Covering homelessness and other issues for KPCC — Southern California Public Radio, reporter Rina Palta began to notice that shelters in Los Angeles County often had empty beds, despite large numbers of homeless people who needed somewhere to sleep. She secured a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and dug for months to get the story.Palta reviewed public documents from ...
For years, people of color in Washington state have reported that they are pulled over by State Patrol officers more often than white drivers. Reporters Jason Buch and Joy Borkholder, of InvestigateWest, decided to look into whether people of color are also searched more often during those stops.With a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Borkholder and Buch filed ...
When President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act into law in 1862, its so-called “Land Grant” program was intended to give fledgling colleges and universities public property that they could use or sell. But much of the land was taken from Native American tribes without payment, sometimes with force.A team at High Country News, with a grant from the Fund for ...
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, state and local government responses varied significantly – and often were shielded from public scrutiny.A team at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation issued open-record requests to government agencies in all 50 states and set out to create an online repository of the material, available to journalists nationwide. With an emergency grant from the ...