The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Blog
John Lauerman and Jonathan D. Salant of Bloomberg News found that for-profit colleges, faced with new federal restrictions, more than doubled their lobbying spending, bringing in six former members of Congress to help make their case on Capitol Hill. Ten education companies and their trade association spent $3.8 million on lobbying in the first nine…
Read MoreA Dallas Morning News review of public records and databases found nepotism in charter schools across Texas, along with many administrators earning six-figure salaries to run charter schools with only a few hundred or a couple of thousand students
Read MorePlease do not miss the opportunity to enter your best work in the 2010 IRE Awards. The postmark deadline is Friday, January 14, 2011. The entry form can be found online. Eligible work must have been published or aired between January 1 and December 31, 2010. Please note we have added two new categories in…
Read MoreAn investigation by The New York Times details the final hours of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Based on interviews with crew members and sworn testimonies, the Times was able to piece together what happened during the final hours of this disaster. “What emerges is a stark and singular fact: crew members died and suffered…
Read MoreAn investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting shows how high school diplomas received online can be a waste of money and not recognized as valid. According to the report although dozens of organizations accredit schools, “the U.S. higher education community at large only recognizes a handful of accrediting organizations as legitimate.” With little regulation in…
Read MoreAs the number of deportations from county jails increases across the country and in central Ohio, local authorities are struggling to deal with the fallout, a year-long examination by the The Columbus Dispatch found. In a communication mixup, ICE agents deported a witness in a murder trial before he could testify. The accused, a US…
Read MoreThe Board of the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) strongly encourages the U.S. government to exercise great restraint when considering matters surrounding the documents released through Wikileaks or taking any actions that could undermine American traditions of a free press and open government. While controversy exists about the nature of Wikileaks’ activities and the disclosure…
Read MoreTo answer nagging questions about the foreclosure crisis, Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica and Sanjay Bhatt of The Seattle Times built a database based on a random sample of some 1,200 foreclosure filings from the central county of three metro areas — Seattle, Phoenix and Baltimore. Their findings challenge some of the conventional wisdom about the…
Read MoreHobbled by Congress, federal watchdogs rarely revoke the licenses of lawbreaking gun dealers. And when they do, stores can easily beat the system by having a relative, friend or employee pull a fresh license – something that routinely happens across the country, a Journal Sentinel investigation by reporters John Diedrich and Ben Poston has found.…
Read MoreJournalists for The Record of northern New Jersey have revisited the site of the paper’s “Toxic Legacy” series five years ago and found that the clean-up of a former Ford Motor Co. dump in environmentally sensitive woodlands remains incomplete. The original series prompted the EPA to take the unprecedented step of re-listing the tract as…
Read More