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.