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The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients

“Star” El Diario reporter’s murder case remains unsolved

By hdcoadmin | January 25, 2013

“Choco was the first journalist to fall victim to the turf war between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels that engulfed the state of Chihuahua from 2007 to 2011. He was not the last. In July, the special prosecutor for crimes against journalists in Mexico testified that 67 journalists had been killed in that country since 2006.…

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Behind the Story: Post-Dispatch mapping finds ‘hot spots’ of pedestrian railroad deaths

By hdcoadmin | January 25, 2013

Photo courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Photo courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In December, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch released Death on the Rails, a special report on the surprising number of pedestrian deaths that have occurred on railways.  Reporter Todd Frankel explains how he cross-referenced databases and resources to build his own map…

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New measure drops Pennsylvania charter school ratings

By hdcoadmin | January 23, 2013

Analyzing state education data, The Morning Call found that only 28 percent of Pennsylvania charter schools met an adequate yearly progress rating, compared to 49 percent using a more lenient calculation implemented by the Pennsylvania Secretary of Education and later rejected by the U.S. Department of Education.

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Deadspin reporting of Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax highlights need for backgrounding story subjects

By hdcoadmin | January 23, 2013

The ability to background a person  is an essential tool for journalists regardless of beat, as shown by news of Lennay Kekua, the deceased girlfriend of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o who never existed but became one of the prominent storylines in sports this year. The fact that Kekua was a complete fabrication is a…

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Gun laws, state by state

By hdcoadmin | January 18, 2013

“President Obama has indicated a move towards strengthening federal gun control measures, but the reality is that the majority of gun legislation in the US is enacted at the state level. That has brought broad variations across the country, with states taking different approaches to issues ranging from sales, permits, licensing, self-defense and carry laws.”…

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Using DocumentCloud, FOIA Project to track requests, responses by agency

By hdcoadmin | January 18, 2013

The FOIA Project has documented more evidence of what its staff calls apparent failure of the Obama administration to fulfill transparency promises, and an upcoming expansion of the project could be a step toward establishing definitive evidence regarding the administration’s level of transparency.   At the end of December, the DocumentCloud-powered venture from the Transactional…

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San Antonio withholds employee identifiers, with backing from Attorney General

By hdcoadmin | January 17, 2013

By Joe Yerardi Back in September, I filed a public records request with the City of San Antonio asking for their last five years of payroll data. When I received the responsive records earlier this month, I was surprised to find that the data did not include employee identification numbers. As any data journalist worth…

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Winning T-shirt selected for NICAR 2013

By hdcoadmin | January 17, 2013

RUNNER-UP             WINNING PROPOSAL  THIRD AND FOURTH PLACE     The votes are in and the 2013 NICAR T-shirts have been selected! Proposal 8, a blue T-shirt with NICAR across the chest, came in first among finalists and is this year’s winning T-shirt. The winning design comes from Ben Welsh of the…

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Where Congress stands on gun control

By hdcoadmin | January 16, 2013

In the aftermath of the Newtown tragedy, President Obama on Wednesday will announce new national gun control measures. He has already urged members of Congress to do the same. ProPublica has created an app that lets you take a comprehensive look at where lawmakers stand on guns, as well as political spending and voting history.

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Bloomberg Administration Proposed, then Dropped, Database of Residents Needing Evacuation and Aid

By hdcoadmin | January 16, 2013

WNYC reports that “in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a registry that would allow disaster responders to know where to find people most urgently in need of aid. But he does not appear to have followed through.”

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