Mine those legal ads for stories
By Doug Fisher
Slow news
day? Hurting for story ideas?
Have you
thought about looking at the potential gold mine buried
in the pages of your newspaper?
Back among
the classifieds and the obituaries and the ads for this
week’s diet aid and fat blocker are the legal ads.
You might skim past them most days. A lot of what’s
there you’ve probably reported anyhow from this or
that board or commission meeting.
But the
heads-up reporter and editor will still keep more than a
passing eye on this potpourri of John or Jane Doe lawsuit
notices, bid requests and adoption proceedings because in
among them are some pretty good story leads.
In late
October, for instance, the U.S. Labor Department published
notices that workers laid off from two area textile plants
were eligible for extra benefits because they were hurt
by competition from foreign imports. A couple of weeks later,
there was a notice for yet a third plant.
It’s
no secret that textiles are hurting, and so the notices
weren’t big news, just more of the steady drumbeat.
But keep track of them, and you’ll start to get a
good idea of how broad that hurt is. The next time you go
to do a takeout or just need some quick background that
puts faces and names with the problem, there are the leads
in your files.
It beats
starting from scratch, and it can apply to any of a number
of businesses and industries nationwide. In fact, a national
reporter recently used one of the towns mentioned in these
notices as the focus for a piece contrasting areas that
appear to be returning to prosperity with those stuck in
the economic muck.
Want to
get a real handle on the value of the drug trade in your
area? Pay attention to the forfeiture and “arrest”
notices. (When the government wants to take ownership of
cash or property seized, the marshal “arrests”
it and publishes a legal notice so that anyone who wants
to file a claim can do so.) Here’s one for $1 million.
Another is for almost $23,000, and another for almost $18,000.
Keep track, and you might find there’s a lot more
cash flowing through your area than you think. You might
also occasionally discover a major case that otherwise got
under the radar.
Those bid
notices can be pretty dry, but sometimes you’ll find
one that piques the interest. A new governmental body here
in central South Carolina is asking for bids for office
furniture, but why does it need sofas, or a coffee table?
This is a government agency, not a law office. And why is
the bid split into four parts; might it not get a better
price buying it all together?
None of that is earthshaking, but if you’ve got a
spare moment, maybe it’s worth asking, especially
if that agency’s on your beat. Perhaps there is no
story, but experience shows that out of such small seeds
do great stories grow.
Here’s
a short notice about a school district seeking bids on 11
semiautomatic defibrillators like those appearing in airports
and similar public places and that have been shown to save
lives.
They’re
simple enough to use that almost anyone can do it in an
emergency, buying a heart-attack victim precious moments.
But in schools? Are they going to be tucked away in an administrator’s
office or accessible for anyone in an emergency? And if
that’s the case, will students get training on how
to us them, or will the person suffering the attack have
to wait until a teacher or administrator can be tracked
down? It raises some interesting questions as this technology
spreads. Might there be a story? You don’t know unless
you ask, and you might not know to ask unless you read the
ads.
By far
the gold mine of the legal ads, however, is the yearly tax
sale notice, sometimes running for several pages. Aside
from the reportorial voyeurism (Don’t you really want
to know if your neighbor is late on his or her taxes?),
there’s a lot to be learned here. Is the ad noticeably
longer than last year’s? Maybe things are worse than
we realize? Do you recognize any of the names, like the
local law-and-order councilman, the tax-activist legislator
or the slumlord?
These lists
also can be an early warning of dreams and promises gone
bad. In one recent notice, one development company had more
than 100 properties delinquent. Is that development about
to go belly-up? It’s worth checking out.
There’s
one more important reason to keep an eye on these ads, and
it’s economic. Legal ads provide a pretty big chunk
of many newspapers’ revenue, even as the pressure
builds to move them to the Internet or to otherwise take
the business away. If we can show the public service of
having the information easily available, it strengthens
the argument that those ads belong where they can easily
be found and examined.
Legal ads
document the mundane workings of government, but also where
government affects people and where millions of dollars
are spent. So next time you’re scratching about for
ideas, let your fingers do the walking no farther than those
often-overlooked pages.
