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Posts Tagged ‘crime’
IRE Radio Podcast | BONUS: Telling an Unbelievable Story
On this bonus episode, we’re sharing audio from the 2016 IRE Conference. In a session on narrative storytelling, reporters T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong explain how they wrote their Pulitzer-winning investigation, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape”. Their reporting is the basis of a new Netflix limited series called “Unbelievable”. You can find the podcast…
Read MoreIRE Radio Podcast | A Pattern of Injustice
Every year, more than 2,000 women in Minnesota report to police that they were raped or sexually assaulted. So, the Minneapolis Star Tribune decided to take a look at what happens after a report is made, analyzing more than 1,000 cases. They found that in almost half, police failed to interview potential witnesses. In roughly…
Read MoreIRE Radio Podcast | Staining The System
Blood delivers oxygen to our tissues. It fights off infections. It courses through our veins. But can it help us catch a murderer? A little-known arm of forensic science, known as bloodstain pattern analysis, believes it can. On this week’s episode, Pamela Colloff, a senior reporter at ProPublica and writer-at-large for The New York Times…
Read MoreIRE Radio Podcast | The Shooter
February 14, 2018 started out as a relatively calm day for Florida’s Sun Sentinel newsroom. Then, Nikolas Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with a semiautomatic rifle. Before the day was done, 17 people would be dead and 17 more would be wounded in one of the deadliest school shootings in modern American…
Read MoreIRE Radio Podcast | Three Strikes
A 1982 Virginia law meant to reduce recidivism had a pretty simple concept: Three strikes and you’re out. Or, in prison terms, you’re in for good. On this week’s episode, we talk with Virginian-Pilot reporter Tim Eberly about his three-month investigation into the law. Tim interviewed 41 “three-strikers” and found that the majority had never…
Read MoreIRE Radio Podcast | One Killer Algorithm
Thomas Hargrove spent decades reporting for the Scripps Howard News Service — until he was abruptly laid off in 2015. Then things got interesting: Court battles, destroyed records, and an algorithm that just might be able to spot serial killers. You can find the podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. Have a story…
Read MoreBehind the Story: How a little-known law can send you to prison for a murder you never committed
Alison Flowers (left) and Sarah Macaraeg (right) You might think you have to kill someone to be charged with murder. But at least in Illinois, you’d be wrong. In an investigation for the Chicago Reader, independent journalists Alison Flowers and Sarah Macaraeg spent several months looking into a controversial law called the “felony murder rule,”…
Read MoreHow two reporters came together to report and write an unbelievable story
By Sarah Gamard T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong broke down their Pulitzer Prize-winning collaboration “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” to a packed conference hall at IRE 2016 in New Orleans. Last year, Miller was working on a series about rape for ProPublica when he got a tip that police had caught a serial rapist…
Read MoreHow journalists cover crime and policing in the wake of Ferguson
By Reade Levinson Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri changed the way journalists cover law enforcement. At the 2016 IRE Conference in New Orleans, civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson joined reporters Oliver Laughland of the Guardian US, Errin Haines Whack of the Associated Press, and Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post to discuss what’s next…
Read MoreIRE Radio Podcast | The Fairbanks Four
For nearly 15 years, a journalism professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has been investigating the case of the Fairbanks Four, a group of men convicted in the 1997 beating death of a teenager. And he hasn’t been working alone. Each year, students in Brian O’Donoghue’s investigative reporting class picked up the case. Their…
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