The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
Keith Epstein and Doug Stanley of the Tampa Tribune analyzed Supreme Court voting data archived by Michigan State University political science Professor Harold J. Spaeth, finding that “since 1953, the Supreme Court has formally ruled on abortion, a privacy issue, only 29 times. Abortion-related cases account for only 0.5 percent of all rulings handed down…
Read MoreRichard A. Serrano and Stephen Braun of the Los Angeles Times used documents to report that “Reps. John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo joined forces with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by federal banking regulators into the affairs of Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz.” The lawmakers inserted regulatory…
Read MoreYolanda Rodriguez of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with assistance from Craig Schneider, Leon Stafford and database editor David A. Milliron, used a FOIA request to show that “Georgia hotels have billed taxpayers more than $19 million to house evacuees who fled after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast last year.” The agency has paid…
Read MoreJeffrey Tomich, with contributions from Jaimi Dowdell, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch used federal data to show that “Illinois’ largest coal mine was fined almost as much for safety violations last year as the rest of the state’s mines combined.” The Galatia mine, owned by the American Coal Co., was fined more than $500,000 by…
Read MoreSeth Borenstein, Linda J. Johnson and Lee Mueller of Knight Ridder Newspapers used federal data to find that “since the Bush administration took office in 2001, it has been more lenient toward mining companies facing serious safety violations, issuing fewer and smaller major fines and collecting less than half of the money that violators owed.”…
Read MoreKaty Human and Jeff Roberts of The Denver Post examined mine safety records for Colorado and found that its “eight underground coal mines paid fines totaling almost $500,000 for hundreds of safety violations in the past two years.” One mine was cited 350 times last year for a total of nearly $50,000. In comparision, the…
Read MoreJim Miller of The (Riverside, Calif.) Press-Enterprise used geographic information system (GIS) software to study the impact of a proposal by Gov. Schwarzenegger and others to prohibit registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school in California. The analysis shows that “At least half of California’s urban areas would become…
Read MoreSam Roe and Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune published a three-part series on the presence of mercury in fish sold in supermarkets. “In one of the nation’s most comprehensive studies of mercury in commercial fish, testing by the newspaper showed that a variety of popular seafood was so tainted that federal regulators could confiscate…
Read MoreEric Nalder, Lewis Kamb, Phuong Cat Le and Paul Shukovsky of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer continue their investigation into abuse, misconduct and disciplinary lapses in the King County Sheriff’s Department. The most recent stories examine the reasons for these failures in oversight — and reveal more cases of abuse, favoritism and retaliation against whistleblowers. The investigation,…
Read MoreBob Marshall of The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reports the Army Corps of Engineers knew about “engineering mistakes that led to the canal levee failures that flooded most of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina” but dismissed them. “Documents, obtained by The Times-Picayune and provided to forensic engineers studying the levee breaches, show project engineers made a…
Read More