William March, Tampa Tribune

Recently we were visited in class by William March, chief political reporter for the Tampa Tribune. Mainly he spoke about how we can use the various tricks we have learned thus far in class to get information if we were to eventually cover politics. It seemed like he gets a lot of his information from the various websites he spoke about. That being said the most intriguing topic he discussed was the various stories he wrote and how he went about gathering the information.

The story that caught my eye the most was about the political contributions to the Bill Clinton campaign. He found that a business had given their employees roughly one thousand dollars apiece and strongly suggested to them that they contribute to the Clinton campaign. This of course is not allowed because the donation was really coming from that business owner not the folks doing the contributing. What was most intriguing about this piece was how the information was gathered. He took us to a variety of websites that showed not only the contributions but who made them and the exact dollar amounts. Then he used those same websites to show these individuals contribution history or lack thereof. It turned out in this case many of these individuals not only had never given a contribution before but didn’t even vote for the candidate they contributed to. This of course not only raised some eyebrows but lead reporters like March to start asking questions. All of this leads to several major convictions and the shut down of the company Future Tech International. Some of the websites he showed us were CQ Moneyline, Autotrack, and Open Secerts.org. All of these have not only been used to help break this story but many other stories over the course of time.

In all what we can take away from this visit was that we have many resources at our disposal to help tell a compelling story. The several examples he gave us help demonstrate what we can use these sites for and prove our point. In addition to the websites he showed us, he also explained some political terms to us that I had never heard. He stated that hard money is money that is donated directly to a candidate where soft money is donated to a party instead of a particular candidate. All of these little tidbits are what makes a story real and interesting to the reader. That being said many of the points he helped uncover during his presentation should be helpful for us going forward.