Category: News

Amid all the recent hand-wringing about the decline of the news business, audio journalism is going through something of a renaissance, with podcasts proliferating while radio listenership holds steady. In a nod to this changing media landscape, this week the 70th annual George Polk Awards announced the inaugural winner in the podcast category. The honor …

Continue reading “In a crowded field of Polk Award honorees, spotlight falls on podcasts”

During a trip to Colorado last summer, then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke stopped by the office of a small Denver-based oil and gas advocacy group called the Western Energy Alliance. It was the waning months of his embattled leadership at Interior before he would be ousted in December, but the group had been a …

Continue reading “Habitat for sale: An oil and gas group calls the tune at the Interior Department”

Fatal shootings by police are the rare outcomes of the millions of encounters between police officers and the public. Despite the unpredictable events that lead to the shootings, in each of the past four years police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of people — nearly 1,000. Last year police shot and …

Continue reading “Police shot, killed nearly 1,000 in 2018”

David Bernhardt had been acting secretary of the Interior for just over a month before President Donald Trump nominated him to take the position permanently. That made Bernhardt unusual in a department that has struggled for nearly two years to fill key leadership positions.

Reporters and researchers can collaborate more extensively to shed light on issues the country’s workforce is facing, panelists said Friday at the Mind to Mind symposium. Journalists typically call academics to get quotes for their stories, and academics call journalists to ask them to write about their research papers, Christa Scharfenberg, CEO of Reveal from …

Continue reading “Better together: Journalists and academics brainstorm ways to collaborate for more impact”

The WAMU 88.5 series “Collateral Damage” focused on the impact of the D.C. police department’s aggressive focus on confiscating illegal guns. The investigation with the Investigative Reporting Workshop explored how tactics used by police to search for guns are also angering and alienating residents, especially in D.C.’s predominantly black neighborhoods where police focus these efforts. …

Continue reading “How WAMU and IRW reported ‘Collateral Damage’”

“Everything he touches turns to gold,” Roberts remembered being told. But the gold wore off, starting in 2016. Roberts estimated that his property value decreased by half, as the real-estate market was flooded with unsold Trump hotel rooms.

Few police departments are better at finding illegal guns than D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department. But in the day-to-day battle to get guns off the street, residents in some majority-African American neighborhoods say they are being caught in the crossfire between an ongoing epidemic of gun violence and aggressive police tactics.

In the last few years, the Investigative Reporting Workshop has undertaken major stories on immigration, police shootings, and sexual assault and sex-offender registries. Our updated site design gives a chance to tout previous coverage you may have missed.

A new Pew Research Center survey finds younger adults more privacy-conscious, and older ones less aware of the control they have of their newsfeeds on Facebook.