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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Wis. journalist offers lesson on stimulus reporting

The government's most recent estimate for the number of jobs the stimulus act created is 640,000. However, when Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Ben Poston began to examine those numbers in Wisconsin, he found the government data was full of problems. Al Tompkins of The Poynter Institute interviewed Poston for the "Morning Meeting" post Wednesday to glean lessons journalists could learn from his work.

Poston explains that the number of indirect jobs the government says have been created by the stimulus uses a formula that says for every one direct job created by the stimulus another indirect one was created. "In the end, you wind up arguing with a formula, since the government does not try to actually measure the jobs," he told Tompkins. Even after his reporting Poston says he doesn't know the exact number of jobs created by the stimulus in Wisconsin: "All I can say for sure is that the total is less than 10,073, the figure first reported. From what I found, it's at least overstated by hundreds of jobs."

Poston concludes the interview with this advice for other journalists looking at stimulus data: "Interview the data like you would interview a source. Look carefully at the grants, contracts and loan data for any discrepancies. If the information seems irregular or improbable, it probably is." (Read more)

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