Reporter Alleen Brown, with support from the Fund, examined public records to find new details about how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security laid the groundwork for Georgia law enforcement to file terrorism charges against environmental protesters camping in the woods to protest a new police facility. DHS monitored online posts critical of a $90 million proposed police training center ...
With support from the Fund, reporter Keith Schneider is writing a continuing series of stories on connections between Big Ag and water pollution. Earlier stories in the series looked at the health impact of farms using large volumes of pesticides that contain nitrate, focusing in part on Minnesota – and last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency directed three Minnesota government ...
The San Diego Housing Commission hands out about $300 million in federal money annually to help low-income tenants pay rent. When landlords want to increase the rent, the Housing Commission must first approve — and it does so nine times out of 10, reporter Cody Dulaney found. Dulaney sifted through data to find that in 2022, the commission fielded more than ...
Emily Carter and Kieria Krieger told Idaho state officials about evidence of child abuse and sexual assault against residents at the youth facility where they worked, as well as sexual harassment against employees. With support from the Fund, reporter Wilson Criscione dug into their claims and others, documenting a pattern of misconduct and poor oversight of the facility. As a ...
The Texas Observer did a deep dive into money and key actors behind right-wing takeovers of local school boards in the state. Reporter Steve Monacelli, with a grant and other support from the Fund, scoured campaign finance reports to find that dozens of ultraconservative school board candidates were backed by political action committees that employ many of the same conservative ...
Columbia Journalism Investigations, NPR, its member station WVXU in Cincinnati and the Ohio Newsroom built a first-of-its-kind database about prosecutorial misconduct by analyzing thousands of pages of Ohio state court appellate decisions from 2018 to 2021. With support from the Fund, the team examined hundreds of cases to identify claims of prosecutorial misconduct, and also reviewed hundreds of pages of ...
In a year-long investigation, KQED reporters examined the impact of a new state law that aimed to reduce the trauma of transgender people in California’s prisons. The reporters interviewed a dozen incarcerated people and reviewed data along with several hundred pages of documents that described prison grievances, disciplinary records and legal filings. The reporting revealed that transgender people in prison ...
Airborne particles routinely released by power plants, petrochemical companies, motor vehicles, concrete plants and other sources have grown dramatically, prompting the Biden administration to tighten regulations for these microscopic particles. The pollution has been linked to heart disease, breast and lung cancer, Alzheimer’s and other grave health problems. With support from the Fund, Public Health Watch commissioned an analysis showing ...
In an ongoing series looking at Pittsburgh’s public schools, Public Source’s Lajja Mistry found that the more experience a teacher has, the more likely that teacher will be working in a school that has more resources. While most of the system’s $676 million annual operating budget goes towards staff salaries, not all of the system’s schools have enough staff. This ...
In a multi-part series, Michigan Bridge probed how the auto industry profited in Michigan cities and then moved on – leaving a legacy of contamination, harming communities and sticking taxpayers with the cleanup costs, even as the state subsidizes the auto industry’s electric-vehicle future. With support from the Fund, reporters Kelly House and Paula Gardner identified $259 million in taxpayer-funded cleanups ...