The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
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Companies that received multimillion-dollar deals with CalPERS, California’s giant public pension fund, pumped more than $300,000 into a union campaign fund overseen by Sean Harrigan while the long-time California labor leader was one of the giant pension fund’s board members from 2000-2004, The Sacramento Bee’s Andrew McIntosh reported in an examination of the deals.
Read MoreExecutive Privilege, a series by The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), detailed questionable dealings by former North Carolina governor, Mike Easley. “Starting in 2003, Easley took at least 25 flights on private jets, some in apparent violation of campaign laws and ethics rules, documents and interviews show. Some flights were free. The value of others…
Read MoreRon Koziol, a co-founder of Investigative Reporters and Editors and a member of the Arizona Project team, died Saturday, June 13, of congestive heart failure. He was 74. Koziol was a longtime police reporter at the Chicago Tribune. In 1975 he helped found IRE, and he was a member of the group of reporters who…
Read More“Of the 2.1 billion gallons of water that flowed through city water mains in fiscal year 2007-2008, 26 percent went unbilled – or unaccounted – for,” according to an analysis of utility records by The News Herald (Panama City, Fla.). Based on the retail rate of water in Panama City, the lost revenue from the…
Read More“The air across Iowa is so polluted that the state is perilously close to violating new federal limits aimed at protecting human health. Yet Iowans have no way of knowing what chemicals they are breathing because of a limited – and often inaccurate – system of monitoring pollution statewide, a Des Moines Register investigation found.”…
Read MoreBy Dawn Fallik IRE Hell is having your panel at the same time as Barlett & Steele AND Eric Nalder. Plus, we were hidden behind the kitchen (Mike Berens cooked a couple omelets before figuring out where we were.) But huzzah! A good 35-40 people showed up to hear four uber-nerds talk about 990 forms (New!…
Read MoreBy Margo Smit Though from a small country half a world away, I try to make IRE conferences a regular on my calendar. And after six conferences in the last seven years, I almost feel like a veteran here. “IRE is my family,” said broadcast journalist Tisha Thompson at the IRE Awards luncheon. It feels…
Read MoreBy Alexandra Berzon My track at my very first IRE conference inadvertently ended up something that could best be described as “How to talk to people.” I found myself drawn to the panels of legendary investigative journalists candidly describing how they get people to tell them things. My favorite part of reporting is the talking-to-people…
Read MoreIf you missed the 2009 IRE Conference — or if you were there but just miss the conference — here are some online recaps and blog posts on the IRE site and elsewhere. Visit IRE’s On the Road blog for posts by Alexandra Berzon of the Las Vegas Sun, Margo Smit of VVOJ, and Dawn…
Read MoreA five-part series in The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) put the spotlight on costly state policy decisions. Stories addressed wide-ranging topics: the high cost of enforcing the state’s mandatory sentencing law for low-level felons; lack of generic drug requirements for Medicaid patients; pet projects and untracked spending; corporate tax loopholes; and the hidden cost…
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