The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients

By IRE Staff Finalized in 2015, the NFL concussion settlement resolved the most serious threat America’s most popular and lucrative sports league has faced, promising to pay every former player who developed dementia or several brain diseases linked to concussions. The league even agreed to fund a nationwide network of doctors to evaluate players and…

By Camille Phillips, Texas Public Radio After the death of an instructional assistant in San Antonio in February 2024, special education teachers in the city’s largest school district filed a formal complaint alleging his death was part of a widespread pattern of student-caused injuries. But that 77-page report was just the tip of the iceberg. …

By IRE Staff There are two kinds of investigative stories: those that would have come out eventually through a lawsuit or law enforcement investigation.  And those that only emerge because a reporter dug them up, tested their plausibility, asked hard questions and ultimately exposed wrongdoing so outrageous that it forced law enforcement to take action.…

By Sukey Lewis & Julie Small, KQED This investigation began with a striking data finding. In analyzing newly accessible records obtained through California’s landmark police transparency law, our reporting team discovered that correctional officers at California State Prison, Sacramento — also known as New Folsom — were using serious force at three times the rate…

By Lori Jane Gliha and Brittany Freeman, Scripps News When a gunman killed 18 people during a shooting spree in Lewiston, Maine in October 2023, our team did what many reporters might do in a breaking news situation: we asked a ton of questions, and we filed open records requests for anything that might give…

Twelve years ago, I was stomping through the corridors of the Pentagon as a military beat reporter for The Washington Post. At the Defense Department, there’s always a deluge of potential news stories and international incidents to monitor. The trick is figuring out which ones will keep your editors happy, which ones you can safely…

By Kathy Best, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism This is a story of AI-assisted redemption.  In 1999, two enterprising Congressional Quarterly reporters wanted to show the link between congressional trips and the private interests that financed them. They used a portable scanner to make copies of travel reports and spent weeks inputting information by hand…

By Nadia Hamdan, Reveal Alexia Fernández Campbell was in Baltimore when she got the news.  It was March and she was attending the NICAR 2024 conference, where her colleague, Pratheek Rebala, would be on a panel to talk about the big project they had been working on together, “Forty Acres and a Lie.” At the…

By Richard Martin, The Baltimore Banner On March 26, 2024, the cargo ship Dali lost power while leaving the Port of Baltimore and slammed into a critical support pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It was 1:24 a.m., and within seconds the bridge crumpled into the cold Patapsco River, sending six construction workers working…