The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
MuckRock, a public records service that files and tracks requests on behalf of journalists, researchers, activists and historians, recently analyzed 907 requests completed by its users. The analysis found about 42 percent of federal Freedom of Information Act requests were completed on time, and 27 percent of those 907 requests are still without a response after…
Read MoreAfter finding out that the Cleveland Police Department had no idea how many rape kits were in their evidence room, Plain Dealer reporters Rachel Dissell and Leila Atassi started digging into how sexual assault cases were handled in their city. Finally, “unsolved crimes by the dozens are returning to Cleveland with DNA matches and the…
Read MoreFor community service and corrective classes, San Diego law enforcement has sent defendants to organizations like the Corrective Behavior Institute for community service. In doing so, it has “sent people who haven’t followed the rules to a nonprofit that hasn’t followed them either,” according to an investigation by the Voice of San Diego, which found shoddy…
Read MoreKUOW in Seattle reports that about 30 times per year, a sponge or surgical instrument is left inside a patient at a hospital in Washington state. Foreign ojects left behind are among the state’s most common medical mistakes. Medical experts told KUOW such an event should never happen, at that the system in place to…
Read MoreReporter Steven Hsieh was never informed about a dangerous landfill in his hometown of West County in St. Louis until one day while watching cable news. Hsieh, one-year out of school at the Missouri School of Journalism, stumbled upon a broadcast of a roundtable discussion in which Diane Schanzenbach, associate professor in the School of…
Read MoreTableau Software is announcing that Tableau Public now has expanded capabilities, including handling spreadsheets that that contain up to 1million rows of data. Tableau Public’s storage space has also increased from 50 megabytes to 1 gigabyte. Tableau stated the changes were made after noticing many public datasets number more than the previous limit of 100,00…
Read MoreAnti-press attacks are generating fear and self-censorship among journalists in Tanzania, according to a report published Wednesday by The Committee to Protect Journalists. Despite good international publicity for moving toward an open government, public discontent remains largely unseen and unheard. CPJ’s findings include 10 serious anti-press attacks since September, which is “a notable jump over historical trends…
Read MoreA Center for Public Integrity reports that increasingly, industry is targeting James Huff’s former employer and its parent, the Department of Health and Human Services — in particular, HHS’s Report on Carcinogens. Two lobby groups sued the agency after two widely used chemicals were listed in the report. In a victory for industry, lawmakers mandated…
Read MoreThe strikes are deeply unpopular in South Asia and in other parts of the world, reports the Investigative Reporting Workshop. The Taliban killed 10 foreign mountaineers in Pakistan in June — in retaliation, the Taliban said, for the U.S. drone strikes. Many of the drones that were used in Pakistan, along with those sent to…
Read MoreAmid the recent fanfare surrounding big arrests in Mexico’s drug war, those journalists still daring to shed light on the cartels and corrupt state officials keep on dying, and the killers, they just keep on getting away with it, according to an Al Jazeera report.
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