Looking for ideas of business stories you can do with computer-assisted reporting? Extra! Extra! on the IRE Web site (www.ire.org/extraextra) carries links to and summaries of stories that used data analysis. Here are some recent examples from the business beat:
The Charlotte Observer analyzed 2.2 million mortgage applications from the top 25 U.S. lenders and found that blacks were four times as likely as whites to get high interest rates for loans. The disparities existed even when blacks had much higher incomes.
The Dallas Morning News used Census and state economic numbers to show that the wealthy residents of Collin County, Texas, carry larger debts than residents in other high-income counties across the country.
Census data helped the San Jose Mercury News tell the story about California's decline in young farmers. The number of farmers younger than 35 fell 44 percent in California and 18 percent nationwide from 1997 to 2002.
The (Allentown, Pa.) Morning Call used restaurant inspection data to scrutinize food safety in the Lehigh Valley and the rest of Pennsylvania. School cafeterias faired well but the report concluded that the "patchwork of food safety laws and public health agencies often fails to provide even the minimal monitoring of restaurants and food retailers."
The Charleston Gazette compared color overlays of old mine maps to newer digital maps in their analysis of a coal company building silos outside its permit area and within 300 feet of a school.
The (Staunton, Va.) Daily News Leader analyzed five years of state Department of Labor and Industry safety inspections and found that many Virginia businesses are not inspected each year. They also reported "the labor department performed too few safety inspections between 1999 and 2003 to reach even a quarter of the construction businesses in more than a third of the state."
The San Diego Union-Tribune analyzed county grant receipts and discovered "records for 54 grants totaling nearly $1 million are missing."