Journalism in action | CODYK.net Sacramento-based multimedia journalist Cody Kitaura's musings on newspapers, web coverage and beyond.

Web tools in action: How I almost localized a story about Thomas KinkadePosted by Cody Kitaura on June 29th, 2010

As a fresh reporter at a smaller newspaper, it’s not always possible or feasible to get big scoops. Small papers also have a limited area of interest, so it doesn’t make sense to write about something hundreds of miles away from the paper’s location. But that doesn’t mean reporters at smaller papers shouldn’t pay attention to nearby papers.

Here’s a short story about how to take small tidbits from a broader story and (almost) localize them. The story didn’t turn into anything, but perhaps something can be learned from the process.

Recently, famed painter Thomas Kinkade was arrested for suspicion of driving under the influence. At first blush, this is likely nothing but fodder for good water-cooler talk. But the Sacramento Bee story linked above contains a brief mention of his financial troubles, including this passage:

On June 2, his company Pacific Metro, formerly known as Media Arts and the Thomas Kinkade Co., filed for bankruptcy protection in federal court.

…

The company owes 1,000 to 5,000 creditors a total of $10 million to $50 million, according to court documents.

A list of creditors more than 100 pages long was appended to the bankruptcy filing. It included a cardboard-box company in Sacramento, the state Board of Equalization and small art galleries in Folsom, Auburn and Elk Grove.

I work for a newspaper in Elk Grove, so that mention interested staff here. I was asked to look into this to see if anything could come out of it.

The first thing I needed to do was find the name of the local gallery claiming unpaid debts from Kinkade’s corporate arm. I did this by using the public records website used by federal courts (more on the basics of this unique website in a future blog post) to find Pacific Metro’s bankruptcy filing. After looking through documents on that site, I found an art gallery no one in the office had heard of listed with a Folsom address. Two names were also included with the name of the gallery.

Google searches yielded very little information on the gallery (including a disconnected phone number), so I decided on a different approach. I plugged one of the names into pipl.com, and found a couple phone numbers based in Folsom. A few minutes later, I was on the phone with a man who closed his Elk Grove art gallery a couple years ago. He told me Kinkade’s corporate division owed him a grand total of . . . less than $200.

Not much of a headline.

He went on to say the credit came from a painting he overpaid for a few years ago. He said he never got his money back, but wasn’t losing any sleep over it. Then there was this:

“I wasn’t even aware he had filed bankruptcy until another reporter called me yesterday.”

OK, so I wasn’t the first to get to him. I wasn’t the first to report Kinkade’s arrest. I wasn’t the first to . . . well, you get the idea. The important thing about this process was that it showed how all of these tools could be pulled together to gather real information. It’s just in this particular case, that information wasn’t really all that newsworthy.