Claire Grant
Claire Grant reports on business with a focus on how real estate deals, local enterprises and funding decisions shape economic life in Sangamon County and across Illinois. Her coverage at The State Journal-Register blends straightforward transaction stories with accountability pieces that follow the money and its impact on residents. Within business, she returns often to property sales, small business openings and the financial side of community programs.
Real estate sales and property trends
Grant covers residential real estate as part of her business beat, documenting notable home sales and ranking top transactions in the area. In one recent piece, she highlights a Springfield home that sold for more than $1 million and presents a top ten list of the highest-priced sales, giving readers a clear view of activity at the upper end of the local market. Through these ranked rundowns of property deals, she shows where significant money is moving in the housing sector and how individual sales fit into broader market dynamics.
Her real estate coverage stays close to the numbers, emphasizing sale prices and addresses while letting the scale of the transactions speak for itself. By treating major home sales as business news, she connects residential property activity to the wider economic story she tracks on her beat. This approach makes her work relevant both to industry professionals watching local trends and to residents interested in how the market is evolving around them.
Local business openings and consumer economy
Grant’s reporting extends across the business landscape, especially new and emerging enterprises in the region. She profiles openings like Triple Blend Nutrition, a Herbalife-based drink business launching in a downtown corridor, introducing the owner and the concept while noting how the enterprise fits into the local commercial mix. Her work also surfaces smaller consumer brands that gain attention in the area, such as a bespoke-focused business that publicly celebrated a media spotlight from her coverage.
These stories focus on the practical details of each venture: what the business offers, where it operates and when it opens. Grant’s tone is direct and descriptive, centered on the business model rather than lifestyle framing. By regularly documenting new storefronts and services, she builds a running account of how the local consumer economy changes over time and which entrepreneurs are actively reshaping it.
Nonprofits, fraud allegations and community impact
Alongside openings and sales, Grant reports on nonprofits and service providers when financial conduct and oversight become news. In coverage of the Phoenix Center, she follows a whistleblower who describes how HIV testing data was allegedly manipulated to secure grant money, an account that led to a state investigation into the organization’s practices. Past employees publicly credit her with publishing a story on more than a decade of alleged grant fraud at the center, underscoring her role in bringing those claims into the open.
Her work connects these allegations to concrete consequences, tracing how funding and reporting practices at a single nonprofit intersect with public health and public dollars. The emphasis stays on documented behavior, the mechanisms of the alleged fraud and the official response, rather than commentary. This makes her coverage useful for understanding both the specifics of the case and the broader question of how grant-funded services are monitored.
Explainers on programs, lawsuits and their effects
Grant also works in video formats to explain how policy changes and legal disputes affect residents and institutions. In one video, she outlines changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and reports how those adjustments are hitting households and food pantries across Illinois, translating program details into everyday impact. In another, she provides an update on a federal lawsuit involving a daycare owner, summarizing the case and what is at stake for the parties involved.
These explainers keep to the essentials: the rule or lawsuit in question, who is involved and how the situation affects people and organizations on the ground. By pairing clear narration with concise reporting, she extends her business beat into adjacent areas of social services and regulation, reinforcing her focus on the intersection of money, policy and community life.
4 more real estate journalists.
Aasma Day
Aasma Day tells the story of money through the lives of ordinary people, showing how housing costs, pensions, benefits and everyday bills shape households’ fortunes. She is Money People Reporter at The i Paper, drawing on more than two decades in journalism and a deep background in investigative and regional reporting. Her beat is money people and household finances, with a focus on personal finance, housing pressures, property charges and real estate traps. She reports on state and private pensions, changes to benefits and allowances, and complex service charge regimes, using clear sums, named benefits and direct testimony. Her pieces are reported features built around individual cases, with plain, direct tone, detailed interviews and close scrutiny of the rules and institutions involved. Her earlier work at the Lancashire Evening Post earned a Specialist Writer of the Year award.
Aditi Ganguly
Aditi Ganguly is a financial writer who shows how market windfalls and headline-making companies turn into real-world spending, investing, and property decisions. She writes for Yahoo Finance and personal finance outlets that syndicate there. Her beat is sudden wealth, retail investors, and the shift from paper gains into luxury real estate and other big-ticket assets, with detailed reporting on newly minted millionaires from events like the SpaceX IPO. She compares familiar stocks so small investors can choose between names like Gap and American Eagle or Facebook and Pinterest, and tracks frontier themes from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency through their impact on portfolios. She explains surges in gold, shifts in consumer spending, and policy or credit moves in plain language, using specific stories, earnings, and advisor input to link big economic and market stories to concrete decisions about building long-term wealth.
Adrian Darbyshire
Adrian Darbyshire is a senior reporter whose work is driven by official documents, archives and on-the-ground detail, giving his stories a factual, report-led tone rooted in the character of specific places. He is a senior reporter at Isle of Man Today, covering how property, heritage and public decisions shape where people live and work. He links real estate stories with politics, history and environmental pressures, reporting closely on government reviews, parliamentary scrutiny, legislative proposals and ministerial conduct. He writes about historic structures, abandoned and threatened infrastructure, major property moves and residential sales, treating buildings as part of a continuing story about place. He also reports on environment, wildlife and land-use, focusing on how planning and infrastructure decisions affect heritage and ecology. He has worked in local journalism for more than two decades, with bylines spanning politics, health, environment, heritage and property.
Alexandra Goss
Alexandra Goss is an award-winning freelance property journalist who treats housing as both an asset class and the backdrop to people’s lives, using detailed case studies to show how money, family and lifestyle decisions meet. She writes regular features on buying, selling and living in homes for The Telegraph, and covers prime and super-prime real estate and its culture for outlets including the Financial Times, Spear’s and PrimeResi. A former deputy editor of The Sunday Times Home section, she reports on the UK housing market’s human impact, from divorce, later-life moves and intergenerational ties to the effects of mortgage rates, stamp duty, school fees and auctions. Her work blends narrative reporting, interviews and practical guides, giving readers clear context, concrete tips and insight into both mainstream and high-end property.