New York State Campaign Finance Consortium (http://www.timesunion.com/capitol/contributions)
Newsday, The New York Times, Associated Press and the Albany Times Union joined together to build a statewide database. The Albany Times Union has put the data in a searchable database on this site.
Virginia Public Access Project (http://www.crp.org/vpap)
The VPAP is a non-partisan, non-profit group that demonstrates how information technology can improve public awareness of money's role in Virginia politics. The Center for Responsive Politics helped make the data searchable.
Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (http://wisdc.org)
From this site journalists can search gubernatorial contributions and expenditures and view legislative candidate contributions and expenditures to senate and house candidates.
Florida Division of Elections Campaign Finance Database (http://election.dos.state.fl.us/campfin/contrib.htm) Campaign finance contribution data is searchable online and downloadable in a file of tab-separated columns suitable for importing into most spreadsheets or databases.
Federal sites
Center for Responsive Politics (http://www.crp.org) Reports describing candidates' sources of funds broken down by industry, metro area and ZIP code. This site also provides in-state and out-of-state comparisons. The CRP site also hosts a number of online engines for searching individual state campaign finance data.
FEC Info (http://www.tray.com/fecinfo) Up-to-date FEC filings are searchable from this site, an excellent alternative for most users to downloading FEC files.
Matt Jacob can be reached by e-mail at matt@nicar.org