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Like Al's ideas? Hear more in our broadcast and online seminars. Sign up to receive Al's Morning Meeting by e-mail: * Click here (sent Monday-Friday at 7 a.m.) Buy Al's book, "Aim for the Heart" (Poynter receives a small cut as an Amazon affiliate).

At Poynter, I often teach a session on how to find useful stuff on the Internet to enrich your stories. In the spirit of Sunshine Week, during which journalists are highliting the ways that public records are the foundation of the work we do, I added some sites to a list compiled by Gannett News Service to help you use public records in your reporting: 

• Know your representative. Vote-smart.org includes voting records, speeches and quotes, education and family background and voting ratings from special-interest groups.

• The official government sites for Congress: House.gov and Senate.gov.

• If campaign money is the mother's milk of politics, then this site is the barn in which the secrets are stored: OpenSecrets.org. You can search for donors and recipients, check donations by special-interest topic, ZIP code and more. You can also see personal financial disclosure forms from every member of Congress, including property and income that they declare. If you want to see the raw data, go to the Federal Election Commission Web site. There, you can see PDF files of actual donors' listings, including donation amounts.

• If you want to know what your national legislators are saying, go to GovTrack.us, and you can sign up for a notification any time they vote or speak on the floor.

• Non-profits have to file 990 forms [PDF] if they take in $25,000 a year or more. These tax forms are government records which are open for your inspection. Go to Guidestar.org to read them free of charge. (And here's a guide to reading the forms, written by a former executive director of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York.)

• The Investigative Reporters & Editors association (IRE) keeps a terrific page of story ideas and results as a resource for journalists. Obviously, most of these stories are based on open records that journalists have analyzed.

More Billionaires

The new Forbes list of billionaires and rich people finds that there was a fairly large growth in billionaires recently. In fact, 20 years ago, Forbes listed 140 billionaires worldwide. This time, the number was 793.

The story says:

The U.S. is home to 44 new billionaires and commands nearly half of the fortunes on the roster.  Bill Gates retains his title as the world's richest person for the twelfth straight year, proving that while it's getting easier to make a billion, the same can't be said for making $50 billion.

In second place is his good friend and bridge partner Warren Buffett. The Sage of Omaha is worth $42 billion this year, $2 billion less than last.

Other notables in the Top 20 include number seven, Bernard Arnault, the pope of fashion who runs LVMH and oversees its high-end brands including Louis Vuittton and Dom Perignon; and Roman Abramovich, the 39-year-old Russian oil baron who liquidated his biggest asset last year for $13 billion.

Seventy-eight women make the list, 10 more than last year, though only six are self-made, including the Queen of All Media, Oprah Winfrey, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and eBay's Meg Whitman.

Forbes has produced a whole Web package on this story, with interactive maps of billionaires' hometowns, and a directory of billionaires by state and region.

Millions of Millionaires

Do people still consider millionaires to be mega-rich? A couple of years ago, one study said more than 2 million Americans are millionaires now -- it amounts to one out of every 125 people in this country. The Lincoln Financial Group has estimated that by 2013, the number of millionaires in America will triple due to inheritances from World War II-generation parents.

You can click here to see the IRS's estimate [XLS file] of how many millionaires live in your state. (Remember, as you read this chart, that population numbers are in thousands -- so add three "0s" -- and the money figures are expressed in millions. In other words, just for example, Alabama has 35,000 millionaires, worth a total of $88,579,000,000.) The IRS also breaks down the data by sex and age. 

The IRS's Winter 2003 Statistics of Income bulletin  said:

California remains the state with the largest number of millionaires, while Connecticut was the state with the greatest per capita concentration of millionaires.

Other studies of millionaires in America say that you may not know who is a millionaire by what they spend. They usually do not drive a new car, wear an expensive watch or wear expensive suits.

The book "The Millionaire Next Door" included this passage about what a millionaire might say in describing himself/herself to you. In many ways, the list could hold the secrets to becoming rich:

• I am a fifty-seven-year-old male, married with three children. About 70 percent of us earn 80 percent or more of our household's income.
• About one in five of us is retired. About two-thirds of us who are working are self-employed. Interestingly, self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires. Also, three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Most of the others are self-employed professionals, such as doctors and accountants.
• Many of the types of businesses we are in could be classified as dullnormal. We are welding contractors, auctioneers, rice farmers, owners of mobile-home parks, pest controllers, coin and stamp dealers, and paving contractors.
• About half of our wives do not work outside the home. The number-one occupation for those wives who do work is teacher.
• Our household's total annual realized (taxable) income is $131,000 (median, or 50th percentile), while our average income is $247,000. Note that those of us who have incomes in the $500,000 to $999,999 category (8 percent) and the $1 million or more category (5 percent) skew the average upward.
• We have an average household net worth of $3.7 million. Of course, some of our cohorts have accumulated much more. Nearly 6 percent have a net worth of over $10 million. Again, these people skew our average upward. The typical (median, or 50th percentile) millionaire household has a net worth of $1.6 million.
• On average, our total annual realized income is less than 7 percent of our wealth. In other words, we live on less than 7 percent of our wealth.
• Most of us (97 percent) are homeowners. We live in homes currently valued at an average of $320,000. About half of us have occupied the same home for more than twenty years. Thus, we have enjoyed significant increases in the value of our homes.
• Most of us have never felt at a disadvantage because we did not receive any inheritance. About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent.
• We live well below our means. We wear inexpensive suits and drive American-made cars. Only a minority of us drive the current-model-year automobile. Only a minority ever lease our motor vehicles.
• Most of our wives are planners and meticulous budgeters. In fact, only 18 percent of us disagreed with the statement "Charity begins at home." Most of us will tell you that our wives are a lot more conservative with money than we are.
• We have a "go-to-hell fund." In other words, we have accumulated enough wealth to live without working for ten or more years. Thus, those of us with a net worth of $1.6 million could live comfortably for more than twelve years. Actually, we could live longer than that, since we save at least 15 percent of our earned income.
• We have more than six and one-half times the level of wealth of our nonmillionaire neighbors, but, in our neighborhood, these nonmillionaires outnumber us better than three to one. Could it be that they have chosen to trade wealth for acquiring high-status material possessions?
• As a group, we are fairly well educated. Only about one in five are not college graduates. Many of us hold advanced degrees. Eighteen percent have master's degrees, 8 percent law degrees, 6 percent medical degrees, and 6 percent Ph.D.s.
• Only 17 percent of us or our spouses ever attended a private elementary or private high school. But 55 percent of our children are currently attending or have attended private schools.
• As a group, we believe that education is extremely important for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. We spend heavily for the educations of our offspring.
• About two-thirds of us work between forty-five and fifty-five hours per week.
• We are fastidious investors. On average, we invest nearly 20 percent of our household realized income each year. Most of us invest at least 15 percent. Seventy-nine percent of us have at least one account with a brokerage company. But we make our own investment decisions.
• We hold nearly 20 percent of our household's wealth in transaction securities such as publicly traded stocks and mutual funds. But we rarely sell our equity investments. We hold even more in our pension plans. On average, 21 percent of our household's wealth is in our private businesses.

Too Fast, Too Soon

The Bakersfield Californian newspaper ran an interesting piece on how difficult it is becoming for kids to make athletic teams. The story includes this passage:

In some parts of town -- particularly on the west side -- parents say it's nearly impossible to get on a school's athletic team unless you've had at least a year or two of private or club training. Keeping their kids out of the competitive club setting would mean denying them the chance to play for their high school teams.

School coaches agree it's hard to make it onto some school teams without the extra training, but said it's not impossible for talented, hardworking kids to make it.

"At my high school we have kids who don't play club," said Judy Rexroth, varsity volleyball coach at Bakersfield Christian High School and director of Bakersfield Volleyball Club. "The more practice they get, the better they develop. Most high schools coaches want the kids that are developed."

With so much expected, it's not always an easy road to the varsity team. Parents of young athletes struggle with just how much training is too much and how to protect their children from the win-at-all-costs mentality of some coaches and other parents.

And there is this telling passage:

"We have a lot of soccer parents at this age and younger who honestly think there are college scouts out there on the soccer field waiting to recruit their kids," Mary Ann Davies (mother of a 12-year-old athlete) said. "They'll go to no end to promote their kids. Private coaches, $2,000 summer soccer camps, the best equipment, $200 soccer balls. At 12 years old, that's a bit much."

College and professional scouts are not looking at 12-year-olds. They find players by watching high school teams, going to club tournaments and from information garnered from a network of high school-level coaches whose opinions they trust.

"It's extremely unusual," [California State University, Bakersfield] women's basketball coach Tim La Kose said of scouting younger players. "We don't go to the youth camps for the purpose of recruiting. There are the exceptions. You'll see a (Olympic basketball gold medalist) Diana Taurasi in the eighth grade and you know she's going to be something special. But those are few and far between."

The Automatic Bathroom

Have you seen all of the technology that people are building into the humble bathroom these days? There are automatic showers that you can turn on from anywhere in the house, faucets that have pre-set temperatures for the water, preheated toilet seats and sound systems for your shower. Wow. See this story from MSNBC for details.