Why are Americans losing trust in power? It’s complicated, new report says
A new Pew Research Center report shows that Americans’ measure of trust in public officials continues to decline.
Administration’s policies target some legal immigrants
Animated by what President Donald Trump has repeatedly called a crisis on our Southern border, the administration has ramped up hard-line immigration policies, some of them targeting legal migrants.
Saying goodbye to our scholar from Japan
Yo Noguchi leaves the Investigative Reporting Workshop next week after a year as a scholar-in-residence from Tokyo, where he has been a staff writer for The Asahi Shimbun Japanese daily newspaper for 20 years. He came to Washington to study campaign finance laws and practices and how they compare to those in Japan. The experience …
Educating Emma: One intern’s lesson in investigative reporting
“You aren’t going to understand it,” the spokesman at Virginia’s top education agency told me during our third phone call. His comment came two weeks after I had submitted a public records request to his agency, part of a project I had planned both to report and to use as training. Prior to that call, …
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States take on Big Pharma
Nearly 250,000 people died because of opioid overdoses between 2010 and 2017. IRW and the Washington Post reported in May that the Trump administration has failed to allocate sufficient funds to fight the epidemic and has left crucial drug enforcement posts unfilled, despite declaring opioid addiction a public health emergency in 2017. While the federal …
Agencies propose changes to FOIA regulations
The EPA in June proposed updated FOIA regulations that would give the agency’s administrator and other political appointees the final say in granting requests and the power to redact or withhold records if it is deemed unresponsive to what the request specifically asked for. The EPA also chose to forgo a comment period on the …
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Introducing The Accountability Project, a new resource for public data
Searching across public data sets can be arduous, particularly on deadline. But any good journalist knows that finding threads among campaign finance data, property records, business ownership and other sources can yield important stories about conflicts of interest, outsized influence and other issues that warrant deeper public scrutiny. That’s why the Investigative Reporting Workshop created …
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Keep going? Resilient reporters stay the course
Shooter found guilty: July 15, 2021 When Capital Gazette Editor Rick Hutzell, the keynote speaker at the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, described those who died in a shooting that devastated his newsroom a year ago, I looked around the room and saw their faces. The five who died were reflected in the 1,350 …
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Streaming now: Audio investigations
We might be living in the golden age of podcasts. Investigative journalists, from reporters in the world’s largest newsrooms to independent producers striking out on their own, are using audio to tell stories previously reserved for 5,000-word stories. At IRW, we’ve curated a list of some of the best investigative podcasts for your binging pleasure. …
Streaming now: films that dig deep
When asked how she got a homeless mother in New York City to share her story in the film “Lucky,” journalist Laura Checkoway said writing celebrity profiles for publications and in-depth pieces helped her develop a knack for getting people to open up; that, and a lot of patience. Checkoway was on assignment when she …
