(a) Get your hands on a leaked copy of the report and prominently publish its findings for your readers' edification.
(b) Mention the report once, in one or two sentences buried in another story, and consider your duty done.
(c) Pat yourself on the back for having run, a few months earlier, a couple of good stories that explored locals' complaints about the company but which didn't mention the report.
(d) The same as (c) except you go whole hog, publishing a series of incisive follow-ups and posting the entire report on the web.
If you answered (a), congratulations-- you work in New York, either at a daily like the New York Times or the New York Post, or at a business publication like American Banker or National Mortgage News, where you have the satisfaction of fully covering predatory lending in Washington State from Manhattan.
If you answered (b), you're at the Seattle Times. You figure that on October 4, when the judge holds the scheduled hearing about Household's temporary-restraining order, the report will finally be released because those New York papers have already published its conclusions. You'll get it out late, it's true, but without lifting a finger.
If you answered (c), you work at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. After a promising start--lengthy stories in April and May that explored in detail local clients' charges against Household--you drop the ball on the suppressed report, barely mentioning it at all. You miss a big part of the story, but you do better than the Times.
If you answered (d), well, you're banished to Bellingham, where you work like a dog in relative obscurity at the Bellingham Herald. Still, you have the satisfaction of a job well done, and your readers love you because you posted the entire report on the web a month ago (read it at news.bellinghamherald.com/downloads/hfc-document.pdf, or read The Stranger's coverage ["Predatory Politics," Sandeep Kaushik, Aug 29]).
