FOIA can be a tricky process, but you don’t need to go at it alone. Here are some of our favorite tips, tricks and examples of opening up the public records process, whether it’s hosting an event to train others or building a larger records campaign that works to get more people involved. The benefits: More transparency, more documents and stronger laws that work better for all requesters.

Car registrations provide a trove of information, allowing us to see what matters to owners, a bit of their personality and, indirectly, where people are driving.

The Documenting COVID-19 project surveyed 19 state and local health agencies, as well as scientists who work on wastewater sampling, to learn about the challenges they’re facing. We found that many states are months away, if not longer, from being able to use wastewater data to guide public health decisions, even as the rise of an omicron subvariant, BA.2, looms. Meanwhile, the CDC’s highly shared wastewater surveillance dashboard is a work in progress, and is difficult to interpret for users who might hope to follow the trends in their areas.

Four Michiganders — a taxidermist, his wife and two mink farm employees — were infected with a unique coronavirus strain connected to minks, leading Michigan health officials and the CDC to conclude they likely contracted the first known U.S. cases of so-called animal-to-human virus “spillover.”

We signed a data-use agreement with the CDC to gain access to their mortality API portal so we could gather more data, more often and provide it for others to use. To help make sense of it, you’ll find other information in the data repository, including excess mortality numbers modeled by demographers at Boston University, vaccination rates by state and a Department of Justice survey released in December detailing all medical examiner and coroner offices in the U.S.