ProPublica Reporting Network

Instead of waiting until you’ve pulled together all information for your project, please file as you go.

Quite a few local reporters have signed up for our Stimulus Spot Check. I asked Megan Glenn, a reporter with the Imperial Valley Press in El Centro, Calif., what brought her on board.  Here’s her answer:

I’m participating in this project because I want to add what’s going on in our region to the picture. We’re one of the classic examples of what the stimulus was supposed to aid: we have a high unemployment rate (25 percent), a high poverty rate, and many of the local governments and schools have trouble raising the capital needed to fund large-scale projects. When you add in the budget problems that California is going through, the stimulus becomes one of the few ways to spur development around here. As such, its effectiveness is very important to us, both at the paper and in the community, but even at our highly local level it turned into more than I could tackle on my own.  When I saw that ProPublica was working on the story on a national scale, I decided to sign up and help out, and to take advantage of the resources they’ve already assembled.

Local reporters, welcome!

Instead of asking how many jobs were created or saved by a specific project, ask how many hours employees spent working on it in the last month.

The number of hours worked is the figure states must file with the Office of Management and Budget starting in October. From my experience tracking New Hampshire’s projects today, the number of hours worked appears to be a more accurate number than the employee head count. More on that tomorrow.

The Hall Institute of Public Policy, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit think tank in New Jersey, has taken on all of the state’s road and bridge projects in our sample.