Investigative Journalism Education Consortium (https://ijec.org/category/student-work/)
Students from the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University have analyzed how governments used $4 billion from the Coronavirus Aid Act to combat homelessness in the new series Caring for COVID’s invisible victims.
The project’s website features in-depth stories, portraits, and explainers of how they analyzed the data behind their findings.
As Covid-19 surges again in the U.S., the high percentage of “recovered” cases might be cited as a sign that a vast majority of those infected quickly rid themselves of the virus.
But the “recovered” statistics are incomplete, inconsistent and call into question the accuracy of any total number of recovered cases, according to a review of 50 state public health sites by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
The Indiana University Media School has produced a series of data stories on summer camps.
The stories, which are written by students, look at state data, state laws, safety and health reports, and criminal background check requirements.
The full series is available on the Media School’s website:
Camp Fever: Injuries, illnesses missing from Indiana state records
Read the first story in the series below:
Steve Berry, the co-founder of The Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, is returning to assist students and interns with their projects over throughout the end of April, the center recently announced.
The center’s executive director-editor Lyle Muller explained to IJEC how Berry’s experience both as an educator and a journalist helps the students reach their full potential.
With the use of mobile video, photos, geographic data and visualizations, students and journalists want to ‘create a conversation about poverty in Oklahoma City between residents of low-income neighborhoods and area leaders.’
The ongoing project has students and faculty from OU’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication as well as other university departments and high school students working together with journalists from the nonprofit investigative newsroom Oklahoma Watch.
With much of the intense scrutiny focused on national campaigns, political financing at the state level can be an afterthought. But state elections constitute an enormous share of the campaign finance complex, and often the reporting and regulation of contributions is lax at best.
When the subject of campaign finance comes up, the focus usually turns to the contribution side of the equation. That is, who’s giving money to politicians, and what do they want in exchange?
The influence of political action committees in Indiana politics in recent years readily can be spotted in the state’s campaign finance database. The largest single contribution, in fact, is from a PAC, the Republic Governors Association Ohio, or RGA Ohio PAC. The organization made a $1 million gift to Mike Pence during his campaign for governor in 2012. RGA Ohio PAC is one of hundreds of PACs that have contributed more than $51 million to Indiana political campaigns between 2010 and 2015, according to the state’s database. Before 2010, the state did not track the type of contributors, and irregularities in the data make it impractical to assess the full extent of PAC activity in the nearly $1 billion worth of campaign contributions since 2000.
On paper, Indiana has a strict cap on campaign contributions from corporations. But in practice, it’s easy for businesses to turn on the flow of money and get around the spending limits.
Under Indiana law, any candidate, party committee, or political action committee must report its contributions and expenses at least once a year (candidate and party committees must file more frequently during election years). Committees file their financial reports with the Election Division either electronically or on paper.