California Watch

Welcome to our Data Center.

We’ve assembled some cool data sets for you to search, including stimulus contractors, lobbying firms and some key campaign finance data. We plan to add more data sets in connection with stories we’re writing – as well as some interesting stand-alone databases of interest.

We hope you will view the data as a tool to find useful information. Please dive into the data to find story ideas that you might share with us or pursue on your own. By arming the public with this data, we are deputizing you, in a sense, to be our eyes and ears – a network of tipsters for California Watch.
It’s pretty simple to search the data. Just click on the data set you’re interested in and begin typing in search terms and/or selecting items from the drop-down menus.

A couple of helpful tips:

• If you leave the search fields blank, you can retrieve the entire database – typically 25 rows at a time.
• Most databases can be searched or sorted by multiple categories.
• If you click on the details feature, you can get more information, and in some cases a description.
• If you see the symbols >=, it means that your search will return results that are "more than or equal to" the figure you enter. So if you enter a figure as a search term for something like campaign contributions, stimulus grants etc., it will return all items equal to or more than the figure you entered.

If you have any questions about our data or would like to see a specific data set on our site, please contact me. Happy searching.

- Agustin Armendariz