The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
WyoFile is featuring a special investigative series, “The Two Elk Saga,” by former Los Angeles Times correspondent and regular WyoFile contributor Rone Tempest. Wyoming has a long history of uncritically embracing, then giving public money to, dubious and expensive energy projects. The proposed $2 billion DKRW Advance Fuels — coal-to-liquids — plant near Medicine Bow…
Read MoreHundreds of kids from poor families are pushed through the court system without legal counsel, according to The Guardian US. The Southern Center for Human Rights found that in 2012 more than 680 kids went through the Cordele, Georgia circuit courts for juvenile offenses. And while a very small number had a private lawyer, only…
Read MoreEver wonder what kinds of questions federal agencies ask FOIA liaisons? We did. So we went right to the source. Kirsten Mitchell is a facilitator in The Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), a neutral office within the National Archives that anyone — requester or federal agency — can come to for help with the…
Read MoreEvery year, the federal government makes thousands of requests for court-ordered electronic surveillance, often without a warrant. And long after the investigations that spawned them have ended, the vast majority of these legal proceedings are sealed indefinitely from public view—unlike nearly all other aspects of American judicial proceedings. The Wall Street Journal surveyed 25 of…
Read MoreSee this post and more like it at NICAR talk, our data blog: ire.org/nicar Mike Soraghan is an oil and gas reporter at EnergyWire (an arm of E&E Publishing) and former NICAR bootcamper from 2013. For those of you who have been to bootcamp, you remember Open Lab, held (almost) every night after class wraps…
Read MoreWe’re offering more than 100 sessions focused on honing specific skills, covering key beats, digging into data and documents and much more. Here are a few highlights we recently added to the schedule: This year’s Showcase Panel will focus on government surveillance – how to cover it as a story and how those prying eyes…
Read MoreVideo by Ryan Kath and John Woods, KSHB KSHB-Kansas City’s year-long investigation into a widespread real estate fraud scheme started simple – with a tip from an observant neighbor. But when reporter Ryan Kath started looking into the housing documents, he spotted a bigger problem. Someone had been stealing homes by forging signature of both the living…
Read MoreEight Houston Police Department detectives have been disciplined for failing to properly investigate more than two-dozen homicide cases spanning almost a decade. The victims were as young as 11 months old. They were nearly all black or Hispanic. They were walking along the sidewalk or just answering their door when they were killed. When news…
Read MoreIn the weeks leading up to a botched execution, an Oklahoma assistant attorney general referred to defense attorneys’ warnings that the execution could go awry as “hysterical speculation,” records released to the Tulsa World show. Assistant Attorney General John Hadden also wrote in a March 21 email that he was “not eager to answer a…
Read MoreIRE and the University of Missouri Journalism School are offering a special workshop Sept. 4-7 that will introduce the basics of newsroom programming by teaching how to build one of the simplest but most useful tools in a data journalist’s toolbox: a web scraper designed to automate the downloading of data. The workshop will also…
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