James McNair examined 10 years of public data on behalf of the Ohio Center for Investigative Journalism. He found a strong correlation between the amount of campaign contributions and the revenue received by law firms doing collection work for the state attorney general’s office. What’s more, the data showed that debt collection firms who hired lobbyists got more money. [Funding for ...
Eliza Griswold examines the fracking boom in her book “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.” In an essay for the New York Times, Griswold addresses a concept called “the resource curse” in her book. In her essay, she asserts that the subjects of her book, who live in a resource-rich part of the rural United States, ...
Cat Ferguson continues her investigation into the drug rehab industry with a look into how marketers use online social media sites like Facebook to find vulnerable — and potentially valuable — targets. In her latest piece for the Verge, Ferguson reports on how some marketers join or start support groups on the platform and trawl them for clients, often without disclosing their ...
Buried in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is a provision requiring publicly listed American companies to disclose if their tin, tungsten, coltan or gold come from Congo or its neighboring countries. It was inserted into the 2010 landmark legislation to stem the trade in resources that fuels armed groups in parts of Africa. While American companies ...
Rebecca Clarren dug through databases and tribal court files for her report, co-written with Jason Begay, on sexual discrimination, harassment and assault in tribal workplaces. Their piece for InvestigateWest, “Confronting the ‘Native Harvey Weinsteins,'” which was also run by The Nation, showed the challenges in investigating such violations. Part of the problem, Clarren and Begay report, stems from the the federal ...
Marc Perrusquia’s new book, A Spy In Canaan: How the FBI Used a Famous Photographer to Infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, tells how a long-running newspaper investigation uncovered civil rights photographer Ernest Withers’ double life as a paid FBI informant. Released March 27 by Melville House in New York, the book reveals that Withers helped the FBI monitor a broad range ...
Daffodil Altan, Andrés Cediel, and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, have teamed with FRONTLINE to tell the story of Guatemalan teens forced to work against their will on an egg farm in Ohio. The investigation into labor trafficking exposes a criminal network that exploits undocumented minors, companies that profit from forced labor and the role of ...
For decades, the Tennessee Valley Authority bought and traded mineral rights from energy companies in Illinois. During that time, from a period stretching from the 1960s into the 1980s, the TVA also signed deals with hundreds of farmers who agreed to sell their mineral rights and promised to sell their land if it was needed for mining. But as Kari ...
In her first installment of a series of stories focused on anti-gang security policies in El Salvador, FIJ/Schuster Institute fellow Danielle Mackey reports on the rising number of enfrentamientos — or “shoot-outs” — that have taken the lives of young El Salvadorans. The number of civilian victims in these enfrentamientos has jumped from 39 in 2013 to 591 in 2016. But as Mackey reports ...
T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong have expanded their Pulitzer Prize-winning story into a book, “A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America,” published by Crown in February. The book tells the story of Marie, an 18-year-old near Seattle, Washington, who reported being raped, only to be branded a liar by police. Miller and Armstrong first wrote about ...