President-elect Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration is going to be expensive: up to $40 million. To help pay for it, his transition team is taking donations. To their credit, they’re being transparent about this process. They’ve posted a sortable online spreadsheet of all inauguration donors and bundlers. (Hat tip to the Los Angeles Times for providing a link to the spreadsheet in the paper’s inaugural roundup story.)
There is gold here for journalists looking for stories linking locals or celebrities to Obama …
In a cursory review of the list, I quickly spotted actress Halle Berry’s name noting the maximum $50 donation. But you’ll also find small-time donors on the list (this would make for a good feature), or businesspeople seeking to curry favor (for a harder-edge news story). Click any column header to sort the data by name, employer, location or amount.
When I tried to sort this data online it crashed my browser, so I would recommend copying the data into an offline spreadsheet format for sorting. Getting the data into usable shape on XLS will take a bit of work — field sizes, merged fields, etc. — but if I can do it, you surely can.
Here are some noteworthy celebrity donations I spotted:
| Jamie Curtis: | $25,000 |
| Christopher Guest: | $25,000 |
| Kate Spielberg: | $50,000 |
| Brad Whitford: | $50,000 |
| Halle Berry: | $50,000 |
| Jeffrey Katzenberg: | $50,000 |
| Steven Spielberg: | $50,000 |
| Marilyn Katzenberg: | $50,000 |
| Jamie Foxx: | $50,000 |
| Sharon Stone: | $50,000 |
| Berry Gordy: | $50,000 |
| Earvin “Magic” Johnson: | $25,000 |
| Thomas Hanks: | $50,000 |
| Robert Zemeckis: | $50,000 |
