The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
“Lobbyists and corporations that employ them can’t give gifts to lawmakers—unless they funnel the money through a nonprofit,” according to an investigation by Mother Jones.
Read More“inewsource and KPBS audited ads in the U-T every day between Labor Day and Election Day 2012 and compared the list with campaign finance records. The results show varied payments for ads, indicating the U-T may have offered bargains to the anti-Filner campaign and to other candidates and issues the newspaper endorsed,” according to the investigation.
Read More“Politicians in New Jersey can receive more money while still keeping the names of their donors secret than those in any other state in the nation, masking the origins of millions of dollars in campaign contributions every year, a Star-Ledger analysis has found.” Read the Star-Ledger’s full investigation here.
Read More“ATF agents running an undercover storefront in Milwaukee used a brain-damaged man with a low IQ to set up gun and drug deals, paying him in cigarettes, merchandise and money, according to federal documents obtained by the Journal Sentinel.” Read the Journal Sentinel’s full investigation here.
Read MoreTom Shephard, a political consultant for Bob Filner, a Democrat running for mayor of San Diego, noticed a lot of full page newspaper ads attacking his client; ads that he was quoted $8,000 for. “Amita Sharma and Ryann Growchowski, with inewsource and KPBS, audited ads in the San Diego Union-Tribune every day between Labor Day…
Read MoreIn a follow up to their investigation on an ATF sting gone wrong, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has found that all leads on the stolen, government-owned Colt M4 have ended in dead ends. “And despite a newly filed search warrant detailing a text message that may link one of the original suspects to the theft,…
Read MoreAccording to documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, applicants who have sought sensitive law enforcement jobs in recent years with the U.S. Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, admitted to a host of astonishing crimes during the application process, including rape, kidnapping. “The records – official summaries of more than…
Read MoreHow far back do the roots of data journalism go? Simon Rogers of the The Guardian’s Data Blog can traces them pretty far. In a video this week on the blog, he explains that “journalists have been working with – and visualising – data since the Guardian first published in 1821.” The video is the second…
Read MoreThe Toronto Star and El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister publication of the Miami Herald, recently collaborated on an investigation that found Canadians are travelling to Cuba in surprising numbers to sexually exploit young people trapped in the socialist country’s underground sex tourism industry. Havana’s conspicuous scenes of street-level prostitution are the public face of a hidden, sordid trade…
Read MoreTest scores rocketed and plunged over several years at Annette Officer Elementary School in East St. Louis, Ill., often a telltale sign of tampering. The school district determined that cheating was “accepted practice. Photo: Hyosub Shin, AJC In Atlanta, 35 educators were indicted in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, all but three of whom…
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