Impact

Fund for Investigative Journalism Diversity Fellow Romina Ruiz-Goiriena’s report, “Gaming the System,” uncovered a cycle of corruption in the immigration system by detailing how wealthy people navigate around U.S. immigration barriers while the other 90 percent are detained or deported. The four-part investigation, published in the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald, detailed how rich foreign nationals from Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, ...

David Armstrong’s investigation for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered dangerously high levels of lead in the soil of a westside community in Atlanta and a lack of testing for residents, especially children. The mostly poor, largely African-American community detailed in his report was designated as a “Superfund removal action,” by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), yet residents found little help in ...

An unprecedented collaborative investigation among newsrooms across California uncovered hundreds of incidents of police misconduct involving dishonesty, sexual assault and use-of-force, as well as a cover-up by investigators from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.The investigation began in 2018 when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the “Right to Know Act,” which made records related to officers involved in ...

Peter Fairley broke national news when he reported for InvestigateWest and The Atlantic that the Trump Administration was blocking the release of a study showing that modernizing the U.S. power grid could reduce reliance on coal and increase the growth of renewable energy.With a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Fairley reported that a National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) ...

Carolina Public Press received a tip that some district attorneys in North Carolina “never” prosecute sexual assault cases. Journalists at the nonprofit news outlet pulled more than four years of data from the state’s court system and assembled a team to analyze it. What they found would lead to bipartisan reforms to the state’s sexual assault laws – reforms that ...

When a friend of Mark Betancourt’s moved to Detroit and posted on Facebook about tax foreclosure in the city, Betancourt searched the internet to learn what it meant. The freelance reporter, based in Washington, D.C., had never heard of it before and didn’t know that the government could seize people’s property if they didn’t pay taxes.Betancourt dug further and learned ...

When a group of journalists read Palm Beach Post reporter Lawrence Mower’s coverage of lottery irregularities in Florida several years ago, they started thinking about an unprecedented expose of the global lottery industry. Mower had issued public records requests for 20 years of data on frequent lottery winners in Florida. His subsequent reporting uncovered fraud, including people who were cashing ...

For years in New Hampshire, press, policymakers, advocates and the public have tried to get access to records detailing misconduct by individual police officers and other public officials, but they were often blocked by a 1993 state Supreme Court ruling that allowed government agencies to withhold the information.Nancy West, previously of the New Hampshire Union Leader and now executive editor ...

When an 18-year-old woman in Washington state reported that she was raped, police didn’t believe her. They charged her with filing a false police report. Her life was upended, and her rapist remained free to victimize other women. Ultimately, two detectives in Colorado identified and caught the rapist.As reported by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller in their Pulitzer Prize-winning ...

For more than a year, a team at Earth Island Journal and Truthout investigated health hazards in prisons resulting from environmental issues. Some prisons are located on or near contaminated land, including landfills, hazardous waste sites and mines, leading to contaminated drinking water and unsafe air quality in some facilities. In some instances, prisons themselves are the source of pollution ...