The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Posts Tagged ‘Behind the Story’
Behind the Story: The Boston Globe’s 4-year battle for secret settlement records
Boston Globe reporter Todd Wallack thought it would be a simple, short-term project to look into settlements made between the state of Massachusetts and some of its employees. After all, he’d done the same thing in California, uncovering an agreement between UC Davis and one of its administrators to avert a nasty lawsuit. But the…
Read MoreGoogle Hangout Dec. 9th with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Deadly Delays Team
On Dec. 9th at 10:00 a.m. CST, IRE will host another live Google+ Hangout with Ellen Gabler and Allan J. Vestal of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Watchdog team. Tune in as we learn about their Deadly Delays series on processing failures in newborn screening programs. Topics for discussion will include how the team uncovered delayed…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Maine pharmacists get licenses despite history of drug abuse
Would you feel safe if your pharmacist had lost his license because of drug abuse or theft, yet had regained it and was dispensing your prescriptions? What about if he had lost his license twice? Naomi Schalit and John Christie of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting found that since 2003, thirteen pharmacists with…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Two Cleveland reporters raise the issue of rape kits that sat untested for 20 years
Rachel Dissell and Leila Atassi wanted an answer to a seemingly simple question: how many untested rape kits did the Cleveland Police Department have in storage? The answer: “We don’t know.” The reporters’ question prompted Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine in 2011 to ask all Ohio law enforcement agencies to send their rape kits to…
Read MoreReporter finds hundreds of unpunished water violations in Minnesota
By Mark Steil, Minnesota Public Radio I’ve always enjoyed looking through large piles of data in my job as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio. My primary beats are the agriculture and energy sectors. I’ve been on the job 35 years now, and for most of that time a document hunt generally meant one thing:…
Read MoreAssessing and mapping dangerous intersections, traffic fatalities in your community
A still image from the Orlando Sentinel’s Blood in the Streets animated video. By Scott Powers and Arelis Hernandez, the Orlando Sentinel This past winter, after an Orlando Sentinel editor almost ran down a pedestrian for the umpteenth time – a moment which occurred about the same time that our breaking-news desk had to write…
Read MoreHow reporter Steven Hsieh stumbled across his first investigation
Reporter Steven Hsieh was never informed about a dangerous landfill in his hometown of West County in St. Louis until one day while watching cable news. Hsieh, one-year out of school at the Missouri School of Journalism, stumbled upon a broadcast of a roundtable discussion in which Diane Schanzenbach, associate professor in the School of…
Read MoreHow to use boating accident data in an investigation
FCIR created this map of boating accidents. Click the map for the interactive version. Last January, Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and NBC 6 in Miami announced a partnership to produce more local in-depth investigations. Even before our partnership was announced, we had already decided during a brainstorm session that boating fatalities would be one…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Solving the mystery of the porn copyright troll
By Dalton Barker Researching the connection between copyright lawsuits and a porn company can be tricky — especially while at work. Claire Suddath, a Bloomberg reporter based in New York City, navigated the murky waters before she published her recent investigative piece: Prenda Law, the Porn Copyright Trolls. Suddath discovered that Chicago-based Prenda Law had…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Tracking food waste at a local institution
Forty percent of food grown in the United States goes uneaten, according to the National Institutes of Health. That’s everything from misshapen potatoes left in the field to the half jar of salsa going bad in your refrigerator. Most of us believe wasting food is bad, but many large institutions write off that waste as…
Read More