The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
James Pressley, school board president in Pleasantville, N.J., sought money from community businesses who were seeking contracts from the school board. John Froojian, of the Press of Atlantic City, reports that money was solicited for the James A. Pressley Scholarship and Community Youth Build Foundation, although neither the IRS nor the New Jersey Consumer Affairs…
Read MoreA Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found that hundreds of Milwaukee County workers, including some high profile officials, boosted their pensions by $50 million by sidestepping county pension rules and IRS tax codes. Reporter Dave Umhoefer traced the self-dealing and cronyism that launched the breaks, which allow workers to pay to convert ineligible work service from…
Read MoreFollowing the collapse of an I-35 bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, journalists turned to the National Bridge Inventory database, available from IRE and NICAR, to check the bridge’s inspection history. The Saint Paul Pioneer Press. and The Star Tribune reported that inspection data from 2005 showed that the Minnesota Department of Transportation deemed…
Read MoreOver a year ago, online investigative reporter Sandy Frost began digging into whistleblower
Read MoreInmate overcrowding and the increasing number of staff vacancies in California’s prisons are spiking overtime costs for the state’s corrections department, which spent more than half a billion dollars last year on overtime pay, according to analysis of payroll records by the San Francisco Chronicle. Tom Chorneau and Todd Wallack report that the surge —…
Read MoreCalifornia and other states require investor-owned utilities to publish reliability statistics, including the number of minutes the average customer goes without power each year. Brad Branan of the Fresno Bee looked at those numbers to find that “customers in the Fresno division of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. go without power longer than those in…
Read MoreJosh Robbins of the Orlando Sentinel reports that inaccurate attendance reports could be skewing the economic impact that sports venues have in the community seeing as though turnstile counts are often lower than the published “official attendance” numbers. As the County Commission in Orange County, Fla. prepare to consider a $1.1 billion plan for a…
Read MoreA quick-hit investigation by Marc Davis of The Virginian-Pilot looked at city liablitiy records and found “Virginia Beach paid 84 homeowners and businesses a total of $457,000 to fix damages or repay plumbing fees for sewer backups in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Among the other four cities – Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Suffolk – none…
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