A. Constituencies

     There are five major sources of news on local government finances. The organizations in these groupings have varied interests in how much the city spends and where the expenditures are directed, and they are concerned about how revenues are gathered. The groups are:

1. Government: the various departments, agencies, bureaus, their directors and employees.
2. Money-providing constituencies: the chamber of commerce, local real estate groups, property-owners associations, taxpayer and merchant groups, banks, state and federal governments.
3. Service-demanding groups: organized groups seeking such city services as welfare, health care, police and fire protection.
4. Organized bureaucracies: public employees, municipal unions, retirement fund manager.
5. Independent groups: League of Women Voters, various municipal information organizations.

     List the people you would seek out for information about their groups' reactions to the present budget. Interview these sources about their priorities in the budget.

B. Bonds

     Cities, counties, school districts and special assessment districts finance major construction by selling bonds. Examine the bonding situation of one of these governmental units and discover:

1. The plans, if any, for new construction; the anticipated interest rate; the value of the bonds.
2. The interest rate on the last bond issue sold.
3. The rating of the unit's borrowing health by one of the rating services (Moody's Investors Service Inc., Standard & Poor's Corp. and Fitch Investors Service Inc.)
4. Taxpayer reaction to issuance of bonds in the past.

C. Schools

     At what level in the budget-making process is the local school district? Write a story on what has been accomplished and what remains to be done. Keep an eye on actual or anticipated major changes from the current budget.

D. Record Keeping

     Go to the office of the city clerk (or the county clerk, if appropriate) and ask for the previous month's (or quarter's or year's) records for the following: marriage licenses, births, divorces, deaths, building permits, trust deeds, real estate transfers. Write a story comparing them with a comparable period one year earlier and five years earlier.

E. Business

     Business conditions directly affect the city's finances. Look into a new business. One way to check on new businesses in the community is through the telephone company, which often makes available new business telephone listings. Interview the owner of a new business about plans, number of people to be hired, reason the business opened, the services to be offered, the owner's background. What are the owner's reactions to the local tax structure?

F. Data

     Some journalists have done stories that show a correlation between income and employment and such factors as crime, delinquency, truancy and poor health. Where income and employment are low, deviant behavior is above average for the city, these stories indicate.
     If your city has clearly identifiable income areas and you can isolate data for other factors in these areas, you can do similar stories. If the data clearly indicate relationships, you should check your findings with local officials and with authorities on the subjects on the campus and elsewhere. These sources may assist you in interpreting your findings.
     Some of the basic data you will need follow:

1. Unemployment: Unemployment by age group, race, ethnic background.
2. Health: Fetal deaths, infant mortality, early infancy diseases, tuberculosis, drug-related deaths, suicide.
3. Crime: Rates and totals for homicide, rape, assault, robbery.
4. Education: Absences, truancies, percentage of students graduating from high school, percentage going to college.

     The Census Bureau has material on population density, housing quality and the racial and ethnic composition of the areas under study.

G. Process

     Here is a story that appeared in a local newspaper. Write a similar story for your community, or select a stage in the current budget and emphasize that in your story.

H. Records

     Make a list of the following over the past 24 hours: fire calls, crime reports, arrests, hospital admissions and discharges, motor vehicle accident reports, births, deaths, marriage licenses issued, business licenses issued, property sales and transfers.

1. Indicate where and from whom such information is available.
2. Include enough information to help an editor decide which items are newsworthy. Indicate why items are worth stories.
3. Select one newsworthy item and write a story.

I. Assessments

     Interview the county assessor and obtain a breakdown of assessed valuation of real and personal property for the current year. Any overall changes from the past year? Any changes in assessments of major property? Ask for the property tax rate; has that changed? Has there been an unusual number of complaints about assessments or has it been a quiet year? Obtain figures on tax-exempt property and list them if you think they might be interesting.

J. Licensing

     State licensing boards decide who can practice medicine, cut hair, build and sell houses, bury the dead. Every state has such boards, some as many as 40, some as few as 10. Their purpose is to establish and enforce standards of professional competence and ethics, but many are criticized as self-serving. Write 300 to 400 words on one state licensing board. Cover the following areas:

1. How are the members appointed? Who recommends, clears, makes the appointments? How powerful is the influence in the appointment process of the trade or professional group that is being regulated?
2. What are some of the board's most recent actions?
3. Has the board been accused of practicing restrictive and exclusionary practices to cater to special interest groups?
4. How does one become licensed by the board to practice? Does it give tests, interviews? How many applicants were there for licenses and how many licenses were granted?

K. Assistance

     Using a map of the city divided into districts, chart the changes in the number of people receiving welfare assistance. Gather data for the last year for which figures are available and for the previous 5 and 10 years. Are there any factors that led to the changes in numbers on welfare rolls? Have there been problems in cutting off people?

L. Vigilant

     I think we should be walking through the jungle listening for odd noises and reporting exactly what we see and hear—and be wary and vigilant.
     —Mary McGrory (on the job of the reporter covering public affairs)

     Select an office, department, bureau or agency of local government and obtain answers from officials and townspeople to these questions and others you may devise:

1. What is the function of the office? What is its budget allocation, number of employees, current major projects?
2. Is the function necessary to meet public demands and needs?
3. Is the office functioning at optimum level in the opinion of its head or director, the second-in-command, some of the career employees and the newer employees?

     Write a story of about 500 words based on your findings.

M. Education

     Here are some assignments on education:

     Majors: Survey a group of high school seniors or incoming college freshmen to see what subjects they intend to major in. One of the fastest-growing majors is business, going from about 10 percent of incoming freshmen in the 1970s to 24 percent 25 years later. Language majors dropped to 1 percent, history to 1.8 percent. Compare these national figures with your findings.
     Textbooks: Bias, prejudice and discrimination have been found in high school textbooks. Make a check of textbooks in various fields: U.S. history—how Native Americans are treated, whether attention is paid to black and Hispanic contributions, adequate treatment of women; biology—adequate treatment of evolution, inclusion of women scientists, adequate discussion of venereal diseases; world history—adequate treatment of the Holocaust, Judaism, Islam, and other religions, suffrage, imperialism and the slave trade, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Any attacks on textbooks in use or proposed?
     Movement: Are job and educational opportunities luring high school and college graduates to other states?
     Accountability: How well are schoolchildren taught, and how well do they perform? Can you and your colleagues make a list of criteria to be used as the basis for reporting the effectiveness of the educational system?
One measure is how well students do on national tests such as Scholastic Aptitude Test. For grade school children, there are standardized tests, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) examinations. Another measure could be the percentage of freshman students who graduate from high school or the percentage of graduating seniors who go on to college.
     Homework: How much homework is assigned daily? Give some examples of the homework assigned in English, history and arithmetic classes. What are students assigned to read in junior and senior high school English classes? How many compositions, essays, reports are they asked to write?
Do students think they have enough, too much, too little homework? What do their parents think?
     Curriculum: Interview teachers about their suggestions for basic changes in the curriculum. How do their opinions differ from those held by principals and the schools' superintendent?
     Math: A fourth of the students in the country could not multiply 671 by 402 and get the correct answer, 269,742. Of all 13-year-olds, a third could not do the multiplication. Fewer than half of all the teen-agers tested could figure out the area of a square given the length of one side. Draw a mathematical profile of students in local high schools. Look at the SAT scores for mathematics over the last few years and compare them to SAT figures for 10 and 15 years ago. Interview mathematics teachers and high school students.
     Bright: Examine the college yearbook of 10 years ago and check news stories about graduation. Select three to five of the students considered the brightest. Where are they now? Interview them, friends, associates.

N. Haters

     "Hate activity among kids has probably never been more widespread or more violent," reports the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups. "Racist graffiti, Confederate flag T-shirts, swastika tattoos and homophobic slurs in high school hallways are only the tip of the iceberg," the Center says.
     "What we're seeing is a more militant, street-fighter culture," says Eric Ward of the Center for New Community in Chicago. The hate activity used to be the province of white boys, but Hispanic and African-American youngsters are becoming involved, as well as girls.
     "Anywhere from a third to a half of gang members are girls," says Ronald Huff, a sociologist.
     Do the police in your community monitor hate groups? What do they indicate is the local situation? Hate crimes are reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which reported that in a recent year the five states with the highest rate of hate crimes were:

Massachusetts	7.4
New Jersey	6.6
Nebraska	5.4
Arizona	4.7
California	4.7

(Rate is number of crimes reported per 100,000 population.)

O. Zoning

     Attend a meeting of the planning and zoning body and cover a single request that seems to you to be worth following up with interviews. Use this as an example of the problems the community faces in planning.

P. Land Use

     Develop a feature story on the land use design for the city and surrounding areas. What are the latest developments? Anything unforeseen when the plan was made? Any people opposing its development?

Q. Developers

     Interview real estate developers and others to obtain some sense of where they think the next major moves of residential and commercial development will occur.

R. Shoppers

     What has happened to the neighborhood grocery store, drugstore, shoe store? Have shoppers deserted them for the supermarket? Interview shoppers, store owners. Has Wal-Mart affected local stores?

S. Housing

     In 1975, the standard-size home under construction for a middle-income family was 1,500 square feet. What is it today in your community and why? Interview builders and real estate agents.

T. Inspection

     Does the city or the state enforce health laws for restaurants, food producers, markets? Accompany an inspector as he or she makes the rounds. Look for particular items and match local enforcement against agreed-upon general standards. For example, the federal health standards for soft ice cream are 50,000 bacteria/gram and 10 coliform bacteria/gram.

U. Continents

     A sociologist wrote, "The city is filled with dark continents that remain impenetrable to the inhabitants of other spaces." Another sociologist described some of these areas as "dreadful enclosures." In these areas, the crime rate is high, rates for diseases and deaths such as pneumonia and infant mortality exceed the average, unemployment is above average, welfare recipiency is high and educational attainment is low. Look through census data and check city and state records for such areas or districts in your city. Then interview residents of one of these areas: To what do they attribute their area's conditions; have they hope for improvement; would they want their children to remain; have they any ideas for changing the situation?

V. City-Suburb

     One of the assumptions in politics is that big cities vote Democratic in national elections and suburbs and small towns vote Republican. How true is this in your state?

W. Garbage

     How much trash and garbage does your city toss out each day, and what does it do with the material? If it uses a dump or landfill, how long will it last? If there are plans for a change in garbage and solid waste disposal, what new methods are being considered: recycling, separation, incineration for energy?

X. Compare

     Here is the beginning of a news story in a Springfield newspaper:

     Make a similar comparison for your community and others in the state. In addition to parks and recreation, you can use education, social services, health, streets, police and fire.

Y. Vouchers

     A number of state legislatures have adopted or are considering school voucher plans that allow students to enroll in parochial and other private schools. Students would pay for tuition with tax-funded vouchers. In Ohio, a plan that permitted tax monies for vouchers for 2,000 students in Cleveland was challenged as violating the separation of church and state.
     What has your state legislature done with voucher proposals? Who is behind them, who against?

Z. Landmarks

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     For a Sunday newspaper feature or a mini-documentary for broadcast, gather information for a story on two or three landmark buildings or historic locations in your community. Blend description with the recollections of local residents and research.