Join us on Friday, Feb. 24, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern on Zoom for a webinar on how to develop and manage collaborative investigative projects. The webinar will be led by Dianna Hunt, Senior Editor at Indian Country Today and a member of FIJ’s Board of Directors, and Bridget Thoreson, INN’s Director of Collaborations. They will share recent experiences, tips for ...
As enrollment declines in Pittsburgh’s public schools, the impact is far reaching. Reporter Laia Mistry, writing for Public Source with support from the Fund, found that with funding linked to the actual number of enrolled students, a common practice in many school systems, dwindling enrollment could make it difficult for the system to maintain its infrastructure and may disproportionately affect ...
Reporters Jennifer Avila and Danielle Mackey, writing for Contracorriente, probed efforts to professionalize the Honduran national police force and rid it of corrupt officers. A special commission was created to clean up law enforcement in Honduras and about 6,500 officers were purged, but the departures have left police agencies with fewer officers as the new government works to transform and demilitarize ...
In a report investigating so-called “ghost candidates” that aim to confuse voters and siphon off votes, Ben Wilcox, writing for the Florida Center for Government Accountability, examined three state senate races in 2020 in which these candidates succeeded in drawing votes in ways that may constitute criminal fraud. The effort was funded by Florida’s largest utility company, Florida Power and ...
Writing for 100 Reporters, reporter Lucy Komisar followed her groundbreaking FIJ-funded story about high-risk Wall Street life-insurance practices with a second piece that showed a wide range of risky practices that benefit insurance executives and shareholders while putting policyholders and pensions in financial danger. The companies involved include some of the largest insurance firms in the country, who are diverting insurance liabilities into offshore ...
A sweeping eight part-series, “Broken Justice,” by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, in collaboration with several universities and news organizations, outlines systemic failures in the criminal justice system. For one of the stories, supported with a grant from the Fund, students from five universities around the country investigated coroner systems nationwide. They found that coroners, who aren’t required to ...
Louisville, Kentucky, police officer Jervis Middletown was demoted for improper conduct and then fired after he aligned with local Black Lives Matter protestors in the wake of the George Floyd killing. He is appealing his termination in court, claiming that the police department treats Black officers more harshly than white officers. With support from the Fund, reporter Gabbriel Schivone wrote ...
An anonymous tip led reporters from Fort Worth Report to investigate claims that public library staff across the city were regularly being physically, sexually and verbally assaulted by patrons. Even after staff members reported the assaults to management, nothing was done. With support from the Fund, reporters Emily Wolf and Rachel Behrndt investigated the story for six months, obtaining documents ...
For a few thousand dollars a year, a high-tech artificial intelligence system offers colleges a way to scan students’ social media posts to look for students at risk of harming themselves. The tool, Social Sentinel (now called Navigate360 Detect), claims that it could help save lives. In an investigation by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of ...
Nonprofit news organization Open Vallejo has covered police shootings in Vallejo, California, extensively, including in a joint report earlier this year with ProPublica, supported by the Fund. In a new story supported with one of the Fund’s follow-up grants for continued coverage after initial investigations are published, the team found that reforms that leaders pledged to implement in 2020 have ...