Journalist's Toolbox Business 2: Investigating Companies

May 3, 2022

May 3

Business Tools, Part II: Investigating Companies

Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series on tools and tips for covering business stories.

Whether you’re tracking a local company, an large industry or a Fortune 500 firm, your search should start with the SEC EDGAR database. It houses quarterly and annual earnings reports from publicly-traded companies and makes them easily searchable.

Violation Tracker is a wide-ranging database on corporate misconduct. Produced by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, it covers banking, consumer protection, false claims, environmental, wage and hour, safety, discrimination, price-fixing, and other cases resolved by federal regulatory agencies and all parts of the Justice Department since 2000 — plus cases from state AGs and selected state regulatory agencies.

The search interface takes some time to learn, but be patient. Start by searching a few local companies or search by regulatory agency and go from there.

Non-profits: Guidestar is a pay-for-use site that lets you view Form 990 filings by non-profit organizations. The forms disclose annual revenues, expenditures, and what their executives and boards earn. It’s an excellent way to investigate a charity. If you can’t afford Guidestar (it’s pricy), then try ProPublica’s Non-Profit Explorer.

CharityWatch: This non-partisan organization grades and ranks charities. You have to donate to have full access, but the free version has a list of highest-paid execs by charity, which saves time having to pull dozens of Form 990s on charities. You can easily look up the NRA president’s salary, or what the NRA was paying Oliver North when he served on its board.

But what do you do when the company is private or a start-up? They’re not required to file a 10-C with the SEC, but there are ways to dig up information on their finances. Have they been sued? Check court records for financials the companies filed. Are some of their data listed with trade organizations?

And then there is FormDs.com, which helps track investments into startups, growing businesses, hedge funds, and private equity firms.

The tool lets you sort, filter and extract critical information from the hundreds of SEC filings (called “Form Ds”) filed each day. The site processes SEC filings on a real-time basis and often learns about new investments before newspapers and online publications.

And it’s great for local media outlets: You can search for people, company names, specific industries, or focus on regions or cities.

Want to learn how to use these tools? Open this document and go to part 2. I’ll walk you through all of the tools in this video:

Around the Web

Social Searcher
Collates postings on social media networks.
Storyline
This Knight Lab tool from Northwestern University lets you build annotations on time series line charts.
SceneVR
This Knight Lab tool turns your collection of panoramic and VR-ready photos into a slideshow of navigable scenes, allowing you to create unique 360° narratives. A simple-to-use editor allows you to order your photos, add descriptions and add text.

Cool Tool Tuesday

Don’t forget that at 1 p.m. CT each Tuesday, we feature a new resource on #cooltooltuesday, like you see in our Around the Web section of this newsletter. Be sure to check it out and retweet it. Here’s a video of some of my past faves:

In Quotes …

“Write boldly and tell the truth fearlessly.” -- Joseph Medill

Follow us: @journtoolbox | JournalistsToolbox | Subscribe on YouTube

Journalist's Toolbox