At stateline.org, our online news service, we report each weekday on developments at the state government level. Lead stories are written by our staff of journalists and contract writers. The site includes a daily roundup of state government stories from more than 140 newspapers throughout the United States. We also provide background information on state government policies and personalities and statistical data that can be sorted or customized and compared across states. Created to strengthen U.S. journalism by being a source of information about what's happening in the 50 state capitols, stateline.org is currently funded with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The National Association of State Information Resource Executives, or NASIRE, has put together in State Search a well-organized, thorough site of high value to state government reporters, one that is "designed to serve as a topical clearinghouse to state government on the Internet." It does just that. This site will give you an alphabetical listing of all topics covered. Each topic link will yield a listing of 50 states. Click on a state, and you'll get the information for that state and topic you're after. Topics include everything from Agriculture to Arts Commissions--32 in all. Don't be overwhelmed--these site designers were sticklers for organization, and navigation is easy.
Various aspects of this site are described by our staff writers, but it's worth a mention in the general section because it's so comprehensive. NCSL exists to support state legislators, so some of its offerings are restricted, but the free information is also abundant. The site allows you to search a thorough range of state government issues, from energy and electric utilities to state taxes and revenue. The Legislatures section allows you to search by topic and has information on elections and redistricting, campaign finance and ethics and lobbying. A state-federal relations section explains policy positions for a variety of issues. The site keeps a calendar of NCSL-sponsored and other relevant meetings.
This is a basic site for state government, a staple for your Internet reporting diet. It is as essential a site to state government reporters as NCSL's, and it is just as rich in policy data. An organization of governors of the 50 states and the U.S. territories, the NGA provides a site with information about each governor as well as extensive pages on state government and state-federal issues. There is a host of background information available here. The NGA is rigidly bipartisan, and so is its information. There's no political commentary here--just the facts.
Run by the Council of State Governments, this site provides a daily roundup of top state news from newspapers all over the nation just as we do at stateline.org. While many of the Web site's research services, such as the States Information Center, are free to state government officials and CSG members only, the site is still a valuable source of state news and legislation. For example, the roundup is arranged alphabetically by issue, so you can just scan down to your beat and see what's happening around the country. The issue categories are extensive, from education and the economy to hunting and fishing and the dairy industry. The roundups are even archived on the site, a fabulous feature should you forget to make a copy of stories on your issue.
Much like stateline.org without the insightful writers (they provide a smaller roundup of state news, but articles on it were three to four months old when I checked the site), the American Legislative Exchange Council's Web site contains your standard political almanac information--a page for each state listing the governor, the Republican/Democrat split in both houses of the state's legislature, term limits for both the legislature and governor, the dates the legislature is in session, how many Democrats and Republicans the state has in both houses in D.C. and a map detailing the 1999 party control in state legislatures. But it was designed with a different intent. Advocating the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty, ALEC seeks to "provide a forum for legislators and the private sector to discuss issues, develop policies and write model legislation."
So beware the information you extract from the Policy and Model Legislation search--here "model" translates as "conservative." As for the rest of the site, much of it is PR for ALEC rather than tools for reporters.
Governing magazine is must-reading for thousands of state officials for its savvy, state-wise staff writers. Its Web site is also worth a look for its Government Performance Project, a link off the main page that offers letter grades for each of the states in financial management, capital management, human resources, managing for results and information technology as well as an overall average grade. The link on the main page called GovLinks: Internet Resources for Government yields a link for state government, which in turn gives a list of links daunting in length but impressive in scope.
Funded by foundations, grants and individual member contributions (average $35) and refusing any corporate or special interest money, Project Vote-Smart has a bipartisan founding board with members such as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, Geraldine Ferraro, Newt Gingrich, Mark Hatfield and Bill Bradley. The information on the site is extensive--the Government and Politics link will lead you to a page with a section on the states. By clicking on Info for Your State and then a state of your choice, you will get standard political almanac information and much more--links for elections and ballot measures, issues and interest groups and think tanks and research institutes. The State Legislature link on each state will yield district maps for the House and Senate for states where they are available. For intensive political almanac information, this is a thorough and well-organized resource.
Calling itself the nation's premier "fact factory," the U.S. Census Bureau provides a literal treasure trove of information on such subjects as income, poverty, housing and demographics. By clicking on Search on the home page, you can do a quick search by subject matter or a more in-depth search by word, place or on a map. The Place Search, which leads you to the U.S. Gazetteer, will retrieve 1990 census data, yielding jaw-dropping amounts of information on any town you choose.
The site is no less thorough in its Map Search function. Located at http://www.census.gov/ datamap/www/index.html, the Map Search provides, you guessed it, a map of each state showing its counties. Each state has a profile of enormous proportions--population, demographic and housing information from the last census, more recent population estimates, income and poverty estimates, an economic profile and government finance information. Each county has a profile with similar categories. In addition, there are profiles of each state's congressional districts and a list of nearby state data centers.
The possibilities of finding data on this site to aid your reporting are nearly infinite. The Statistical Abstract of the United States can be found from the home page by selecting S under the Subjects A to Z menu. The site also provides e-mail news alerts of upcoming data releases, often giving you advance notice so you can do some reporting before the embargo date. The alerts are available free by subscription at http://www.census.gov/mp/www/subscribe.html (Go to Press Releases). This is definitely a site that's worth taking the time to get to know.
When we asked the Department of Labor if it organized any of its statistics by state, unemployment, labor force or cost of living, we were told to point our browsers to this URL, the Geographic Profile of Employment and Unemployment, 1997. By clicking on the Estimates for States link, you get 13 different charts and tables telling the story by state comparisons. (Most are in a .pdf format with the file size given.) Examples include unemployment rates by state, employment-population ratios by state and employment status of the experienced civilian labor force by occupation. There are more charts available on the Geographic Profile comparing cites (the Estimates for Metropolitan Areas and Cities link) and census regions (the Estimates for Census Regions and Divisions). The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers an infinite amount of data to sort through on its page of links to other statistical sites at http://stats.bls.gov/oreother.htm, but the Geographic Profile is a good place to start for state-by-state breakdowns and comparisons.
At first this list looks slightly overwhelming; some of the entries may look familiar from sites reviewed here, too. The Population Reference Bureau, funded by foundation grants (such as from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations), government contracts, individual and corporate contributions and publication sales, has put together a site that covers a lot of ground. The page is divided into two parts: the top half contains sites that have data on all 50 states while the bottom is a listing of states with corresponding Web sites that provide information on them. The sites with data on all 50 states are divided into the categories of General, Population, Farms and Land, The Economy, People and Lifestyles and Resources and the Environment. While some of the sites in these categories are obvious (the Census Bureau's Map Stats, for example), others are less so, such as the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics crime rates by state.
The bottom half of the page is just as useful, though the Web sites listed don't seem to fit into categories as neat as the sites on the top half of the page. Still, you'll find analysis of the fishing, mining, oil industries in Alaska and population and growth statistics for Florida, to name a few examples. The page is well-organized, and except for the links that no longer work (of which there were several), this page will generally lead you to good solid information. It's a good place to begin looking for statistical data if you're not sure where to start.
Here's a handy source. On the home page, there's a link for each state and a key word search. Each state link is a comprehensive listing of what's online for that state: the state home page, statewide offices (from the governor down to the state treasurer), legislative, judicial and executive branches (and all state agencies under this jurisdiction), state boards and commissions (state board of education, board of elections), regional sources (area mass transit sites) and finally all city and county sites available. If you need to see what's playing in Peoria, you can--literally. There's also a link toward the bottom of the page labeled State Courts, which leads you to a searchable database of judicial Web sites for all 50 states. You can search by state, multistate (those Web sites showing more than one state's judicial sites) or view the entire collection.
The key word search on the home page searches only site names, but the home page has other useful multistate links and links to national organizations to make up for it. The site is not cluttered, which is helpful, but its categories are also not well-organized.
This site lists, for quick reference, links to all of the states' constitutions as well as their official state sites. That's all that's there, but it's nice to have all the constitutions in one place in case you're interested in some light reading.
Capweb, which bills itself as "the Internet Guide to the United States Congress," provides congressional delegations by state on a colorful map. Click on the state, and you'll get a list of the representatives and their districts. Click on the representative's name, and you'll find contact information, committee memberships and ratings from interest groups where available. The quick access to the congressional delegations by state is probably the most useful part of the site for state government reporting--the rest of the site's resources focus on congressional-level issues.
Because each state is governed by different sunshine laws, it's hard to keep track of where you can legally demand information if you're searching for some elusive fact in multiple states. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has provided a Web site with this information for each state, telling what/whose information is public, how to get it and how to appeal. Each state follows the same outline, divided into two main parts: access to records and access to meetings. So once you are familiar with the outline format, you can skim to the part you need for each state. For example, skim to the Meeting Categories, Open or Closed section to find out whether you can sit in on a budget session. Included in the outline format is a section called State Law on Electronic Records, which details whether or not using information in electronic format affects its openness, how e-mail is treated and whether information can be demanded in an electronic form.
The Student Press Law Center has created a letter generator for state public records requests for all 50 states. Just insert a description of the records sought and the name and address of the records' keeper in the fill-in-the blank form. Choose the state where you're requesting records, and you will get a letter with the specific citation for that state's open records law and the time legally allotted for the agency you're contacting to respond. All you have to do is print and mail it.
Robert Niles, the executive producer of Denver Rocky Mountain News' Web site, InsideDenver.com, has done a great service to reporters in putting together this site. The range of information is broad but no less useful because of its breadth. Rusty on your statistics terms and need to do some number crunching? Niles provides links as a sidebar on this home page that are understandable crash courses on terms such as per capita, standard deviation, margin of error and sample sizes. You'll need to wade through a long list of links on the home page to get to the state-level information, but you won't be disappointed with what you find: links to USDA state fact sheets with aggregate population, farm and agribusiness statistics for each state; links to state crime statistics from Census Bureau and state agency Web pages; and links to search income and employment data broken down by industry at the state level. There are other useful if not unusual resources, such as a calculator to compare the costs of living in U.S. cities, the full text of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare (which includes quotations plucked from Bartlett's just for Shakespeare's works). The site's categories are well-organized, but the home page is hard to read. Still, for almost any reference, this is one to keep bookmarked.
Here's a simple but useful site, and it delivers just what it says: voter registration in raw numbers--the number of registered Democrats, Republicans and "Other"--for each state in an alphabetical listing. Compiled by the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service, the list could use some updating (the source of the numbers is listed as the State Election Administrations in April 1995), but these numbers are good to have anyway.
The U.S. Department of Defense has compiled easy-to-access listings of all military bases in the United States. You can scroll to the bottom of this page for a summary chart of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps installations by state. You can also, at the top of the home page, select a state in the By State, By Service tab for full listings of all bases and the cities the bases are located in, number of military personnel and civilians at each one, number of acres each base spans and its major unit or activity.
The Hotlinks component of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators' site is a useful, convenient listing of every state's department of motor vehicles Web page. Sunshine laws vary in by state, but this is the fastest way to get to multiple motor vehicle departments to see if you can obtain other people's driver's license or vehicle registration information.
BILL TRACKING
While a state legislature site usually allows you to track pending legislation in that state alone, there was just one place on the Web that we could find that allows you to follow a bill in multiple states without charge. NCSL, which keeps a database of all state laws, will give you the information free of charge, but it must be done over the phone. In case your newsroom is willing to foot the bill, the following are a few services that will track bills in several states for a fee.
StateScape is the only exception that we found that lets you track legislation across multiple states for free. Though designed for corporate clients, StateScape gives free access to reporters in its Press Access section. Your request may not be fulfilled within 24 hours, nor is it guaranteed that they will be able to fulfill your request, but they will look into issues and track bills across several states free of charge.
StateNet provides an easy way to track bills in each of the 50 states. Just type in the bill number and StateNet, which also publishes California Journal and StateNet Capitol Journal, will return a summary or description of the bill and its status. You can download the full text of the bill from the site. StateNet is quick to let you know a subscription is $1,800/year, and you can sign up right on the site.
NETSCAN iPublishing provides state information products and services including RegAlert and LegAlert, its online regulation and legislation tracking services. Simply fill out an interest profile and RegAlert and LegAlert will notify you by e-mail every time there is a change in regulations or legislation that pertains to your interests. Users also can search manually for regulations or for legislation by state, bill number or key word, among others, and bill summaries, histories and full texts are available. Want to subscribe? First, decide which service you want and how many states you need to track. For LegAlert, the price is $250 a year per state for unlimited access to information on each state you choose. RegAlert is the same price: $250 a year per state for unlimited access. Subscriptions are available online.
GoverNet Affairs has similar features to the other services mentioned here. It costs a small fortune ($17,500 per year) to search for a bill (or similar versions of the same bill) in all 50 states, be notified when that bill changes and customize reports on an issue. However, the site has recently added a new service called GoverNet Lite, a cheaper subscription that allows you to search multiple issues across all 50 states to get the bill title, summary, status, recent changes and the bill itself. You can't save your searches, and there is no report customization or e-mail notification of bill changes, but this subscription costs only $50 a month or $500 for a year. You can subscribe online, but you have to wait for them to call you back to sign up for services. It's easier to just call them to subscribe.
If the thought of Lexis-Nexis makes you want to tear your hair out, you may appreciate Findlaw.com. This is an excellent free source for searching for existing federal and state laws. From the home page, click on Laws: Cases and Codes for federal law, and you'll find the U.S. Constitution, U.S. Bankruptcy Code, Courts of Appeal, Supreme Court decisions searchable by volume and by year, all 11 Circuit courts plus the D.C. and Federal Circuit Courts. Click on U.S. State Resources from the home page, and you'll find a listing of states. Each state will yield a directory with a link called Primary Materials leading to its cases, codes and regulations. The site as a whole is comprehensive, and if you're looking for a law made within the last five to 10 years, then you can usually find it.
This page provides free access to site links containing full-text state constitutions, statutes, administrative code and legislation (usually with a link to the state's legislature page). Its design is as plain as its name. Use with caution--it doesn't seem totally reliable as there's a disclaimer saying that only "sites maintained by governments are in bold type."
Legal.online, on its State Courts page, has listed alphabetically state by state the appellate court sites for each state and if available the dates of decisions online as well as what electronic format they come in.
This nonpartisan Web site goes out of its way to offer both sides of every issue. The Issues Library is particularly helpful as a resource for issue analysis and background information. Organized alphabetically by topic, the Library Index gives extensive links on each issue, including reports on the topic by other policy groups. The Library's Organization by Issue link offers an interesting feature. Click on a topic, and you get all the players involved or interested in policymaking for that issue. Policy.com offers free e-mail updates to keep you current on policy news.
Also nonpartisan, this site is the "for dummies" version of public policy. The site aims to let leaders and policymakers know what the opinions of the American people are on selected issues as well as informing interested citizens. The organization conducts its own research and polling. Each issue, ranging from abortion to gambling to America's global role, has a digest divided into two parts: Understanding the Issue and Public Opinion. Public Agenda Online, too, offers twice-weekly e-mail services to keep you abreast of their latest headlines. The information here may not be new to you, but it will remind you of what you need to be paying attention to.
Part of Vice President Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government, this site links to information by topic, type or current issues. The latter category includes pages of links for welfare reform and Y2K. While neither page delves into state-by-state analysis, they provide in-depth background on each issue. The welfare reform page, for example, includes links to the Welfare Reform Law of 1996, the federal government's Welfare to Work site and the Department of Agriculture's food assistance programs, among others. This page is best used as a starting point on new and unfamiliar state issues.
Want to see which doctors have had disciplinary actions filed against them in New York state? Search here for physicians, physician assistants and special assistants who have been disciplined since 1994. Run by the New York State Department of Health, this site allows you to search by the physician's name or in the monthly reports of disciplinary actions. On the home page, click on the link called Physician Name, which will yield links alphabetically by last name of the doctor (A-C, D-F and so forth). By clicking on the appropriate alphabetical link, you can find the doctor you're investigating. Click on the name and you'll get a license number, the action taken (license suspension, license surrender), effective date and nature of misconduct--exactly what the doctor did. Monthly reports will yield the same details. The reports are grouped by month and year and list doctors alphabetically under the type of action taken (warnings or final disciplinary actions, for example). Obviously, this site has its limitations, but it's a great place to start an investigation of any doctor in New York State.
The New York State Department of Education has provided online license verification through its Office of the Professions. You can look up the license of an accountant, social worker, doctor or nurse in New York state to name a few of the professions listed. You can search by name or by license number within a profession.
These are two examples from New York, but you might find a similar department in your state. Please let us know what you find.
There couldn't be a better name for a collection of campaign finance data than opensecrets.org. The Center for Responsive Politics has lived up to its name as well, providing searchable databases on lobbyists and their spending habits in Washington, politicians, PACs, donors, even soft-money donors--you name it, this site has it at the federal level. Its state page has a U.S. map, each state a link yielding a profile telling who's making the big contributions in the state and where the money's coming from. You can't customize your own searches on the state pages, but you can see top contributions listed by city or by zip code. Each state has a Money Map that breaks down where the contributions come from geographically by county.
In addition, a few states have individual Open Secrets sites, more detailed pages that combine all available campaign finance information about state and federal politicians. Here you can conduct your own searches. Only three exist so far, including Arizona, Illinois and Minnesota. The Center plans to provide more Open Secrets state sites before the 2000 election.
Speaking of campaign finance, these folks are particularly concerned about what their name suggests--they even disclose where they get their money. Supported by grants from the Ford and Soros foundations, this nonpartisan, nonprofit program provides a Web site with cross-state comparisons on contribution size in state legislative races as well as on contributors with NRA affiliations and gambling interests. The comparisons are already there for you, however; unfortunately, you cannot sort data or customize your comparisons.
It is what it says: all campaign finance data, all the time. The home page opens to a map, with links to each state detailing campaign finance data available there: races covered, years covered, contribution limits, campaign finance reporters in that state, etc. Run by Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting, the site includes a search engine to track cash flow across multiple states in state and federal races. You can search by last name of a contributor or candidate, find out who gave what to whom and when as well as how the candidates spent their money. Some information about PACs, candidates and party committees is provided. Although they don't pretend that their data is perfect, the Campaign Finance Information Center is an easy way to track what your legislators are doing with their campaign contributions and where they're getting them.
The Center for the Study of the States was established "in response to the growing importance of state governments in the American federal system." The Center conducts research on trends affecting all 50 states with a concentration on state government finances. The Center publishes a quarterly analysis of trends in state tax revenue, the State Revenue Report, which highlights recent changes in tax laws. The Center also publishes State Fiscal Briefs, which analyzes trends in local and state government spending and comes out several times a year, as well as Government Employee Reports, which examines trends in state and local government employment. If you're interested in subjects as arcane as these, highlights of each of the reports are available on the Web, and full texts are available by paid subscription.
The Stimulus and the States Follow how states are managing the stimulus money and which programs are receiving funding as part of the recovery effort using Stateline.org's stimulus special section.
Stateline.org has put together a list of state public policy resources organized by issue. Here, you will find useful links to essential information from government, academia, and think tanks. If you have a link to add, please email us.
The Pew Charitable Trusts applies the power of knowledge to solve today’s most challenging problems. Pew's Center on the States identifies and advances state policy solutions.
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