This package was a group effort during the Spring 2001 semester by students in MASC 375, the Legislative Reporting course at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Mass Communications.

We began working on the project in January. We decided to examine gifts to legislators for several reasons:

• It was unexplored territory. No other news organization had published an analysis of who gives the most gifts to Virginia lawmakers or which legislators receive the most gifts, according to a Lexis-Nexis search.

• Gifts to politicians had been in the news recently because of presents taken by Bill and Hillary Clinton when they left the White House in January.

• Virginia has no limits on legislative gift-giving. Lobbyists can give as much as they want - even during the legislative session.

• The public should have online access to information about the gifts legislators receive. Until now, this information had been available only on paper at the Capitol. We felt it would be a public service to put the gifts data on the Web.

At the start of the session, we ordered copies of the Statements of Economic Interests for members of the House of Delegates (from the House Clerk's Office) and for members of the Virginia Senate (from the Senate Clerk's Office). These statements also are called conflict-of-interest forms: They can reveal whether a lawmaker has a financial interest in an issue pending before the General Assembly.

On their statements, legislators must list:

• Offices and directorships (Schedule A)
• Debts of more than $10,000 (Schedule B)
• Investments of more than $10,000 (Schedule C)
• Honoraria of more than $200 (Schedule D)
• Gifts of more than $50 (Schedule E)
• Employers paying the legislator or family members more than $10,000 a year
• Business interests of more than $10,000 (Schedule F)
• Payments of more than $1,000 for representation and other services (Schedule G)
• Real estate of $10,000 or more, other than the legislator's home (Schedule H)
• Real estate contracts with state government agencies (Schedule I)

For some lawmakers, the form may run only a few pages; others may file a statement of 100 or more pages, including background material.

Because our focus was gifts, we zeroed in on Schedule E, on which legislators must list all gifts of $50 or more received the previous year. We had 140 legislators to contend with (100 House members and 40 senators); the class was made up of 13 students and an instructor. So we each took the Statements of Economic Interests for 10 legislators and entered the Schedule E information into a spreadsheet.

We did the data entry in Microsoft Excel. For each gift, students entered the recipient's name, the giver's name, the giver's city and state, the description of the gift, the value of the gift and any notes made on the legislator's form.

We then combined each student's data into a single spreadsheet - with all gifts on all legislators. We fixed typos and inconsistencies, especially in the spelling of donors' names. Then we analyzed the data with Excel's PivotTable Report feature. This allowed us to see how much each donor had given in gifts and how much each lawmaker had received.

After doing the analysis, the class discussed possible stories: about the top givers and recipients, about expensive or unusual gifts, about why donors give gifts to legislators. Each student was assigned a story.

One student, Jessica Brown, decided to write about gifts given to Virginia's top three statewide elected officials: Gov. Jim Gilmore, Lt. Gov. John Hager (who presides over the Senate) and Attorney General Mark Earley. These officials file their Statements of Economic Interests with the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

After Jessica obtained the filings for Gilmore, Hager and Earley, the students entered the gifts data into Excel so we could total and analyze it. (It would have been hard to do this by hand or with a simple calculator: Gilmore reported 337 gifts worth almost $55,500.)

To guide us in this project, we read numerous stories about legislative gifts and campaign donations in The Washington Post, The Virginian-Pilot and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. We also used such resources as:

• The Virginia Public Access Project, an online database of political donations to state officials and candidates. (This database covers campaign contributions but not gifts.)

• Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc., and its Campaign Finance Information Center.

• An article by Kit Wagar of The Kansas City Star on that newspaper's computer-assisted investigation of gifts to Missouri legislators. The article was published in the September 1999 issue of Uplink, the newsletter from the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.

If you would like more information about our project, please contact Jeff South, who teaches Legislative Reporting at VCU, or use our feedback form.