In some places, just half of the spike in deaths during the pandemic is blamed on COVID-19. Researchers say that points to a massive undercount.

Studies have repeatedly found mandates encourage mask use and slow COVID spread. But politics and lawsuits make them unattractive to policymakers.

In collaboration with MuckRock, NYU Professor of Journalism and Emmy Award-Winning reporter Hilke Schellmann and NYU Senior Research Scientist and Tandon Faculty Member Mona Sloane have been awarded $200,000 grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation to bring an innovative AI tool to under-resourced newsrooms to significantly scale up their investigative capacity and democratize access to FOIA records.

Although sex crimes overall are notoriously underreported, and data is not easily accesible, in Cicero some of the reasons may be locally specific, advocacy experts say. Non-English speakers face language barriers, people worry if they do come forward, it will not lead to arrests and even when advocates assist, the experience can be fraught with officer communication problems and delays.

We are now accepting submissions for The Foilies 2022, the annual project to give tongue-in-cheek awards to the officials and institutions that behave badly (or ridiculously) when served with a request for public records.

USA TODAY and the Documenting COVID-19, a project of MuckRock and the Brown Institute, are investigating how many coronavirus deaths are going uncounted. We recently published a story about a new tool to investigate where deaths are going uncounted. Join us Wednesday, Dec. 15, to learn how to understand and use this data yourself.

COVID deaths in the United States have been undercounted, public health experts say. They’re trying to figure out where and why, and a new data set helps.

En los últimos seis meses de nuestra colaboración con LSE, testeamos diferentes herramientas y técnicas para construir una plataforma que ayude a los periodistas de investigación a comprender y procesar documentos poco estructurados y obtener conocimientos útiles.

Alguna vez ¿has tenido una pila de documentos y has querido comenzar a concentrarte rápidamente en una parte determinada de material? ¿Te gustaría contar con ayuda para trabajar solamente en los contratos, o quizás, los informes policiales que detallan un determinado tipo de encuentro, o bien, poder dividir rápidamente las cartas de respaldo de aquellas negativas dirigidas a un político sobre un tema clave?

El acceso a la información pública tiene un rol fundamental en la exigibilidad de otros derechos y es una de las herramientas principales que la sociedad civil requiere para controlar e influir en los gobiernos.

La Nacion, CLIP, Ojo Público, and MuckRock collaborated together to explore how machine learning could help fuel more effective ways for journalists, researchers, and the public to keep an eye on large government document sets. Here’s what we learned and how you can build on that work.

Como periodistas trabajando con documentos y bases de datos, nos encontramos con que la información más interesante se oculta en aquellos documentos que son largos, no estructurados o incompletos.

In the last six months of the JournalismAI Collab, we experimented with different tools and techniques in order to build a platform that helps investigative reporters understand and process unstructured documents to get useful insights. Here’s what we hope to work on next.

As the delta variant ran rampant this summer, Missouri officials pleaded with the federal government to allow a $100 gift card program to incentivize COVID-19 vaccines. The problem: Hospitals largely weren’t interested.

Mask mandates saved lives and prevented COVID-19 infections in Missouri’s biggest cities during the worst part of the delta variant wave, an analysis by the state Department of Health and Senior Services shows. But the analysis, conducted at the request of Gov. Mike Parson’s office in early November, was never made public — until a public records requests pried it free.

Nearly a year ago, after the first shipments of vaccine arrived in Chicago, city government rolled out a strategy to get extra doses into South and West side communities identified as most vulnerable to COVID-19. Equity, the mayor said, was the strategy. But did the city go far enough?

As journalists dealing with data and document sets, we find that the most interesting information is usually hidden in large, unstructured, and incomplete sets of documents. Especially information in public contracts: what the government is buying, how much money is being spent, and who are the suppliers. To answer these questions, four media organizations joined forces under the JournalismAI Collab and experimented with different machine learning tools and techniques in order to build a platform that helps investigative reporters understand and process unstructured documents to get useful insights. This platform ended up being “Dockins”.

Ever get a pile of documents and want to start quickly honing in on a certain segment of material? Wish you had a little help pulling out just contracts, or maybe police reports that detail a certain type of encounter? With MuckRock’s DocumentCloud platform, that’s a challenge we know all too well — and we have a new solution to help.

The final resting place of thousands killed by COVID and AIDS is now overseen by the Parks Department amid visions of remaking the remote spot to welcome more visitors. But a $33 million contract to a firm without cemetery experience, under watch of an ex-Rikers captain, is raising concerns.

Keeping schools open and safe during the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t simple, but one key to safer environments involves upgraded HVAC systems, which help keep air circulating and fresh.

The October 1 closing of a popular darknet marketplace leaves a big hole in the billion-dollar industry of illegal drugs, credit card and bank fraud, forged documents and more.

Dr. Robin Trotman had an inkling his Springfield hospital system was experiencing a harbinger of what was to come. It was late June, and CoxHealth was seeing an influx of COVID-19 patients who had already been vaccinated, as the highly contagious Delta variant spread unchecked through the region.

Breakthrough data by occupation was released by the Southern Nevada Health District after an open-records request. Here’s how you can find the same thing in your state.

As of Oct. 15, there have been at least 575 breakthrough cases in healthcare workers and 562 in casino workers, with each occupational group representing about 6 percent of the more than 10,000 total reported cases of COVID-19 in fully-vaccinated people.

Launched in April 2020, the Documenting COVID-19 project has filed thousands of public records requests and partnered with newsrooms around the country to report out critical accountability stories of the pandemic. Now the effort is expanding even further with MuckRock.