Archives

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 ...

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida said it has stopped keeping a list of people deemed likely to commit future crimes and repeatedly sending deputies to their homes, according to documents filed in a federal lawsuit. The agency’s practice of targeting people deemed at risk of committing crimes was the subject of a 2020 Tampa Bay Times investigation, supported by ...

Katie Thornton’s “The Divided Dial” podcast, aired by NPR’s On The Media program, has been nominated for a Peabody Award. Thornton’s podcast, with support from the Fund, examined how one side of the political spectrum came to dominate talk radio — and how Salem Media Group, the largest Christian, conservative multimedia company in the United States, is using the airwaves to ...

A story by students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, published in the Dallas Morning News and supported by the Fund, exposed universities’ use of a high-tech tool to spy on students, prompting the University of North Carolina to drop the system and sparking investigations at 11 universities in seven states. Reporters Arijit Sen and Dereka Bennett found that a ...

A story by Investigate West, supported by the Fund, exposed a cozy relationship between the federal Environmental Protection Agency and a mining company in Butte, Montana, that it was supposed to regulate. As a result of the reporting, the EPA announced several steps to increase transparency and engagement with the local community, including holding more public meetings, evaluating public health data to ...

The Hawaii legislature is considering several bills to protect the constitutional rights of parents suspected of abuse and neglect. The measures would dramatically narrow the rules for when children can be taken from their parents without a judge’s order. The legislation comes after extensive reporting by Honolulu Civil Beat’s John Hill and colleagues, with support from the Fund. Civil Beat’s ...