Cincinnati Empowerment Zone

The cynical definition of a critic is “one who knows the way but can’t drive the car.” Generally speaking, critics of the arts are better at criticism than they are at the endeavor they’re criticizing. Otherwise, they’d be artists and not critics.

But media criticism is a unique undertaking. Critical writing about journalism is itself an act of journalism, and ought to be held to the same standards as the work it trains its eye on.

Unfortunately, too much media criticism fails to do some basic fact-checking. Like, if you’re going to criticize a news outlet for failing to cover something, check to make sure it has indeed neglected to cover it.

Take the recent criticism by two former Cincinnati Enquirer staffers — Peter Bronson and Ben L. Kaufman — of the Enquirer’s coverage of the Cincinnati Empowerment Corporation.

Bronson, who was editorial page editor and a conservative op-ed columnist for the Enquirer before being laid off last year, would have readers believe that the Enquirer didn’t write a single critical story about the Cincinnati Empowerment Corporation from 2002 through 2010.

Kaufman, who left the paper in 2002 and is now the Citybeat media critic, passes along Bronson’s criticism approvingly: “Bronson excoriates The Enquirer — for which he was a columnist and editorial page editor — for its cowardice, suggesting fear of being accused of racism often restrains any sense of duty as a public watch dog. The Empowerment Zone is not the first fiasco of its kind involving years of willful ignorance and timidity.”

The problem here is that the basic premise — that Enquirer editors imposed a news blackout on any coverage critical of the Cincinnati Empowerment Corporation — is just plain wrong. (Full disclosure: As the City Hall reporter for the Enquirer from 2001 to 2005, I was partly responsible for coverage of the Empowerment Zone.)

So here, as a public service, I present a partial accounting of stories by the Cincinnati Enquirer over the years documenting problems with the Cincinnati Empowerment Corp.:

• “Broadnax Pitched for Agency,” by Mark Curnutte, October 16, 1999: “Supporters of former Cincinnati Health Commissioner Stanley Broadnax, who served 28 months in prison for drug abuse and cocaine trafficking, want him to lead a public agency charged with rehabilitating nine of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.”
• “Wrong Choice for Empowerment Zone,” editorial, October 30, 1999: “Mr. Broadnax is a terrible choice to handle millions in public money. And the controversy over his appointment is damaging an agency that will need public support and credibility.”
• “Empowerment Zone Going Nowhere, Winburn Charges,” by Dan Klepal, December 24, 1999. “Cincinnati’s new empowerment zone board has been powerless during its first year because of infighting, a lack of direction and an organizational structure that has rendered it lame, a city council member says.”
• “Blight Fighters Mired in Indecision,” by Dan Klepal, March 16, 2000: “Cincinnati’s empowerment zone has been ineffective and could be stripped of its designation if it doesn’t follow six recommendations made by City Council on Wednesday, council members said.”
• “Dueling Plans Target Inner City,” by Derrick DePledge, August 27, 2000: ”Renee Crawford … said she is afraid some businesses and social service groups are acting in self-interest instead of for the good of the neighborhoods. ‘It’s a wonderful thing if it ever gets off the ground,’ she said. ‘But it looks like some organizations just want their piece of the pie.’
• “Leader Finally Takes Over City Empowerment Zone,” by Ken Alltucker, January 13, 2001: “It took two years and two failed candidates before the Cincinnati Empowerment Zone found a leader.”
• “Empowerment Zone, Three Years Later: Few Results,” by Ken Alltucker, May 14, 2001: “Three years and one race riot later, the nine neighborhoods — most of them predominantly African-American — are still the city’s poorest, and the plan hasn’t been put into action.”
• “MIA Empowerment Zone,” editorial, May 17, 2001. “Three years after Cincinnati Empowerment Corp. was formed to rebuild nine of our poorest neighborhoods, it has no results. Zero.”
• “Cincinnati Empowerment Zone Targeted,” by Derrick Depledge, February 5, 2002: “The Bush administration determined there was ‘no convincing evidence’ that providing grant money along with the tax breaks available through empowerment zones makes the initiatives more effective.”
• “Thumbs Down: No Empowerment,” editorial, February 9, 2002: “The Empowerment Zone board members caused needless delays when they tried to rig the bylaws to hire as director Stanley Broadnax, a former city health commissioner convicted of cocaine trafficking. … Faster action by the Empowerment Zone might even have reduced the turmoil.”
• “Federal Grant Use Questioned,” by Derrick DePledge, February 10, 2002: “The Bush administration’s decision to strip federal money for some empowerment zones from next year’s budget was based in part on questionable results in cities like Cincinnati, federal officials said.”
• “Empower Whom?” by Peter Bronson, April 26, 2002: “A January financial report shows that Cincinnati’s Empowerment Zone spent nearly a dollar on administration for every dollar on programs — and those included hip-hop, crafts, karate and boxing for ‘anger management.’”
• “Audit Says Cincinnati Wasted Much of Empowerment Grant,” by Gregory Korte, February 4, 2003: “The agency responsible for running the Cincinnati Empowerment Zone misspent thousands of federal dollars and failed to produce results in key programs, according to a just-released federal audit”
• “Sustainable Jobs,” editorial, February 5, 2003. “A federal audit of Cincinnati’s Empowerment Zone program further damages its credibility as a jobs creator for poor neighborhoods and strengthens the case for ending outright grants in favor of tax breaks.”
• “Empowerment Official Sought in Theft-ring Case,” by Howard Wilkinson, October 4, 2003. “One of the 23 people indicted as part of a theft ring that police say fenced stolen goods through corner markets is the staff accountant for the Cincinnati Empowerment Corp.”
• “P&G Backing Out on Jobs Plan,” by Cliff Peale, September 2, 2004: “Higher costs and project delays have prompted Procter & Gamble Co. to pull out of a proposed $30 million investment in Cincinnati’s empowerment zone.”
• “Agency’s Spending Under Fire,” by Gregory Korte, October 26, 2004: “City auditors said Inner City Health Care Inc., a 30-year-old agency with an original mission to provide health care to minority communities, often submitted ‘false documentation’ for expenses it had not incurred. The agency sought reimbursement of $28,967 through the Cincinnati Empowerment Corp. for a 15-passenger van it never bought.”
• “Interlaced Lives: Dale Mallory Appointed Now-Suspect to Board,” by Dan Klepal, April 18, 2006. “Dale Mallory helped appoint the man who allegedly shot Kabaka Oba outside City Hall last week to a powerful board that handles millions of redevelopment dollars for poor areas of town.”
• “Mayor’s Brother Scrutinized,” by Gregory Korte, June 14, 2006: “A federal anti-poverty program is reviewing its contract with the brother of Cincinnati
  Mayor Mark Mallory after discovering he billed the agency for working to bring a
  controversial social services center to the West End.”
• “Mallory’s Bills ‘Troubling’: Mayor’s Brother Asked to Repay Some Money; He Says No,” by Gregory Korte, June 19, 2006: “Dale Mallory’s bills to a federally funded anti-poverty program ‘raise some troubling questions’ about how the Cincinnati Empowerment Corp. hires and monitors its consultants, including possible conflicts of interest, lawyers for the agency said in a report.”
• “Activists Grill Empowerment Corp.” by Gregory Korte, July 11, 2006: “Neighborhood activists confronted the board of the Cincinnati Empowerment Corp. on Monday, demanding to know why the agency used federal tax money to promote a controversial church-run social services center in the West End.”
• “Empowerment Agency Faces Probe,” by Gregory Korte, July 19, 2006: “The Cincinnati Police Department and federal authorities will conduct a joint investigation into the Cincinnati Empowerment Corp. after reports of conflicts of interest at the inner-city development agency, a top police official told the West End Community Council Tuesday night.”
• “Agency Director’s Purchase Questioned,” by Gregory Korte, June 27, 2006: “The executive director of the Cincinnati Empowerment Corp. has obtained ownership of a West End building where an Empowerment board member is a tenant, raising more questions about conflicts of interest at the federally funded development agency.”
• “Inner City Non-Profit’s Funds Frozen,” by Gregory Korte, June 29, 2006: “The city of Cincinnati has frozen its funding for a nonprofit organization that helps inner-city neighborhoods after questions arose about conflicts of interest involving its board and staff.”
• “Cole, Empowerment Corp. Spar in Hearing,” by Gregory Korte, August 2, 2006: “In a sometimes contentious public hearing before Cole’s neighborhoods committee, the councilwoman challenged Empowerment Corp. officials on possible conflicts of interest, and about the administration of a $5 million loan program.”
• “Empowerment Corp. Lawsuits Target Companies That Got Loans,” August 5, 2006: ”The Cincinnati Empowerment Corp., under scrutiny from city and federal agencies for its business practices, has begun to take action against several businesses that received federally subsidized loans.”
• “City Resuming Payments to Development Agency,” by Gregory Korte, September 1, 2006: “The city of Cincinnati will resume payments to its inner-city development agency following a two-month freeze to look into allegations of conflicts of interest.”
• “Questions Raised Over Non-Profit,” by Jane Prendergast, February 2, 2010: “Cincinnati City Council members want to know more about why the city and a non-profit agency that’s supposed to help create jobs in Cincinnati’s most struggling neighborhoods did not take advantage of $130 million in federal bonds before they expired.”
• “Cincinnati Empowerment Corp. Has Little to Show for $25 Million,” by Jane Prendergast, February 21, 2010: “The Cincinnati Empowerment Corp. promised jobs and major development in Cincinnati’s poorest neighborhoods when it started 10 years ago. But now that the program is about to end, there’s almost universal agreement that it fell far short of expectations, leaving questions about who is to blame and who should have been monitoring the agency.”
• “City Could Investigate Revitalization Agency,” by Jane Prendergast, March 7, 2010: “Cincinnati City Council members this week will be asked to launch an investigation and audit of the Cincinnati Empowerment Corp., the nonprofit agency that was supposed to help revitalize nine of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.”

If this is the picture of a newspaper neglecting to write about an agency’s problems, I’d hate to be at the agency the newspaper decides to report on.

I e-mailed Messers Kaufman and Bronson (a courtesy neither one of them extended to anyone at the Enquirer) to ask them if they had read any of these stories. Mr. Kaufman said he had, and that he nonetheless stands by his criticism. (Though he clarified that his critique was institutional, and not personal.) Mr. Bronson responded, but asked that his e-mail be off-the-record. I’ve decided to honor that request.

Am I being thin-skinned? Maybe. Like a lot of reporters, I’ve taken my share of abuse from bloggers, and I’ve let it slide. But Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Bronson are former colleagues who used to be — and perhaps still are — professional journalists. Is it too much to expect them to do a basic web search before criticizing a news organization for not covering something?

Michelle Minkoff, a graduate student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, has been doing a series of profiles of some of the smartest database reporters and newsroom developers around: People like Matt Waite, Chase Davis, David Donald, Maurice Tamman and Mary Jo Webster. She calls them “data delvers.”

How the heck she came up with my name, I’ll never know.

Anyway, she does a decent job of summarizing my crusade for greater data literacy in the newsroom:

While not everyone needs to be a specialist, Korte said, “Everybody should know Excel or a spreadsheet, and how it’s organized, how to do counting, totaling and averaging.”

“Don’t be afraid of data,” said Korte.  To him, that means being willing to use data sets, but also approaching the numbers as you woud any source.  “Think about the data that is available, talk to the people who have it, think about what information you want.”

Using programming for analysis and web scraping is a great way to take your skills further, he said.  “The value of programming is that it can speed up the more repetitive tasks that you were doing manually, and it allows you to do what others cannot.”

“Most reporters see a new database, and it’s just too tempting– they’re only doing the story because it’s low-hanging fruit, begging to be analyzed.  The issue in news is to find the right data.”

We should all be data delvers.

Here, all in one place, are links to all the popular precinct maps that ran with various stories in The Cincinnati Enquirer after the November 3, 2009 general election:

• Cincinnati Mayor: Mark Mallory (D) v. Brad Wenstrup (R)
• Cincinnati City Council: First-place finishers by ward
• Cincinnati Board of Education: Vanessa White (C) electoral strength and Charter-Democratic ticket comparison
• Ohio Issue 3: Casino gambling in Hamilton County
• Hamilton County Issue 9: Cincinnati rail transportation charter amendment
• Hamilton County Issue 52: Cincinnati Public Schools renewal levy

There’s nothing wrong with TinyURL.com, the url-shortening service that started in 2002 to help tame unwieldy links and has become indispensable in the age of Twitter.

It’s just that, well, (1) everybody uses it — or a clone like bit.ly or snurl.com or snipurl.com — so it’s a bit impersonal, (2) there’s no guarantee it will work, and (3) as it’s grown, the typical “tinyurl” is now at least 25 characters long if you include the protocol and six-character path name.

So I’ve registered the domain name 4gk.us and set up my own Django-powered URL-shortening service. I now have complete control over my shortened urls. By shortening the domain name and starting with just one character in the path name, I can get that my URLs down to as few as 15 characters — giving me 10 precious characters per tweet to be even more insightful, informative and witty. Added benefit: I can see which links people are actually clicking on in my tweets (assuming they’re clicking on any — this could get demoralizing).

And okay, yes, I suppose there’s also the vanity thing.

Frankly, I’m surprised more news organizations — and others who rely on social media — haven’t created their own, branded custom URL shorteners. If you’ve got the server space, the cost is just $10 to register a short vanity domain (which are getting gobbled up fast, by the way, especially in the .com and .us top-level domains.) And if a third-party service goes down, you’re losing traffic. If your own servers go down — well, you weren’t going to get the traffic anyway.

I’m not opening 4gk.us up to the public, because I don’t have any way to screen out link spam or prevent abuse. But I’d be happy to set up free accounts for trusted friends, family or colleagues who might find it useful. Seriously. Let me know.

(Also, for those interested: I cribbed the Django code from Nilesh D. Kapadia, who is a pretty bright fellow, and modified it only a little. His URL-shortening Django app is open-source and available for download, if you’re into such things. I also recommend Webfaction as a Django-friendly web hosting service.)

(Self-plagiarism disclosure: This post is a compilation of previous observations I’ve made, mostly on Facebook or on in this comment currently awaiting moderation at the Oxford University Press blog.)

There’s been much hand-wringing lately about how social networking is changing journalism.

Frankly, I’m more interested in how it’s changing language:  How it has forced users into peculiar, unnatural, inventive ways of writing, and what that writing reveals about how people of about themselves and their world.

Last winter, a friend of mine confided that she was beginning to think in the first person, prefacing every daily activity in her head with, “Mandy is….”

Two months later, Facebook made a subtle change to the way it prompted users for their status updates. Instead of the previous “Gregory is …”, the site simply gave a big empty box under the question, “What’s on your mind?”

The change made Facebook more Twitter-like (Twitter asks, “What are you doing?”) and gave users more flexibility. The verb “to be” is the weakest of all weak verbs, and omitting it by default also encouraged more active statusing. And it encouraged a less solipsistic view of the world, because the writer isn’t the subject of every sentence by default.

Indeed, I looked over my friends’ Facebook status updates over the last 24 hours and found:

• 27 formed by stand-alone sentences that ignored their user name in the sentence structure (plus 12 sentence fragments).
• 21 status messages with a “Username is ….” construction — and seven more where the “is” was understood. (Another added a his wife as a subject to announce they “are” expecting.)
• Eight beginning with “has…” or “had….”
• Two beginning with “wonders….”
• One each for “needs,” “must,” “might,” “loves,” fears,” “saw,” and, from a television critic, “DVR’d.”
• Another was in Turkish and I don’t understand what it said.

Still, there’s something to be said for the simple, declarative sentence. And it was amusing to watch Facebook friends attempt to circumvent the “Username is” constraint by making their first name possessive (“Gregory’s day just went pear-shaped.”) or adding an appositive or other dependent clause immediately after the username-subject (“Gregory, having mowed the lawn and cleaned the garage, is reading for a nap.”) One of my favorites comes from a friend who uses his status to keep score: “Joseph 1, Tuesday 0.”

Over at Language Log, the linguistics blog of record, Eric Bakovi? has also taken note of the pronoun issues involved with updates, observing another phenomenon I’ve noticed: Originally confined to the third person, some users will shift back to the first person halfway through an update.

I started thinking about this again yesterday after the Nieman Journalism Lab pointed me to a study by the linguists at the Oxford University Press analyzing the most common words used on Twitter.

Verbs are much more common in their gerund form in Twitter than in general text. “Going”, “getting” and “watching” all appear in the top 100 words or so.

“Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating” are all in the top 100 first words, revealing just how often people use Twitter to report on whatever they are experiencing (or consuming) at the time.

Here, I have a quibble with the linguists at the Oxford University Press. Words like “watching” and “getting” can be gerunds or participles. And they seem to be used on Twitter more often as present participles (”I am watching American Idol”) than as true gerunds (”Watching American Idol is one of my favorite pastimes.”)

Regardless, it’s fascinating to watch how “statusing” (a gerund) is developing its own linguistic (not to mention journalistic) norms. We’re talking about ourselves in the third person, living in the present progressive tense and getting our point across in 140 characters or less.

People are verbing. And as Calvin once said to Hobbes….

"Verbing weirds language."

Last week, while on an weeklong furlough from my employer, I created an online database of Cincinnati City Council election results by ward. I’ve now launched that project publicly at CincyPolitics.org. The data’s not very deep yet, and the site still has limited functionality, but it’s the first web site I’ve ever created entirely from scratch. I’ll expand it in the future as time allows.

At some point, I’ll write a little more about how I created it. But for now, a little background on why I created it.

As a newspaper reporter whose computer-assisted reporting skills were self-taught, I mostly used database analysis as a tool to research articles. I started with Microsoft Excel and worked my way through Microsoft Access and two different flavors of SQL, SQL Server and MySQL. I dabbled in enough PHP to get up a few Wordpress sites, and to create some behind-the-scenes databases for storing and searching public records. Somewhere along the way, I learned some mapping skills, primarily with ESRI’s ArcGIS programs, and became enamored with all kinds of geographic-based data: census counts, property values, fire incidents, subsidized housing units and sex offenders.

But as a former politics reporter, I especially loved voting results. Every Election Day, I go in to work late at night, when they’re done counting the ballots. I get a precinct report, cudgel it into a database, and analyze where the votes came from. I’ll work through the night and have a story online by the time most people wake up the next morning.

The analysis can produce some pretty maps for the newspaper, but I’ve long struggled with how to make them interactive for the web. We have some talented Flash designers in house, but their skills are in the design, not in database work. So the online maps we’ve done have been pretty one-dimensional — and require Flash designers to hand-enter election results.

The solution, I thought, was some kind of dynamic database platform that would have the infrastructure in place and allow me to plug in the numbers on deadline. So far, CincyPolitics.org is a pretty simple solution to that. I’m hoping it can get better. It’s mostly a learning project as I try to teach myself new web development skills.

That’s where computer-assisted reporting has been going for the last several years now — taking those databases we used to crunch behind the scenes and getting it out on a public platform so readers can see it for themselves.

UPDATE: Canceled because of inclement weather.

David Umhoefer, a Pulitzer prize-winning local government reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, will be speaking at Northern Kentucky University Wednesday.

Following his talk, I’ll be on a panel titled, “New Media, Old Values.” I’m hoping it’s a thought provoking discussion of how news organizations can stay true to their First Amendment mission while adapting to a rapidly changing technology landscape.

The program begins at 6 p.m. at Northern Kentucky University (University Center Room 238). Dinner is $12 for Society of Professional Journalists members and $16 for non-members

The other day, my colleague Alexander Coolidge found out — belatedly and accidentally — that our series on foreclosures won an honorable mention (and a $1,000 cash prize) from Excellence in Economic Journalism from the Fund for American Studies. (From the newspaper: “Enquirer series on foreclosures honored for economic reporting.”)

We came in a close second to the winner of the $10,000 prize: The New Orleans Times-Picayune, for an exposé of insurance fraud in the wake of Katrina. But what was especially gratifying was that, of all the reporting on the foreclosure crisis last year, The Enquirer’s series was judged as good or better than news organizations 10 times its size.

Here’s the comments from the judges:

Well reported series on the subprime mortgage crisis comprised seven of the nine finalists… But a wonderfully reported enterprise series by Rebecca Mowbray of the New Orleans Times-Picayune on insurance fraud in the wake of Katrina Hurricane took the $10,000 award.

Honorable mention and a $1,000 prize went to Gregory Korte and Alexander Coolidge of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The IPJ competition for 2007 drew the largest number of entries in its history.

The seven finalists writing on the subprime mess were the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times, the Miami Herald, Bloomberg News, the Sacramento Bee, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Asbury Park Press. The Detroit News submitted a fine series on the sale of Chrysler Corp. to a private equity group by Mercedes Benz.

The Wall Street Journal threw an army of reporters at the subprime crisis over the course of the year. Bloomberg News produced a number of prophetic pieces labeling certain kinds of subprimre mortgage securities “toxic waste” and predicting the crisis that was about to break.

But The Cincinnati Enquirer and Sacramento Bee series were judged the best of the subprime efforts. The Enquirer’s Gregory Korte and Alexander Coolidge produced more than a dozen pieces showing every aspect of the crisis as it destroyed values, shattered lives, and transformed whole communities in the Cincinnati area. The Sacramento Bee’s eight part series matched them in excellence, but four reporters were involved. So the judges awarded the honorable mention to the Enquirer’s outnumbered two.

The Enquirer’s and Bee’s series almost took top prize. But in the end, the judges felt the work of Mowbray at the Times-Picayune was first among almost equals and most deserved the award.

Judges were Rich Thomas of Newsweek; Mike Ruby, formerly of U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek and the Milwaukee Journal; and John Merline, formerly at USA Today and now AOL.

Congratulations to the Times-Picayune for the well deserved award.

This morning, the Enquirer began promoting a series I reported with my colleague James Pilcher that we’re calling “Gas Price Secrets Revealed.” It’s a look at the vagaries of retail gas pricing, explaining why you’ll pay more on one day of the week and why two stations a mile apart can have such vastly different prices.

We came up with some pretty interesting findings, and we think it’s some of the most detailed reporting on retail gas prices done anywhere.

We’re scheduled to go on WVXU’s Impact Cincinnati program Thursday morning to explain our findings and take questions. The show airs on 91.7 FM at 9:20 a.m.

UPDATE: Here’s the Impact Cincinnati program in .mp3 format.

It’s been 15 years this fall since my byline last appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This week, it was back.

The Cincinnati Enquirer has joined a consortium of Ohio newspapers pooling resources to fact-check election year political ads. Each paper will take turns reviewing an ad for accuracy, and share the story with the other papers. I’ll be the primary reporter for the Enquirer. Other papers participating are the Plain Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, The Dayton Daily News and the Canton Repository.

It’s part of a larger cooperative being formed by most of Ohio’s largest daily newspapers to share stories as an alternative to the Associated Press. (See coverage in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and WNYC’s On The Media.)

My first Ad Watch report, on the Obama campaign’s “New Energy” ad, appeared in the Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch and the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The Cleveland Press Club awarded The Cincinnati Enquirer first place honors in public service in its annual Excellence in Journalism Awards last weekend.

The award was for Foreclosure’s Fallout, a story I wrote with colleague Alexander Coolidge. The series used an examination of 30,000 foreclosures and interviews with dozens of homeowners and neighbors to explain the toll of home repossessions in Cincinnati neighborhoods, examine the role of local lenders and investigate the way sheriff’s sales are conducted.

It’s quite an honor, considering the worthy competition from other newspapers in parts of the state even harder hit by the foreclosure crisis.

Online database produced for the Cincinnati.com Data Center.

Cincinnati Magazine says The Cincinnati Enquirer “seems poised to triumph in a journalistic New World Order of mommy-blogs, data collection experts, and citizen journalists.”

The story is heavily inspired by a similar story by Wired Magazine last year: “To Save Themselves, US Newspapers Put Readers to Work.”

Photograph by Baerbel Schmidt for Wired

Online database produced for the Cincinnati.com Data Center.

Jay Leno: “You wouldn’t think something like this would provoke an argument…”

“… Guess they don’t want to rush to judgment on that one in Cincinnati.”

I have a theory that the closest parallel to the 2008 presidential campaign is … the 2005 Cincinnati mayor’s race. And I’m going to try it out Wednesday at a panel discussion Wednesday on “Media Coverage of The Politics of Race & Gender in the Presidential Election” at the University of Cincinnati.

Should be a lively and interesting panel. Co-panelists:

• Lincoln Ware, host, The Lincoln Ware Show, WDBZ-AM
• Kathy Y. Wilson, senior editor, Cincinnati Magazine & author of Your Negro Tour Guide: Truths in Black and White
• Tom McKee, reporter, WCPO-TV (Channel 9)
• Mike Sheehy, associate journalism professor, University of Cincinnati

Where: University of Cincinnati, Tangeman University Center, Room 4002, 600 Clifton Avenue, Cincinnati, OH
When: Wednesday, February 27, 7 p.m.

The moderator is my colleague Keith T. Reed, a business reporter for the Enquirer and economics blogger at BET.com.

Sponsors: Cincinnati Association of Black Journalists and the University of Cincinnati’s Journalism Program

Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Financial Times focused on Cincinnati for a story on the “real-life impact” of the subprime mortgage meltdown, and cited my reporting:

An analysis by the local newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, last November found that Deutsche Bank National Trust “owned” 188 homes in Hamilton County, more than anyone except for the federal government, and was taking on nine or 10 newly foreclosed properties a week.

Here’s that story:  Banks taking homes, but city footing bill: Repair, demolition costs add up on foreclosed property.

New ideas may test voters

My colleague Jon Craig reports:

Attorneys argued before the Ohio Supreme Court Tuesday whether the names and addresses of foster care parents should be public record. …

Enquirer reporter Gregory Korte made a public records request shortly after the August 2006 death of 3-year-old Marcus Fiesel, seeking an electronic database of all foster homes in Ohio. … The Enquirer reported in March that Hamilton County court officials discovered 27 foster parents had arrest records.

More coverage in the Columbus Dispatch, Dayton Daily News, and the Canton Repository.

Ben L. Kaufman writes in his revamped media column in this week’s Citybeat: “(W)e need more stories like Greg Korte’s nuanced data-based exploration of the impacts of local eminent domain and home foreclosures.”

Out in the cold: Front loaded schedule should have nominees picked by Feb. 5.

Thank you for visiting my new web site.

I’ve revamped GregoryKorte.com in order to feature my recent newspaper stories and other professional work. It’s still under construction. Coming soon: My resume, a bio and some special projects.

Subscribe to my RSS feed for the latest.

If you’re looking for my personal blog, it’s moving to a new domain name. Friends, relatives, casual acquaintences and former drinking buddies may contact me for the new location.

Lawsuit: Mortgage company avoided deed to get out of maintaining property

Help those losing homes, justice urges: Tells lawyers to offer service for free

County may ask proof of mortgage: Rule would slow foreclosure rate

Housing chief resigns: New authority board members shifting agency’s focus

Deeds often not filed after foreclosure: Cities then issue arrest warrants for wrong owners

Judge puts brakes on foreclosure: Says banks must prove they hold mortgages

Tunnels a money pit: Report says maintaining subway is cheapest option

City cuts water to Westwood apartments, citing danger

At auction, dreams are gone in minutes: Millions in real estate on the block every week

Bank says its lawyer misspoke: Union Savings disavows letter citing loans

Banks taking homes, but city footing bill: Repair, demolition costs add up on foreclosed property

Even long arm of law can’t reach absentee owners

Communities beat ‘flippers’ to the punch

Bank, city argue over houses: Union Savings threatens to stop lending in inner city

Renters told to get out: As owners walk away, residents often left ‘out in the cold’

Sales tax increase had everything but support: Money, endorsements can’t overcome widespread opposition

[kml_flashembed movie="http://opera.cincinnati.com/netcasts/embedplaysm.swf?vfile=netcasts/10am/netcast_11072007.flv&vname=NetCast: November 7" align="center" width="315" height="330" wmode="transparent" /]

Microsoft Live maps mashup of city report on protecting public view corridors.

Vendors already angling for a piece of the action

Goal is 30% of contract work: Minority participation

Set your watches … Start building: Deadlines will pace construction

Banks a go? Not until all details ironed out: ‘Contingencies’ could still stall development

The Enquirer Voting Hotline was a Google maps/Blogger mashup built to track problems reported by voters at their precincts in the 2006 general election.