The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
“The call it “piling on”: Police officers, looking to pad their paychecks with overtime, add their names to arrest reports and other investigative paperwork, no matter how minor their role. Then, when a case arises in court, they get called to testify – and possibly paid overtime.” The Philadelphia Inquirer has learned that this could…
Read MoreAccounting by the Journal Sentinel and MedPage Today shows that a University of Wisconsin-Madison chairman has received more than $25 million in royalties from Medtronic, a medical device firm, since 2003. “Additionally, UW Hospital spent $27 million for Medtronic spinal products from 2004 to 2010, according to documents obtained through an open records request. And…
Read More“A review by The Salt Lake Tribune has found that perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars of Utah’s beer tax money have been diverted to other causes or rolled into everyday city or county activities in. In some cases, the recipients seemingly stretched the interpretation of the statute to justify how they spent the money.…
Read More“Taxpayers in Colorado’s largest school districts have spent more than $5.8 million during the past five years to subsidize the activities of local teachers unions. The expenses resulted from years of agreements that require tax money to pay for everything from full-time union leaders’ salaries and benefits to providing leave for some teachers to attend…
Read More“In the wake of two controversial officer-involved shooting deaths in the summer of 2010, the Las Vegas Review-Journal analyzed two decades of shootings by officers with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The newspaper found an insular police department that is slow to weed out problem cops and slower still to adopt policies and procedures…
Read MoreAn elderly couple was forced to move from their home after petroleum from an old gas station leaked into the ground and contaminated their well water. The couple was unaware of the Inland Protection Trust Fund, which was created by the state of Florida in 1986 “to respond to leaking petroleum storage tanks … which…
Read MoreIt was an unbelievable record for anyone, let alone a public employee. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that one Opa-Locka, Fla., officer had been: “Fired five times and arrested three, he was charged with stealing a car, trying to board an airplane with a loaded gun and driving with a suspended license.…(He) split a man’s lip…
Read MoreTired of government agencies that care more about protecting their data than the public? Frustrated by official websites that defiantly offer no easy way to download vital data sets? It’s time to fight back. Join IRE and Scraperwiki for a 12-hour data liberation marathon during the 2012 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference in St. Louis on Feb.…
Read More‘The Dayton Daily News reports that the U.S. Veterans Affairs inspector general’s office has estimated $500 million worth of VA contracts through the Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business Program go to ineligible businesses each year. After the VA beefed up its review process over whether firms actually are headed by disabled veterans, it found 1,800 companies…
Read More