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Hydrogen sulfide hotspots, regulatory failure
By Will Evans, The Examination, and Caroline Ghisolfi, Houston Chronicle We knew we had a story when Sam Birdwell answered our call and began talking openly. Birdwell had retired after a long career with the state of Texas, patrolling oil fields to make sure companies followed the rules concerning hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a toxic gas…
Read MoreReverse engineering Medicare, Inc.
By Christopher Weaver, The Wall Street Journal One doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to reverse engineer the federal government’s convoluted Medicare Advantage payment system. Taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year on excessive payments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage, but it is shrouded in secrecy and fueled by vast reams of…
Read MoreUnearthing a broken promise
By April Simpson, Pratheek Rebala and Alexia Fernández Campbell Every investigative journalist has been there. It’s early in an investigation, and the problem is the size of 27 football fields. That’s how much space the documents could cover if we laid them out. Where do we begin? That’s how we felt at the beginning of…
Read MoreMapping preventable death in “Bleeding Out”
By Lauren Caruba, The Dallas Morning News In the back of an ambulance in San Antonio, I watched as paramedics worked on a man they had pulled from a house with bullet-riddled windows and blood-smeared tiles. He had been shot twice, in the arm and chest. When I looked down at my shoes, I saw…
Read MoreInvestigating how loopholes and middlemen are breaking America’s H-1B visa system
By Jason Grotto, Bloomberg News In December 2023, with the migrant surge at the US-Mexico border dominating the national conversation, Bloomberg data investigations reporter Eric Fan was crafting a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that would crack open another problematic part of America’s immigration system — the skilled-worker visa program known as H-1B.…
Read MoreAccessible data visualizations
By Douglas Schepers, Fizz Studio; Frank Elavsky, Carnegie Mellon University People with vision or cognitive disabilities often struggle with charts, graphs and diagrams as a source of information. People with disabilities also have a fundamental ethical and legal right to an equivalent experience of information access. For basic images, adding accessibility is as simple as…
Read MoreBehind the Story: How KDNK investigated gas spills on private property
Photo courtesy of KDNK Oil and gas companies reported about 90 spills last year in heavily-drilled Garfield County, Colorado. Many of the leaks happened on private properties leased to drilling companies, said Ed Williams, a reporter at community radio station KDNK. But when unsafe levels of dangerous chemicals like arsenic and benzene contaminated the land,…
Read MoreBehind the Story: America’s Woman Warriors
Staff Sgt. Jessica Keown, with the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss in El Paso Texas, served with a female engagement team, or FET, in Afghanistan. David Gilkey/NPR From the time NPR corresondent Quil Lawrence spent in Iraq before covering veterans issues, he could tell women in the military were doing more than…
Read MoreCrimes in the classroom
By Susan Snyder and Dylan Purcell, The Philadelphia Inquirer A series of racial attacks at a Philadelphia high school in late 2009 – and the school district’s inadequate response – prompted The Inquirer to launch an investigation into school violence. Its seven-part series, “Assault on Learning“, and follow-up stories published throughout the past year, showed that…
Read MoreCampaign cash flow at the state level: Look at contributors, ballot measures
By Beverly Magley and Anne Sherwood, National Institute on Money in State Politics For your stories about 2012 state elections, check out free campaign-finance information at The National Institute on Money in State Politics (followthemoney.org), a nonpartisan not-for-profit organization. In addition to downloadable data sets, you can mine reports on trends and anomalies, as well…
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