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.