| How this project was done |
This package was a group effort by the students in MASC 375, the Legislative Reporting class at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Mass Communications. Students began working on the project in early February under my direction. (I'm Jeff South, and I teach Legislative Reporting.)
We decided to examine campaign contributions because money has been the focus of heated debate in state and national politics. Our questions were relatively straightforward: Who are the biggest donors to members of the General Assembly? How much have they given, and why?
Through other stories for the class, students had become familiar with the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit group that has built a database of campaign donation records filed by state legislators and candidates.
VPAP is funded by such news organizations as the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Virginian-Pilot, The Roanoke Times, the Daily Press of Newport News, The Washington Post, The Associated Press and the Virginia Press Association. VPAP shares the complete database with the participating newspapers.
The organization also has a Web site where anybody can look up campaign contributions by the recipient or donor. We used this Web site to obtain the data for our project. (A disclaimer: I am treasurer of the VPAP board. But the class project used only information available to the general public - directly from the Web.)
Here is the game plan we followed for the project:
1. We got the data from the VPAP Web site. We had to download the list of contributors for each legislator - one lawmaker at a time. Every student was assigned to obtain the donor lists for 14 legislators. (One lesson learned: the advantage of being a member of VPAP's funding consortium. Participating newspapers get the entire database, with all contributions to all politicians, ready for analysis.)
Each legislator's list named every contributor for the 1999 election cycle. It included the donor's name; how much the donor gave; the donor's general "sector" (such as "Energy, Natural Resources"); the donor's more specific description (like "Electric Utilities"); and the donor's city and state.
We downloaded each list as a text file. In the text file, each piece of information was on a separate line in one long column. But to flow the information into a database, we had to put it into separate columns - with the legislator's name in the first column, the donor's name in the second column, the donation amount in the third column and so on.
2. We used Microsoft Word to convert the data from a one-column list to a multi-column table. (To speed up the process, I also used a program called Monarch to do this "parsing.") We combined all of the data into one file, then imported it into Microsoft Access, a database manager.
3. We analyzed the data with Access. We totaled all the contributions and found that legislators had received $17,703,629 during the 1999 election cycle.
Then we grouped, or subtotaled, the data by donor. This gave us a list of 10,533 contributors and how much each gave to state legislators. We put this list in order from the biggest donor to the smallest. Then we summed the donations for the top 100 contributors, the top 150 contributors and the top 200 contributors.
We found that the top 150 donors gave legislators a total of $9,474,120 - or 54 percent of their donations. We decided to focus on this group of donors.
4. Each student was assigned stories on three of the top donors. From the complete database, I provided the contribution records for each assignment. (The student who was assigned the Medical Society of Virginia, for example, got a list of all the society's donations to legislators.)
Students analyze each donor's records with Microsoft Excel. They looked at which legislators got the most money from a particular contributor, how much money the donor gave to Republicans and Democrats and whether the contributor concentrated donations on a particular legislative committee.
Students were told to combine their research with traditional, shoe-leather reporting - by talking to legislators, donors, lobbyists and other sources.
While most students profiled three top donors, one student wrote an overview story about campaign finance in Virginia.
Want more information? You can download the 14-page document that gave students specific instructions on how to do the project. Warning: The document, in Adobe Acrobat format, is 3.6 megabytes.