Choose your location
MuckRock
Release Notes: Introducing DocumentCloud AI Credits, GPT-3 Add-Ons, viewable organization membership lists, bulk processing Add-Ons and more
Over the past three months the team has been working hard to create better solutions for journalists and the public at large to share, analyze, annotate and, ultimately, publish source documents to the web, particularly with enhancements to the DocumentCloud platform. For previous site improvements, check out all of MuckRock’s...
Microsoft abandons project mapping Chicago’s air pollution
Why we're reporting on Chicago's air pollution and how to republish this story. Chicago’s air quality is among the worst in the U.S., and there are several local hotspots for particulate matter 2.5 — the tiny particles that come from diesel trucks and industry and enter people’s lungs and blood, causing significant health problems. Our ongoing series on Chicago air pollution can be republished under a Creative Commons license. For more information, click the republish button below.
Has your family been impacted by the West Lake landfill or radioactive waste near St. Louis? We want to hear from you
Shortly after World War II, the federal government dumped massive piles of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project in several areas of greater St. Louis, including near the airport, in Weldon Spring and along Latty Avenue next to Coldwater Creek. Those piles were repeatedly moved and reburied and, to this...
The Foilies 2023: Recognizing the worst in government transparency
It seems like these days, everyone is finding classified documents in places they shouldn’t be: their homes, their offices, their storage lockers, their garages, their guitar cases, between the cracks of their couches, under some withered celery in the vegetable drawer … OK, we’re exaggerating—but it is getting ridiculous.
New CDC and state data shows how the COVID-19 pandemic led to a startling rise in maternal deaths
Why we’re releasing data on U.S. maternal mortality. By most available metrics, maternal health in the United States worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. To share the latest 2022 figures and the best available data from a selection of states, MuckRock has compiled the following repository of U.S. maternal mortality data. It relies on two types of sources: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, covering January 2018 through December 2022, encompassing 6,193 pregnancy-related deaths nationwide; and death records from Michigan, Minnesota and North Carolina, covering calendar years 2020, 2021 and provisional data from 2022, comprising 607 pregnancy-associated and pregnancy-related deaths. Explore the data and our methodology in our GitHub repository below.
Pitch your public records and data stories to MuckRock
Since 2021, MuckRock has been expanding its editorial team and launching projects on the COVID-19 pandemic, air pollution, access to child care and other public service topics with local partner newsrooms. As we continue this work in 2023, we’re looking to help freelancers, newsrooms and community organizations expand their investigative...
Get funding and assistance for document-driven projects that inform the world
Today, we’re announcing the opening of applications for round two of our Gateway Grants, offering up to $150,000 in grants between $10,000 and $50,000 to support projects that help analyze, preserve and grant access to key documents. Last year, DocumentCloud helped newsrooms, researchers and community groups upload and analyze...
Missouri child care providers say their industry is in crisis. We want to hear from parents and providers.
Missouri has been particularly hard-hit by the national trend of unaffordable and inaccessible child care. This legislative session, the issue has captured the bipartisan attention of lawmakers and the governor. We want to hear from families and providers about Missouri’s child care crisis, so we’re launching a form that you...
Upload large collections of documents to DocumentCloud with ease
DocumentCloud’s users can already upload documents easily within the web interface. Drag-and-drop uploads are fine for a dozen documents, or even a hundred documents, but using the web interface to upload thousands of pages of documents takes a toll on DocumentCloud’s indexing engine and can cause performance delays for everyone. It’s also just inefficient to batch documents in smaller subsets, keep track of which documents were successfully uploaded, and manually check for errors that might require re-uploading.
Initial Gateway Grantees launch projects to help preserve, analyze and publish critical document collections
Today, MuckRock is excited to announce the first round of DocumentCloud Gateway Grantees, four projects that bring together cutting-edge technology and at-risk document collections to model preserving access despite a range of global challenges. Revealing who profits from rainforest destruction to the secretive inner workings of Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Board, these projects leverage MuckRock’s DocumentCloud platform as well as the Filecoin storage network to ensure that the public can access this important information — now and in the future.
New York City could be doing more to use its wastewater testing data, official says
Wastewater surveillance has become increasingly important for tracking COVID-19 in the last year as fewer people get swabbed for PCR tests, making case data less reliable. New York City was one of the first places in the U.S. to set up a sewage testing program, but the results have been hard to find. This story was published in partnership with Gothamist and the Documenting COVID-19 project, which is supported by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock.
The ‘Uncounted:’ People of color are dying at much higher rates than what COVID data suggests
Why we’re investigating COVID deaths as part of our ‘Uncounted’ project. Death certificates have long been prone to error. During the pandemic, they've gotten worse, resulting in thousands of uncounted COVID-19 and Long COVID-19 deaths, our Uncounted project with the USA TODAY network has found. Click on the button for the full data and methodology.
The Kapikill Files, chapter 4: One Man’s Terrorist
The FBI spent five years searching for Orhan Gündüz’s killers, focusing on two men who had attempted to bomb a Turkish consulate in Philadelphia the same year, 1982. This is the final piece in the Kapikill Files series — read chapter 1, chapter 2 and chapter 3.
Developing your first DocumentCloud Add-On
DocumentCloud’s standard user interface already includes features like searching within and across documents, project management, collaboration, document annotation, redaction, access control, entity extraction, PDF modification, tagging, embedding, adding a table of contents, the ability to email in documents and much more. But what if we, as a community, wanted...
It’s time once again: Share your transparency horror story with a nomination to The Foilies 2023
We are now accepting submissions for The Foilies 2023, 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. Compiled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock, The Foilies run as a cover feature in...
We Found Dozens of ‘Long COVID’ Deaths Across the U.S., as Defined by the CDC. Here are Some of Their Stories.
Why We’re Investigating Long COVID as Part of Our ‘Uncounted’ Project. Long COVID is an ongoing public health crisis in the U.S. Almost 15% of all U.S. adults have experienced Long COVID, according to federal estimates, and the condition may have pulled 2 to 4 million Americans out of the workforce. For the first time, the CDC has tracked how many Long COVID deaths have been recorded on death certificates over the past 2 ½ years: a little more than 3,500 out of 1 million official COVID-19 deaths. That 3,500 figure is likely a significant undercount, experts told us. And death certificates have long been prone to error. During the pandemic, they've gotten worse, resulting in thousands of uncounted COVID-19 and Long COVID-19 deaths, our Uncounted project with the USA TODAY network has found. So we replicated the CDC's work with our own death certificate analysis in New Mexico, Minnesota, California's Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego, and Chicago's Cook Cook County. Click on the button for the full data and methodology.
MuckRock
359+
Posts
558K+
Views
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.
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments. It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency: our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. We strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation. Join us in shaping the news narrative together.