Last week, The Association of Health Care Journalists, along with IRE and five other journalism and open-government groups, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture calling for the release of public information about the country's food stamp program. From the AHCJ blog: 

Currently, the USDA refuses to reveal how much money individual retailers make from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. Additionally, the USDA does not disclose which products are purchased with SNAP dollars or how much is spent on each product, in aggregate.

The USDA’s position runs contrary to President ...

Can a 50-story Las Vegas hotel be environmentally-friendly?  This is the question USA Today reporter Tom Frank sought to answer when he began reporting on the increase in construction of so-called environmentally friendly buildings.  Through his investigation, Frank found that green commercial construction has increased.  Non-profits are behind the movement, but few have assessed the real impact of their programs.  Often, green building improvements are simply cheap routes to large tax breaks.  Frank’s ongoing Green Inc. series explores the challenges non-profit groups face in helping for-profit businesses “go green.”

His investigation began with an online search of the U ...

In the wake of a disaster, individuals and business owners are often left with severely damaged property. Many turn for help to the Small Business Administration, which approves low-interest loans to help rebuild. For declared disasters in 2011 alone, the Small Business Administration approved over $1 billion in loans.

NICAR has updated the SBA database of these loans, which is now current through Sept. 2012. 

WHAT'S IN IT?
Disaster loans through the SBA are one of the primary forms of federal assistance for individuals and non-farm, private-sector businesses who have suffered losses. The data have information on the borrower ...

In a recent piece for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, Amy Green reports on the cost of sugar supports to American taxpayers.  She is currently working on a book about the Florida Everglades, which will explore political and environmental impacts on the area.

When Amy Green, a native Floridian, thinks of the Florida Everglades, she sees a different side of Florida.  “The Miami International Airport was once underwater,” she says.  She’s been considering this and other political, economic, and environmental impacts of draining the Everglades since at least 2010.

Through this research, Green became interested in the Everglades ...

By Anthony DeBarros
USA TODAY

In April, after USA TODAY published its Ghost Factories investigation into forgotten lead smelters, we heard from several people who wanted to know more about how the project came together — particularly the online package that included details on more than 230 of the former factories.

The following is an expanded version of a post I originally sent to IRE’s NICAR-L mailing list:

Alison Young was the lead reporter who conceived the idea for the project. In late 2010, she came to me with a couple of PDFs showing a list of suspected lead smelter ...

(Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of our "Behind the Story" look at coverage of the Hanford nuclear reservation's environmental issues.)

Determining when an ongoing issue becomes an issue worth investigating isn’t always easy.

Craig Welch, an environmental reporter for The Seattle Times who juggles topics from oceans to forests, also keeps his eye on the Hanford nuclear reservation, which had become, as one of his stories stated, an "atomic mess after 40 years of bomb-making."  

In Welch’s investigative stories "Big cleanup questions still loom at Hanford" and "Will ...

Many investigative reporters are recreational data users, but data alone cannot be trusted.

"You can’t take what is in those databases for granted," said Kate Golden, a reporter and multimedia producer for WisconsinWatch.org. At the panel "Environmental analyses for any newsroom," she emphasized the importance of speaking with the lead agency to find out what the data actually means.

During the panel, Elizabeth Lucas a data reporter for The Center for Public Integrity and Golden highlighted a variety of investigative environmental stories such as "Despite lone inspector’s efforts, persistent haze envelops Iowa town" and "Under legal pressure ...

In "Problems plague cleanup at Hanford nuclear waste site," USA Today’s Peter Eisler takes on 56 million gallons of radioactive waste and finds he isn’t the only one who has a few things to learn. After 10 years of developing the “first-of-its-kind” nuclear waste treatment plant, the Department of Energy and its contractors still don’t know how to build it.

Project costs tripled to $12.3 billion and the start-up date was moved to 2019 from 2011, Eisler reported.

By using in-depth interviews and federal employees' documented concerns over "technical problems," Eisler was able to relay to ...

Many Texans had no idea that carcinogenic radiation was in their tap water.

For decades, the environmental agency that was supposed to protect the public from pollution had been deliberately changing radiation test data for water systems.

Not only had false data been reported to consumers, but the "lowballing" also allowed water providers to avoid breaking federal safe drinking water rules.

This all began when KHOU I-team member Keith Tomshe noticed a disclaimer on his water bill stating that small amounts of arsenic, also a carcinogen, had been found in his neighborhood’s drinking water. The disclosure is called a ...

Des Moines Register reporters Chase Davis and Perry Beeman spent months compiling and making sense of data for a series on air pollution in Iowa. But, with more than 1,600 polluting facilities across the state, there simply wasn’t space in the stories to mention any but the most noteworthy. That’s where data editor James Wilkerson and digital projects editor Michael Corey came in. They developed an interactive map that allowed users to see information about the facilities near them. "It localized the story to basically every community in Iowa," Davis said of the map. It also gave ...