Candidate Accountability Research Training
Service Description
Welcome to Sunlight Search’s Candidate Accountability Research Project in partnership with MuckRock. The five sessions below will provide you with reporting tools you can put to use to deeply profile political candidates. We’ll start by creating a timeline of a candidate’s life using basic information about where they live and work and who their associates are. After your first session, you’ll walk away with a timeline that will help you begin to sketch out a picture of your candidate’s life and a plan to file FOIA requests that will fill in the details. By the end of session five, you will have a deeply reported timeline that brings the candidate’s real history into focus, understanding their professional, personal and political backgrounds and where those events overlap in newsworthy ways. - Session 1: Backgrounding Basics (with MuckRock) - Session 2: Getting Personal with Finances - Session 3: It’s All Political (with Open Secrets) - Session 4: Social Media Sleuthing (with MuckRock) - Session 5: School & Work