• Voodoo Anyone?: How to Understand the Economy Without Really Trying is a primer on economics for journalists and other laymen. If read and absorbed by journalists, this book will surely make the world a better place—one with far less economically illiterate reporting, at any rate. The book’s author is Chris Warden, who, before his untimely passing earlier this year, was accomplished both as a journalist and a teacher of journalism. As he did so well when he wrote for Investor’s Business Daily, Warden uses anecdotes and illustrations to explain the key concepts of economics and how those bear on the major stories that reporters cover. Warden was a model journalist. Many learned from him, and many more can still learn from him by reading this book.

• The Sunlight Foundation has created a database of the quarterly expenditures of the U.S. House of Representatives. The House itself published the information online for the first time at the end of November. Sunlight then took the pdf document and turned it into a searchable database to make it easy for anybody to find out how members and committees are spending their office budgets.

• KansasReporter.org is filling a void left by the downsizing of traditional media in Kansas. Could this be the business model that will save journalism? Concerned that too few resources were being devoted to original reporting of state government affairs, the Kansas Policy Institute (née, The Flint Hills Center) launched KansasReporter.org to serve as a free wire service and news bureau on Kansas state affairs. The Kansas Policy Institute is Kansas’s free market think tank, but the organization doesn’t intend for KansasReporter.org to be a partisan advocate. The project, according to its mission statement, aims to “provide vigorous and credible reporting on all sides of stories,” and wants readers to hold it accountable to that mission. Kudos to the Kansas Policy Institute for being willing to step outside of its “think tank” identity here. Surely, supporting good reporting can only help the cause of preserving the free society.

• Future of Capitalism, a new blog up and running since September, seeks to “ventilate and illuminate … by using detail and example” questions such as: “Are we sliding toward socialism?” and “Would that be good or bad, and why?” The site is edited by Ira Stoll, formerly of the New York Sun. This week, Future of Capitalism has helpfully weighed in on Atul Gawande’s much discussed New Yorker article arguing that the history of the USDA Agricultural Extension Service shows how government can help a private industry bend its cost curve downward, as the government now wants to do with health care reform. According to Future of Capitalism, Gawande’s account might be just a bit off. (See What Atul Gawande Left Out and More on the 1900 Census.)