The timber industry has claimed that logging actually helps address climate change – a claim disputed by most environmentalists but supported by the Nature Conservancy, the largest such nonprofit in the country, which has been dogged by accusations that its ties to large corporations compromise its focus on its mission. In a new investigation for Grist, with support from the ...
In a series for Capital & Main supported by the Fund, reporter Aaron Cantu, a fellow with Type Investigations, found that state and federal efforts to reduce air pollution in California’s San Joaquin Valley may not be working. For the year-long investigation, he examined public records, interviewed residents and experts, and worked with organizations who use specialized emissions-capturing cameras. The ...
In a deep dive into thousands of pages of documents, reporter Laurence Du Sault, writing for Open Vallejo and ProPublica, probed what happens inside the Vallejo, California, police department after police kill civilians. With a grant and editorial mentorship from the Fund, Du Sault and the Open Vallejo team analyzed and coded years of internal police records, built two databases ...
In a series of stories for San Francisco Public Press, veteran reporter Seth Rosenfeld has exposed a culture of secrecy at the California Public Utilities Commission that has made it nearly impossible for the public to know if dangerous drivers for ride-sharing companies were being taken off the road. The commission has enormous powers, regulating power companies, water, telephone, transportation ...
Willamette Week reporter Nigel Jaquiss first learned in 2020 about Portland’s interest in undoing the damage done to a historically Black neighborhood after a highway had been built that had erased 1,000 homes and gutted the local business district. With support from the Fund, he was able two years later to report on the city’s efforts to spend $90 million ...
The industrial jobs that employed a generation of residents of Akron, Ohio, are mostly gone, but the health effects of the toxins they worked around every day live on. Some illnesses are only now surfacing, and, if the findings of epigenetics and toxic exposure studies are any indication, they could keep doing so for generations. With grants from the Fund, reporter Yanick Rice Lamb, who ...
With a grant from the Fund, veteran reporter Peter Byrne probed how taxpayer funds for conservation in Marin County, California, have supported the growth of agricultural businesses that degrade the lands, even inside a national park. The latest story in an ongoing the Pacific Sun-North Bay Bohemian investigative series details how commercial interests with local political clout have monopolized monies ...
Deadline Detroit reporter Violet Ikonomova investigated the oversight system used by the Detroit Police Department to evaluate officers accused of wrongdoing and uncovered a pattern that keeps bad police on the force. With a grant from the Fund, Ikonomova looked at cases of criminally charged officers who exhibited problems before their arrests to see how the department allowed them to ...
The Imprint, a publication of Fostering Media Connections, teamed up with local reporters across the country for a yearlong series on the hidden foster care system, which allows the removal of children from their homes, but places them with relatives or family friends who are not subject to court oversight and don’t often get support from the child welfare system. These ...
A battle over the use of dicamba, a weedkiller that critics says harms crops, has turned ugly in Arkansas, with large soybean farms forming a political action committee and going to court to sideline critics. With a grant from the Fund, Loretta Williams, assisted by reporter Trey Kay and producer Mitch Hanley, revisited the issue they first reported on in ...