Farmers across the Midwest have been forced into a tough decision since the agribusiness company Monsanto introduced new cotton and soybean seeds genetically modified to withstand the pesticide dicamba beginning in 2015. It’s a reality that Monsanto and BASF planned on when they released the dicamba cropping system, according to grantee Johnathan Hettinger’s report for the Midwest Center for Investigative ...
1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard’s Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd ...
Reporters rushed to parse through police records in California after new legislation made them public for the first time in nearly 50 years, but the task of filing and reviewing thousands of open-records requests was impossible for newsrooms that had seen budget cuts and lay-offs. That’s when grantees at SoCal Connected helped form the California Reporting Project, made up of some 40 ...
As states across the country fight the COVID-19 pandemic, a lead poisoning epidemic is raging in Connecticut, where weak state laws have done little to help the disproportionately Black and Hispanic victims, according to grantee Jenifer Frank’s new report.Although the state adopted CDC’s strict standards for lead poisoning almost a decade ago, its laws continue to require action only when ...
An ongoing series from the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting shows that two thirds of juveniles are sentenced to life in prison without parole, even though a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision says such sentences should be “rare.”Shirley Smith’s investigation examined the case of Brett Jones, a Mississippi man who appealed his resentencing to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral ...
Sales of secondhand goods are booming, growing about 3 percent each year, faster than conventional retail. And market researchers project this multibillion-dollar industry will grow exponentially.This surge in secondhand shopping has opened new opportunities for the public to be misled about how much money for-profit retailers are making off the charities they brag about benefiting, according to grantee Francesca Lyman’s ...
In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Georgia was widely pilloried for a series of high-profile errors related to its bungled Covid-19 data dashboard, and for its early reopening based on the data it displayed. The site’s problems damaged the state health department’s credibility, threatening its ability to effectively manage later stages of the pandemic.However, as grantee Keren Landman ...
Fund for Investigative Journalism Diversity Fellow Romina Ruiz-Goiriena’s report, “Gaming the System,” details how wealthy people navigate around U.S. immigration barriers while the other 90 percent are detained or deported. The investigation includes stories in English and Spanish, videos and an innovative video game, which allows the audience to simulate the experience and navigate obstacles. You can view the full ...
The Syndicate is an 8-episode, narrative podcast series about the rise and fall of one of the most sophisticated marijuana smuggling rings of the past decade. Host and reporter Chris Walker digs into how a group of college friends and family members gamed Colorado’s legal cannabis industry to hide a massive, black market operation. The group made tens of millions ...
Louisville police were executing a no-knock search warrant signed by Judge Mary Shaw when they shot and killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor in her home. The case put a spotlight on the way Louisville police executes search warrants and how seriously judges scrutinize them.In their new report, grantees from The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (KyCIR) examined more than 200 warrants ...