authors write: “These relationships did not seem to be a reflection of a general disagreeable orientation; indeed, the more strongly people self-reported having conspiracy beliefs, the more positively they reported the economic performance of the country in the past. As such, those high in conspiracy belief were characterized by a sense of economic deterioration: things were good once, but not so much now and going forward.”

Evaluating the Unequal Economy: Poverty Risk, Economic Indicators, and the Perception Gap
Timothy Hellwig and Dani Marinova. Political Research Quarterly, March 2022.

The study: Broad, aggregate measures of a nation’s economic health, such as GDP, fail to capture individual economic experiences, the authors write. Instead, the authors analyze poverty risk. To do that, they examined data from 27 countries from European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions surveys, along with public opinion surveys. Data for each country is either from 2009 or 2014. The focus on poverty “captures not only currently experienced problems but also anticipated ones,” the authors write. The authors classify a household as at risk of experiencing poverty if its members were relatively less likely to say that the economy improved over the past year.

The findings: The authors take the position that “poverty risk serves as a filter for macroeconomic information.” For those with no risk of experiencing poverty, strong GDP performance means an overall rosy economic outlook. But those at a higher risk of poverty are less likely to offer a positive assessment of an economy, despite good macroeconomic news, such as GDP growth or low unemployment numbers. Aggregate national data points are “far removed from their daily struggles,” as the authors put it.

The authors write: “We further show that those at risk of poverty know less about economic performance by standard economic indicators but offer more accurate estimates of national poverty rates. These novel findings underline the need to depart from familiar indicators and address how unequal economies structure preferences and policy responses.”

Perception of Economic Inequality Weakens Americans’ Beliefs in Both Upward and Downward Socioeconomic Mobility
Alexander Browman, Mesmin Destin and David Miele. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, March 2022.

The study: Economic mobility works both ways. It can mean moving up the economic ladder or moving down. The authors explore the relationship between strong beliefs that personal financial health in the U.S is unequal, with a small number of people holding disproportionate wealth, and whether stratified economic classes are unlikely to shift. The authors conducted three online surveys, not representative of national demographics, among 618 U.S. adults in 2018 and 2020.

The findings: Participants who strongly believed that a small number of individuals hold most of the wealth in the U.S. were more likely to also believe that the rich would stay rich while people with low income were unlikely to climb the economic ladder.

The researchers also found that Americans’ perceptions of inequality may be becoming more accurate — the participants in the 2020 study more accurately estimated the wealth held by the nation’s richest 20%, compared with participants in the surveys conducted two years prior.

The authors write: “[Participants] believed that social class groups in their country were largely ossified and impermeable, and thus that Americans were unlikely to move out of the groups they were born into.”

Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions
David Brady, John Ferejohn and Brett Parker. American Politics Research, January 2022.

The study: The authors explore what they call a “puzzling” gap in political research: how being a Democrat or Republican might affect people’s perception of whether the national economy is doing well or poorly. Namely, the paper aims to reveal whether the difference in partisan perception has widened across more than two decades, as well as the root causes of any change. The authors examine results from 234 monthly Gallup polls conducted between 1999 and 2020 to see how people responded to Gallup’s ongoing question asking whether the economy is getting better or worse.

The findings: By the end of the period studied, both Democrats and Republicans were more likely to have a dim view of the economy when a president of the opposing party was in office, compared with the beginning of the period studied. The authors observe the biggest gap in September 2020. At that time — roughly six months after widespread COVID-19 shutdowns began — 78% of Republicans thought the economy was getting better, compared with 5% of Democrats. Democrats and Republicans were most closely in agreement on how the economy was doing in January 2009, when only 17% of participants from either party thought the economy was on an upswing, a reflection of the recession happening at the time.

Democrats were more optimistic about the economy when a Democrat was president and the same was true for Republicans during Republican administrations. Independents were not swayed by the party holding the presidency. There were two recessions during the period studied. The authors find that data about the economy is only relevant to economic perceptions during the recessions, “otherwise, individuals are largely content to rely on their partisan affiliation.”

The authors write: “Whatever the role of economic factors in partisan economic perceptions, it is nevertheless clear that political variables are of primary importance. Moreover, it appears the influence of those variables is becoming more pervasive.”

Economic Self-Interest and Americans’ Redistributive, Class, and Racial Attitudes: The Case of Economic Insecurity
Cody Melcher. Political Behavior, March 2021.

The study: Melcher, a sociologist at Loyola University New Orleans, uses the 2016 American National Election Studies survey of more than 4,000 U.S. adults to examine how they perceive their personal economic health, currently and over the coming year. He then examines how these economic perceptions affect participants’ social and political views.

The findings: Respondents worried about experiencing economic hardship in the future tended to have a negative attitude toward powerful and rich business entities. The same negative attitude toward big business was expressed by people expecting to become unemployed during the coming year. Those with high anxiety over facing general economic hardship were also more likely to agree that the federal government should enact policies aimed at improving employment. Those specifically expecting job loss were less likely to perceive the U.S. as a country that, broadly, offers economic opportunities. They also were more likely to align with “the perception that ‘many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead.’”

The author writes: “The evidence presented here makes it clear that existing measures and conceptualizations of economic self-interest — and the body of empirical work that discounts economic factors in American public opinion — need to be rethought in light of economic insecurity.”

Questions for sources

Here are some questions you may find worth asking sources, based on this research:

• For people with lower levels of income, do they see the economic gains for some corresponding to others losing out? Or, do they interpret the economy as an ever-expanding pie, able to accommodate all who have the ability and desire to profit? The answers may help explain individual rationales behind perceptions of national economic performance.  
• Among people who believe in conspiracies, did that belief coincide with a personal economic shock — for example, job loss or a major medical expense?
• Are people able to reflect on the specific reasons they think the economy is doing well when a president of their same political party is in office? For people who have voted in several presidential elections, do they feel they are now less likely than in the past to think the economy would be in good hands under a president of the opposing party?

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