The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients

By Ronny Rojas, Noticias Telemundo; Brenda Medina, ICIJ; Àngela Cantador, CLIP In 2023, while covering the death of 53 undocumented migrants who were trapped in a cargo truck in San Antonio, Texas, Noticias Telemundo journalists put a call-out in their stories and social media platforms asking immigrants who had traveled in similar conditions to share…

By Jennifer Gollan & Susie Neilson, San Francisco Chronicle Police pursuits are glamorized on television news and in video games. But the causes and aftermaths of these chases receive little public attention. Our investigation shined a spotlight on the reckless decisions that often set pursuits in motion and on the bystanders and passengers they’ve killed.…

By Jeremy Finley, WSMV I have a complicated relationship with tips. When I’m juggling a data project, a documentary, anchoring a nightly newscast and weekly reporting, they seem to spill into my hands like quarters from an old slot machine. And I complain, I can’t keep up with all this. But when everything falls apart—as…

By Amy Davis & Andrea Slaydon, KPRC 2 I’ll never forget watching 95-year-old Ray Dittmar navigate his uneven lawn with a walker, getting down on his hands and knees to read his own water meter. He called me when the city of Houston told him he had used 111,000 gallons of water in one month.…

By Challen Stephens & Ivana Hrynkiw, AL.com It’s not easy to make a dent when reporting on Alabama prisons. The system is jam-packed, cruel and deadly. Reform tends to happen only when the state is forced by the courts. But in 2024, something surprising happened.  After we began reporting on the bottleneck at the state…

By Katey Rusch, UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program Since we exposed the widespread use of secret deals to bury police officers’ misconduct in California, we’ve been asked the same question repeatedly: How did you know these agreements existed when they were designed to evade detection? The honest answer is that it happened by accident. In…

By Alejandra Cancino & Maya Dukmasova, Injustice Watch On paper, Chicago is a “tenant-friendly” town. This project began more than a decade ago when Maya Dukmasova started requesting data on eviction lawsuits from the Cook County Circuit Court. Court records are public, but in order to analyze the data, Maya needed bulk, case-level information in…

By Melissa del Bosque & Jack Sapoch, Lighthouse Reports. In March 2023, a fire tore through a locked cell inside a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, killing 40 men and injuring 27 others. It was the deadliest fire in a government immigration facility in Mexico’s history. Officials claimed that the fire was a…

By Brendan Keefe, WANF How do you find government agents in the world’s busiest airport when they’re disguised just like the passengers they target? That was the challenge I faced when trying to track Drug Enforcement Agency task force officers who were searching innocent travelers for cash at boarding gates. The story would end with…