Making budget news fit to print: reflections from a survey of editors and budget officials.

• Author: Swoboda, Dale P.

Is an adversarial relationship the nature of the media business or can improved communications between city finance officials and editors/reporters better serve the public's right to know?

"I know about the media in much the same way that a deer knows something about hunters," Steven T. Florio wrote in "The Media and the CEO."(1) Municipal budget officials often find themselves caught in reporters' sights because news stories about government budgeting and finance illustrate the drama associated with large amounts of the public treasury being used for purposes that affect many people in many different ways. Reporters and editors often get credit for holding municipal budget officials accountable.

A 1994 survey of newspaper editors and municipal budget officials conducted by the author found that most editors consider the budget process, revenue generation, spending decisions and cuts, and deficits very important. They are highly likely to publish stories about budget issues in their newspapers. Given the complexity of budget issues, however, how qualified are reporters to write about them? What preventative steps can budget officials take if newspapers do occasionally misfire with omitted or inaccurate information? This article will examine some of the results of the survey to shed some light on these questions.

A representative sample of all 1,600 daily newspapers in the United States - listed in the Editors and Publishers Yearbook 1993 - provided the sampling frame for this survey. The largest city in each newspaper's market was the unit of analysis, and a sample size of 222 cities in 49 states was selected. The sample of cities was stratified by population size, and respondents were systematically selected to include key media and municipal representatives. One hundred and twenty-seven of 222 finance directors and 107 of 222 managing editors responded.

Survey results show that most newspaper editors and city budget officials strongly agree that municipal governments provide enough budget information for newspapers to produce in-depth budget stories, as shown in Exhibit 1. The survey also revealed, however, that reporters and editors are considered inadequately trained to deal with the complexities of specialized budget stories, reducing newspaper effectiveness at informing the public about budget policy. (See Exhibit 2.)

Overall, 69 percent of editors and 54 percent of budget officials surveyed do not think it necessary to improve the...