This package was a group effort during the Spring 2002 semester by students in MASC 375, the Legislative Reporting course at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Mass Communications.

For the past several years, the General Assembly has defeated legislation requiring the state to audit how politicians spend their campaign funds -- the donations they get from supporters.

When that happened during this year's legislative session, our journalism students decided to examine the expenditure records themselves. We got help from the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit group that promotes public disclosure of campaign finance data. VPAP maintains a database of contributions and expenditures reported by all Virginia legislators, statewide officials and candidates for the past several years. The organization has put the data on the Web so that the general public and the press can access the information.

The Legislative Reporting students focused on the campaign-fund expenditures that members of the General Assembly made last year. The data included 11,927 expenditure records totaling $7,251,956. The class analyzed the data using Microsoft Access, a database manager, and Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet program.

After analyzing the data, we brainstormed story ideas, developed a budget and assigned an article to each student.

To guide us in this project, we read numerous stories about campaign finance in The Washington Post, The Virginian-Pilot and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. (Interesting, after students turned in their stories, The Pilot ran an editorial chastizing the General Assembly for blocking proposals to audit members' campaign expenditures.

If you would like more information about our project, please contact Jeff South, who teaches Legislative Reporting at VCU, or use our feedback form.

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