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 ...

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 ...

I had long suspected that the Clean Air Act was not only being routinely violated in Indiana, but that those violations were rarely being punished. Proving that suspicion, however, seemed impossible — until I read The New York Times’ Sept. 12, 2009, piece about violations of the Clean Water Act. The interactive graphic that accompanied the story linked to an U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database called ECHO, Enforcement and Compliance History Online , which I discovered also tracks Clean Air Act violations. Jackpot.

That meant that someone had already built a database showing not only every violation of the Clean Air ...

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates the nation's aging and overburdened sanitary sewer systems overflow at least 23,000 times a year and discharge between three billion and 10 billion gallons of raw sewage into streams, rivers and lakes. The problem is even bigger – 850 billion gallons bigger - when older sewer systems that discharge both storm water and sewage from the same pipe are included in the tally. But there is no national database to chronicle when, where and how much. The best the EPA has to offer is its Enforcement and Compliance History Online, a database known by its ...