New York Times reporter Barry Meier knew lawsuits against the manufacturers of all-metal artificial hips were on the rise. But it wasn’t until I queried a balky Food and Drug Administration database that he was able to confirm that all-metal hip implants were quickly becoming the biggest and costliest medical implant problem since Medtronic recalled a widely used heart device in 2007.

The FDA collects voluntary reports from patients, health care providers and medical device manufacturers about problems experienced with specific devices. The federal agency compiles the reports of deaths, injuries and product malfunctions in a database known as ...

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The statistics did not make sense.

Identity theft complaints to the federal government had been declining for the last four years. With almost daily reports of major information breaches, phishing attacks and other forms of cyber-crime, how could this be?

I answered this question by turning to a federal database that I obtained with a Freedom of Information Act request. I reviewed five year’s worth of identity theft complaints to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the consumer watchdog agency that collects ID theft information.

After a year’s wait for the records and extensive work scrubbing and assembling ...

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Badger Guns and Ammo in suburban Milwaukee rose to national prominence in the 1990s when reports showed it had sold more crime guns than any other dealer in the nation.

In 2007, I learned from sources that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had found serious problems at the store, known then as Badger Outdoors. Such records on gun stores are shrouded in secrecy by law but I discovered the ATF was considering revoking the license – a rare move taken against only the worst gun dealers.

However, a few months later ATF’s plan evaporated. The ...

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Two colleagues approached me last summer with an intriguing pitch: They wanted to trace the meat, poultry and other food served in school cafeterias all the way back to their manufacturers. Parents, they said, were often in the dark about the quality of the food their kids eat at school — much less who supplies it — and they suspected school officials didn't know enough about the foods' sources to act when students fell ill.

How could I resist the challenge? I love food. A couple months later, though, I'd start thinking twice about having a hamburger, thanks to what ...

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In February, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, designed to stimulate the economy by injecting $787 billion into the nation’s infrastructure and tax relief programs. Getting a handle on that spending has proved a challenge.

Journalists covering the stimulus have struggled to find raw data containing a comprehensive list of federal contracts associated with the ARRA. The U.S. government’s official stimulus information Web site, Recovery.gov, does not offer that information. (See this Uplink article for more about using stimulus data for reporting local news stories).

Getting raw data

For detailed data, journalists ...

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Assessing the health of the nation's water is a daunting task, and the subject of an ongoing New York Times series called "Toxic Waters." It can't be done through data alone, but there is plenty of data available, particularly at the federal level. But working with it proved to be a difficult and occasionally frustrating task. Here's the story behind the database that we built for our readers.

Records describing enforcement of the Clean Water Act can be found at the federal level and among dozens of states that have authority to administer some or all of ...

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If you're reading the news these days, then you don't have to turn too many pages in a newspaper or follow too many links on a Web site to run into a story about the federal stimulus package.Also known as the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, the stimulus has been a hot topic since President Barack Obama introduced it to the country days after taking office.

With an estimated $787 billion allocated for the recovery act, everyone has been asking, "Where is the money going?"

Early reporting on the stimulus focused on national politics and ...

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The federal government launched Data.gov a little less than a month ago with raw databases, data extraction tools and widgets and pledged to bring "unprecedented access to government information." The White House said the site would allow "unfiltered access to government data streams in machine-readable formats." At launch, the site offered 73 links to demographic, economic and environmental data files and tools that had already been available on federal government Web sites, some of them for years. Now the catalog offers nearly 300. It's clear that the White House is going after the low-hanging fruit in the first ... Read more ...

Covering the early stages of the federal stimulus package was frustrating. Much of the data available at the state level were just multimillion-dollar allocations going to existing federal programs or to state agencies to divvy up through competitive grants. Back in March, there wasn’t much detail provided on how and where the money was being spent. In mid-March, Journal Sentinel transportation reporter Tom Held received a spreadsheet from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation that showed 37 bridge projects were approved to receive the first round of federal stimulus dollars. The estimated cost: nearly $16 million. We quickly saw an ...

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It seemed like such a simple request: My editor would be on vacation, but while he was gone maybe I could look at the federal contracts database and do an easy story about defense spending in the area in recent years. That “easy story” quickly turned into a 12-part series. More importantly for journalists, it turned into a series that was important, timely and easy to do. With my direct editor on vacation, I took my findings to Metro Editor Tom Germuska Jr., who agreed that one story on defense spending wasn’t going to cut it. Because what I ...

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