After InvestigateWest, with support from the Fund, uncovered widespread sexual abuse in Idaho prisons, the state’s Department of Corrections is working with state legislators to change a state law that makes it difficult to prosecute prison staff. The director of the prison system also said the state is updating its policies and working to ensure that people who are incarcerated ...
“Seized,” a feature documentary about the police raid on a Kansas newspaper, will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The film, directed and produced by Sharon Liese, with support from the Fund, takes viewers inside the police raid on the Marion County Record newsroom, which captured national attention. It unfolds in real time through police body-cam and surveillance ...
Following an investigation by Robert Lopez, with support from the Fund, which found that children are working in unsafe conditions in California’s agriculture industry, officials announced changes. For the Los Angeles Times and Capital & Main, Lopez interviewed dozens of young farmworkers who described toiling in fields that reeked of chemicals, laboring for piece-rate wages that paid less than minimum ...
South Dakota Searchlight, with support from the Fund, is cataloging Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) cases in the state, which has no definitive record of such cases. In collaboration with ICT News, Searchlight is combining data from official databases with names solicited from family members who may have never reported their loved one’s case to authorities. The outlets are ...
When a pair of journalists in Chicago both received questionable rejections for open-records requests, they asked the Fund to support a yearlong investigation into city agencies increasingly using “trade secret exemptions” to block access to information. For the Chicago Reader, Max Blaisdell and Matt Chapman filed 70 records requests across 35 city and county agencies and reviewed 350 denial letters. ...
The federal government’s public-lands grazing system gives private livestock operators access to more than 370,000 square miles of public land across the American West – a system propped up by subsidies that benefits billionaires, mining companies and corporate interests, according to reporting by High Country News and ProPublica, with support from the Fund. For more than a year, the team ...
The Philippine military is using aircraft it received in U.S.-sanctioned arms deals to target civilians and political opponents under the auspices of its campaign against local communist rebels, according to reporting by Nick Aspinwall, with support from the Fund. He reported that the U.S. helps arm the Philippine military to help contain China, but the Philippines is using its helicopters ...
For Rolling Stone, and with support from the Fund, Sean Patrick Cooper dug into the impact of Amazon’s rapidly expanding data centers on water pollution in Eastern Oregon. Cooper has been tracking data center developments nationwide, and he spent more than a year interviewing sources and obtaining public records in to expose political and financial influence campaigns to expand data ...
Two years after Borderless uncovered inhumane conditions and the death of a five-year-old boy at a city-run shelter in Chicago, the local nonprofit outlet documented long waits for shelter placement and persistent issues with shelter conditions, in a new investigation supported by the Fund. Reporters Aydali Campa and Katrina Pham obtained public records and interviewed shelter residents, including one who ...
Some of Los Angeles’ largest landlords skirt anti-discrimination laws that are supposed to protect low-income people applying for apartments, according to an investigation by Capital & Main, with support from the Fund. The yearlong investigation used public records, interviews and fair housing tests to examine Section 8 voucher acceptance by seven of the city’s largest landlords. Capital & Main hired ...