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 ...
As part of its ongoing investigation of deaths in county jails, which is supported by the Fund, the Tucson Sentinel tracked the case of Caleb Kenowski, whose family did not know about his death for nearly three months. Reporters Natalie Robbins and Dylan Smith found that Kenowski’s family searched for him for months, and that the sheriff’s department did not ...
In a story for NPR’s Throughline podcast, reporters Anya Steinberg and Sequoia Carrillo, with support from the Fund, showed that land in Minnesota’s Leech Lake Reservation has been taken away gradually from Native Americans through a web of complex forces – including coercion to sell, appropriation of lands for federal conservation and dam-building that flooded homes and food sources. The ...
With support from the Fund, a team of journalists documented how a disinformation campaign, orchestrated from abroad, aimed to topple the new administration in Brazil and install defeated far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. The investigation found that since 2018, Eduardo Bolsonaro took part in 125 meetings with far-right leaders in several countries, including the U.S., and engaged cyber mercenaries to grab ...
A group of Nepali workers were subjected to abusive working and living conditions at Amazon warehouses in Saudi Arabia, a team of reporters found. Forty-eight of the 54 Nepali workers interviewed said recruiters misled them about the terms of their employment. All 54 say they were required to pay recruiting fees – ranging from $830 to $2,300 – that far ...