The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Posts by hdcoadmin
That’s not natural or organic: How Big Food misleads
A Salon report states: “Major conglomerates claim their food is healthy. But they might have funded the study — and the feds barely care.”
Read MoreThe huge drone that could not be grounded
“A major defense contractor used campaign donations and insider access on Capitol Hill to defy the Air Force and keep a troubled drone aloft at a cost to taxpayers of billions of dollars,” according to a Center for Public Integrity report.
Read MoreWisconsin partnership tracks unsolved murders
Gannett Wisconsin Media began publishing a four-week series called Cold Cases: Tracking Wisconsin’s unsolved murders. According to Gannett Wisconsin Media, the project is the most comprehensive look into unsovled murders ever assembled in the region. The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism also partnered with Gannett Wisconsin Media on this project, which includes a searchable database…
Read MoreCalifornia transit agency changes records policy in midst of investigation
inewsource out of San Diego reports that in the midst of an investigation into a local transportation agency, the North County Tranist District, the agency voted to adopt a policy change that would direct its employees to delete certain emails after 60 days, a drop from the previous email retention policy of two years. Despite…
Read MoreChild deaths in India push global issues of pesticides, food safety into news
Food safety is a global issue. I was reminded of that with the news that more than 20 children in India died after consuming school lunches provided by a government-run program. Some children remain ill and authorities are trying to pinpoint the source – possibly a chemical found in pesticides that somehow made it into the…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Solving the mystery of the porn copyright troll
By Dalton Barker Researching the connection between copyright lawsuits and a porn company can be tricky — especially while at work. Claire Suddath, a Bloomberg reporter based in New York City, navigated the murky waters before she published her recent investigative piece: Prenda Law, the Porn Copyright Trolls. Suddath discovered that Chicago-based Prenda Law had…
Read MoreIn a big freelance project, a little organization up front goes a long way
By the time I sat down to write the 6,000 word article I’d been reporting for the past several months, I was ready to quit. I had over 50 interviews, thousands of pages of documents and reports, contact information and source names all stored across my phone, random word documents, email drafts, and actual paper…
Read MoreProPublica releases open source version of Free the Files
The ProPublica News Apps team on Tuesday released Transcribable, an open source version of its Free the Files project, a web application that enabled the team to crowdsource a massive cache of campaign advertising spending documents. The open source version allows anyone with a DocumentCloud account to create their own application and start crowdsourcing their…
Read MoreLaCrosse Tribune reporter turns IRE training into data-driven stories for community
In March, LaCrosse Tribune reporter Chris Hubbuch attended an IRE training event in Wisconsin, where introductions to Excel and data-driven journalism were on the agenda. Since then, he’s produced data-driven stories on foreclosures, property values, crime and waste. He even revelaed that the LaCrosse mayor’s pet license was out of date. Using federal data, the…
Read MoreSmall-town Texas patients died amid federal, state regulatory inaction
The Dallas Morning News investigation shows how Dr. Tariq Mahmood operated a chain of dangerous small-town Texas hospitals for more than four years until regulators finally started to crack down. Before they acted, repeated warnings about grave risks to patients and potential fraud reached multiple agencies. At least four patients died. The project details how federal…
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