Several grantees recently received awards for stories they produced with grants and other support from the Fund, including: NPR’s Station Investigations Team, Columbia Journalism Investigations, the Ohio Newsroom and WVXU received a first-place award from the National Headliner Awards for their investigation of prosecutorial misconduct in Ohio. The Maine Monitor received a New England Newspaper and Press Association Award for ...
Idaho’s governor signed into law two reforms that were introduced after InvestigateWest uncovered serious misconduct in facilities for troubled youth. One of the new laws will create a state oversight agency for youth homes, and the other will establish guidelines for placing troubled youth in group homes. In addition, the legislature commissioned an official investigation into oversight of youth treatment ...
The state House and Senate in Hawaii each passed bills this month that would significantly change the legal process for taking children from their parents when they’re accused of abuse or neglect. With support from the Fund, Honolulu Civil Beat published a series of reports investigating the state’s child-welfare system. That series showed that children are frequently removed from their ...
The U.S. Marshals Service and a county sheriff’s office helped execute a search warrant of a medical-device warehouse near Atlanta this month, just two weeks after Grist reported that warehouse staff were unknowingly exposed to a carcinogenic chemical. With support from the Fund, Naveena Sadasivam and Lylla Younes reported that ambulances were routinely called to the warehouse when employees had ...
An investigation by the Times Union, based in Albany, revealed that serious police car crashes resulting in property damage, injury or deaths increased dramatically over the last decade in New York. With support from the Fund, the Times Union team analyzed state and federal data, obtained crash records from eight of the largest police departments in the state and interviewed ...
Investigations by Fund for Investigative Journalism grantees about youth homes in Idaho and Louisiana have led to changes and sparked calls for reform of the troubled field. In Idaho, a home for at-risk teenage girls closed in February after months of reporting by InvestigateWest, with support from the Fund. Reporter Wilson Criscione documented allegations of serious wrongdoing, including rape, assault ...
A series in the Maine Monitor, produced with support from the Fund, documented serious problems with the state’s probate court system, which oversees adult guardianships. The series found that there are few safeguards in place to prevent fraud and abuse. Maine is unique in that probate judges are elected, work part-time and are not part of the state’s judiciary branch. ...
Walmart, the largest retailer in the United States, is no longer selling Milwaukee Tool-branded gloves on its online market place — after FIJ grantee Wisconsin Watch probed claims that a subcontractor for the Brookfield, Wisconsin-based tool company relied on forced Chinese prison labor to manufacture certain models of gloves. Shi Minglei, who lives in Minnesota, launched a public campaign to pressure Milwaukee ...
Next week, Maine voters will decide whether people with mental illness in the state’s loosely regulated guardianship system could continue to be barred from voting under the state’s constitution. The referendum comes in the wake of a series of stories in the Maine Monitor about the guardianship system. Reporter Samantha Hogan, with support from the Fund, has been taking a ...
A new report in InvestigateWest, with support from the Fund, found extensive evidence of rape, sexual assault, race-based harassment and attempted suicide in a publicly funded residential facility for vulnerable girls and young women in Idaho – and a lack of oversight of the company that owns the facility. Girls ages 11 to 17 live in the facility; most have ...