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For one month only, the MuckRock swag store returns with a twist
MuckRock’s Swag Store offered a wide range of coasters, stickers, books, t-shirts and hoodies, but we made the difficult decision to put it on hiatus in 2021 as we focused on other work. We do, however, still have a fair amount of assorted inventory, so we’re offering a special,...
Try a new way to keep tabs on local government with Agenda Watch
Every day, city council and school board meetings across the country generate endless agendas, minutes and supplementary material, with the intent of keeping the public in the know about what their public officials are doing. Thanks to public meetings laws, the live-action sibling of public records laws, everyone is entitled to these materials, but it is hard to keep track of it all or know which documents will be critical to understanding your community.
A MuckRock guide on how to make sense of wildfire smoke and interpret data in real time
I. What documents and data to request about air pollution from your local government. II. Explore our EPA wildfire data, including historic U.S. wildfires. III. Analyzing wildfire PM2.5 data from California. IV. Call for public stories: How is wildfire smoke changing your daily life?. V. "What’s in the air?": An...
How MuckRock and DocumentCloud can make collaborative reporting more user-friendly
At the Collaborative Journalism Summit in Washington, D.C., MuckRock’s data journalist, Dillon Bergin, presented a workshop on how to use MuckRock and DocumentCloud in collaborative reporting — from “bulk” filing multiple open-records to different government agencies to collaboratively annotating documents across newsroom partners. The two-day conference,...
The Tijuana sewage crisis sickens thousands each year. We want to hear from you.
The Imperial Beach and Coronado areas of California have been deeply impacted by the Tijuana sewage crisis, leading to hundreds of days of beach closures and thousands of people sickened by sewage and toxic waste that has poured from the Tijuana River into the Pacific Ocean. The region has been...
As wildfire smoke worsens public health, government watchdog calls EPA response ‘ad hoc’
Why are we reporting on wildfire smoke in California?. Climate change is warming the planet, leading to more drought, higher temperatures and more devastating wildfires. In the Western U.S., wildfires are growing in size and happening more often. California has been hit especially hard by disastrous blazes and has led to a downward slide in air quality.
Key House Democrat demands NIH answer for pace of long Covid research
Why we're reporting on the National Institutes of Health. Long Covid affects an estimated 16 million Americans and the research work by the National Institutes of Health represents the federal government's most high-profile, and costly, attempt to understand and address the disease. This series explores the taxpayer spending and work thus far by NIH's RECOVER initiative. Stories are co-reported with STAT News, a newsroom focused on health, medicine, and scientific discovery that is produced by Boston Globe Media. Funding for this project also came from Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Our ongoing series on the Covid-19 pandemic can be republished under a Creative Commons license.
Second cohort of Gateway Grantees launch projects to help organizations worldwide better carry out their role as watchdog
MuckRock is excited to announce the second cohort of DocumentCloud Gateway Grant recipients. These six projects bring together cutting-edge technology and at-risk document collections to model preserving access to essential records in the face of a range of global challenges and while exploring a greater role in serving as watchdogs for the communities represented.
Release Notes: Add-On Deep Linking, Translate Documents, Change Visibility of Notes in Bulk, Split Documents with Ease, and Tag Documents with Hash Values
DocumentCloud has had many feature updates within the last couple of months, including the ability to deep link to Add-Ons, translate documents using Translate Documents, split large documents using Document Splitter, add hash values as metadata to documents using Document Hasher, bulk change the visibility of notes on DocumentCloud using the Change Note Visibility Add-On, bug fixes for Transcribe Audio, and a few other general improvements.
Help build a public archive of COVID-19 related materials
Have you been reporting on COVID, or do you have COVID-related documents on DocumentCloud? MuckRock invites you to contribute your documents to a public digital archive to help journalists, researchers and historians tell the stories of the pandemic. We’re working with Columbia University’s History Lab to create an interactive repository...
Bureaucratic hurdles stymie Missouri families seeking help affording child care
About 'Disappearing Day Care,' how to get our data and republish this story. "Disappearing Day Care" is our ongoing series on the U.S. child care industry. We published our first part of this series in Michigan in 2022, with the Detroit Free-Press and Chalkbeat Detroit. In 2023, we are focusing on Missouri, with The Missouri Independent. In many U.S. communities, child care is reaching a dire inflection point. Daycares are struggling to stay financially afloat. Parents are struggling to pay or find child care. And government aid programs are limited in scope and many are expiring. Our ongoing series on the child care industry can be republished under a Creative Commons license. For more information, click the republish button below.
Missouri’s governor made access to child care a top priority. Where do his proposals stand?
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson made improving access to child care a major part of his 2023 legislative agenda, declaring during his annual State of the State address in January that “early childhood care is essential to our state’s success.”. Since then, lawmakers have worked to enact his recommendations,...
Shine a spotlight on transparency as our Whitmore FOIA Fellow
Over the past decade, MuckRock has helped requesters file, track and share more than 120,000 public records requests, digging into everything from massive federal programs that failed to meet the mark to the air quality near you to hijinx within the CIA. Each year, more than a million requesters turn to our templates, FOIA guides and other resources to help make the most of state, local and federal requests.
Missouri child care deserts include nearly half of kids 5 and under, new data shows
About 'Disappearing Day Care,' how to get our data and republish this story. "Disappearing Day Care" is our ongoing series on the U.S. child care industry. We published our first part of this series in Michigan in 2022, with the Detroit Free-Press and Chalkbeat Detroit. In 2023, we are focusing on Missouri, with The Missouri Independent. In many U.S. communities, child care is reaching a dire inflection point. Daycares are struggling to stay financially afloat. Parents are struggling to pay or find child care. And government aid programs are limited in scope and many are expiring. Our ongoing series on the child care industry can be republished under a Creative Commons license. For more information, click the republish button below.
Five things we learned about Missouri’s child care crisis
MuckRock and The Missouri Independent analyzed the supply and demand of Missouri child care programs since 2019, drawing from public records and data provided by the advocacy group Child Care Aware. Reporters sought to find what areas of the state have the least child care availability, how availability changed during...
Release Notes: New and improved agency pages!
Every time a MuckRock user files a request with a new agency, we create a dedicated profile page to start keeping track of their key details, including their average response time, how often they assess fees and more. Thanks to our community of requesters, you can now browse over 22,000 agency pages — and we wanted to make them even more useful.
The NIH has poured $1 billion into long Covid research — with little to show for it
Why we're reporting on the National Institutes of Health's RECOVER intiative and how to republish this story. Long Covid affects an estimated 16 million Americans and the research work by the National Institutes of Health represents the federal government's most high-profile, and costly, attempt to understand and address the disease. This story explores the taxpayer spending and work thus far by NIH's RECOVER initiative. This article was co-reported with STAT News, a newsroom focused on health, medicine, and scientific discovery that is produced by Boston Globe Media. Funding for this project also came from Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Our ongoing series on the Covid-19 pandemic can be republished under a Creative Commons license. For more information, click the republish button below.
How Centro de Periodismo Investigativo chips away at Puerto Rico’s financial secrecy
Carla Minet, founder and executive director for Puerto Rico’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI), and Carlos Ramos-Hernandez, a public interest attorney at CPI, recently joined us to share how they used their Gateway Grant to publish and analyze tens of thousands of previously secret documents. The organization has worked to monitor the island’s Fiscal Oversight and Management Board, or Fiscal Control Board (FCB).
Release Notes: Planned downtime Saturday
This coming Saturday, April 15, 2023, MuckRock services — including MuckRock itself, DocumentCloud, and our MuckRock Accounts service — will be inaccessible from 1-3 p.m. Eastern while we upgrade our backend database systems. During Saturday’s downtime, MuckRock and DocumentCloud will be largely inaccessible, including document uploads, request pages,...
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MuckRock is a non-profit, collaborative news site that brings together journalists, researchers, activists, and regular citizens to request, analyze, and share government documents, making politics more transparent and democracies more informed.
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