During the weeklong IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting Boot Camp you wake up thinking about spreadsheet pivot tables and practice so many database queries that you never want to ask another question that requires a “WHERE” statement. But the most important lesson that gets drilled into your head is a simple one: practice, practice, practice.

After I left the January 2011 boot camp, I tested out my skills on some smaller stories.  I took a look at the public and private colleges that received Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits, which was primarily an exercise in cleaning up a Microsoft Excel ...

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported an illegal immigrant who was a witness in a homicide case, an attorney told me. "Prosecutors are going to drop the charges."

Sure enough, the case crumbled and the U.S. citizen who had been charged with murder was set free. ICE agents had deported the witness after he was arrested on unrelated charges and booked into the county jail, court documents showed.

Local and federal authorities responded by pointing fingers at each other and insisting this was an isolated incident. The problem, a breakdown in communication, had been addressed, they promised ...

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Located just south of Chicago, Indiana's Lake County has long been a hot-bed of political corruption, bloated government and patronage jobs. County government spending became so rampant that the largest corporate taxpayers in 2005 commissioned a study that recommended cutting government spending or consolidating services to save taxpayers millions. Few of the recommendations were adopted, and about two years later, the Indiana General Assembly forced a frozen tax levy specifically targeting the county's wasteful ways.

Times of Northwest Indiana reporter Bill Dolan and I spent four years collecting a decade's worth of electronic spending records for all ...

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It's always nice to get a tip, but we found our local overtime pay leaders by goofing around in some online records. I came across an online database of public employee salaries offered by SeeThroughNY, a non-profit transparency portal.

And like any curious journalist, I pulled out our county government and sorted it top to bottom in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

This was not the typical payroll information we routinely get from government payroll offices. This database of 4,727 records originated from the state pension system, run by the state comptroller’s office. It wasn’t just a ...

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New Jersey residents have long lived under a broken property tax system that has more in common with feudal states than the United States. Nearly half of our $47 billion in tax revenue comes from property taxes — which are based on the government's perceived value of a person's home rather than what he or she actually earns.

The average property tax in 2008: $7,045, or about 11 percent of the median household income. It's about four times higher than the national average, and higher than what the average worker pays in Social Security and Medicare taxes ...

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Every day, cities buy land to make way for parks, streets, sewer lines and flood plains. It’s often more than they need. Sometimes they buy full lots in fairness to property owners who may not have use for the leftovers and sometimes they buy excess to prepare for future growth. In some cases, cities buy swaths of land for projects that may never happen. All these transactions can add up to hundreds of millions dollars worth of unused land, including worthless patches along highways and large plots of “conservation” land that developers covet. The Wichita Eagle found all these ...

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Bill Fronick recalled taking a sick day when he stepped on a nail while moving offices. It’s the only time he remembered calling in sick, he said, and that was in the mid-1970s. Fronick, who was an assistant director at Lambert Field in St. Louis, was rewarded for his hard work with a payout of $65,680 when he cashed in his unused sick days and retired from his job with the City of St. Louis. Another city employee, a construction and maintenance supervisor, bought a new car and took his wife on a cruise to Bermuda with the ... Read more ...