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Klaxon Cloud: Free, simple alerts when a webpage updates
Want to know when your favorite government agency posts new information? Wondering if a corporate press release might see some post-publication revisions? We’ve brought the power of The Marshall Project’s Klaxon site monitoring tool into DocumentCloud, and it’s now easier than ever to track changes and get alerts from websites you care about.
Unlocking global access: Meet the Gateway Grantees strengthening democracy through the power of documents
Today, the MuckRock Foundation is announcing five new recipients of Gateway Grants, which include a mix of financial, technical and editorial support for projects that support and strengthen transparency and access around the world. Gateway Grants are supported through our partnership with the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW),...
Announcing The Foilies 2024: Spotlighting the absurd in transparency
Every year, we’re thankful for all the amazing stories that Freedom of Information requests help tell as well as the public officials that do the hard work of providing access. But despite our holiday wishlist, every year some government agencies, officials and private companies fight back against the public’s right to know, which is why we are looking for your nominations for the 2024 Foilies, “awards” that highlight intransigence, secrecy and all sorts of other transparency-thwarting.
Release Notes: New DocumentCloud tools, better bulk processing and more
In the last two weeks, MuckRock’s tech team has been hard at work enhancing the DocumentCloud platform. Notable updates include an improved method for changing the access level of documents in DocumentCloud, a range of new and upgraded Add-Ons and revamped functional tests for DocumentCloud’s frontend. You can...
Midwest pollution spiked dramatically this summer because of Canadian wildfires. Now officials may erase those days from the books.
Jessica Beverly made her two boys stay inside when Canadian wildfire smoke blanketed her Woodstock home in June. But she had work to do. “I was busy in the garden but the smog and the sun blacked out the sky,” said Beverly, who lives on a 9-acre hobby farm 60 miles northwest of Chicago. “I just couldn’t breathe.’’
Release Notes: MuckRock’s new donation page, easier pinning of Add-Ons and stability improvements
Over the past few weeks, MuckRock’s tech team has been hard at work. We recently rolled out a new donation page, just in time for NewsMatch, making it easier than ever to support our work. We’ve also worked to revamp the DocumentCloud homepage with more information, along with adding the ability to pin your favorite DocumentCloud features more easily.
MuckRock helps California journalists unearth thousands of police misconduct records
When the California legislature passed the landmark “Right to Know Act” in 2018, lawmakers lifted the veil on four decades of secrecy surrounding police internal investigations and officer discipline. Journalists from organizations across the state joined forces to begin requesting and analyzing the newly available records, but the project was time consuming and difficult to track between so many newsrooms.
Our search for the best OCR tool in 2023, and what we found
Editor’s note: This update to a 2019 review of OCR tools is cross-published on Source. The original review was designed and written by DocumentCloud alumni Ted Han and MuckRock COO Amanda Hickman. A lot has changed since then—enjoy!. OCR, or optical character recognition, allows us to transform a...
Here’s why MuckRock and POGO had to archive FOIAonline
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dismantled a vital tool for transparency when it decommissioned FOIAonline.gov, an online resource that allowed the public to make and track Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to over 20 federal agencies, and to view responsive documents. The EPA, which oversaw FOIAonline on behalf of participating agencies, claims to have fulfilled over 1.5 million requests and attracted 34,000 active registered users over the decade-plus that the portal was operating. But while the decommissioning of FOIAonline has been in the works for several years, it still remains unclear when the public can expect access to these records to be restored by government agencies, if ever. In the interim, POGO and MuckRock have partnered to host a publicly available archive of nearly 34,000 documents captured before FOIAonline was shuttered.
Weldon Spring uranium plant contaminated Missouri lakes with radioactive waste
Steve Allen and Eric Singsaas grew up hunting and fishing in August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area and swimming in quarries along the Missouri River in St. Charles County, never knowing they were playing near nuclear waste. “Everything we did,” Allen said in an interview, “we did together.”
Smoke, Screened: As U.S. wildfires pollute the skies, a loophole is obscuring the impact. Can it be fixed?
During wildfire season in the western U.S., soot-clogged skies have long triggered public alerts with advice like: Shut the windows and stay indoors. For those who can afford it: Use an air filter. As Canadian wildfire smoke curled down to Kentucky this year, officials began to do the same thing.
Federal report finds more than $400 million in costs in Coldwater Creek radioactive waste cleanup
Cleaning up Coldwater Creek and other radioactive waste sites in St. Louis County will cost more than twice what federal officials thought six years ago, a new federal report finds. A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office released Tuesday finds the government’s financial liability at the sites ballooned from...
Smoke, Screened: In Detroit, a ‘magic wand’ makes dirty air look clean — and lets polluters off the hook
In southeast Detroit, the Environmental Protection Agency says, the air is clean. Robert Shobe’s lungs tell a different story. Like a lot of Detroiters, Shobe suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, also known as COPD, a long-term lung ailment that flares up when the air is smoggy or smokey. On those days, Shobe said: “I probably am low on energy, and I feel like I’m seeing a haze in the air.”
Revealed: How a little-known pollution rule keeps the air dirty for millions of Americans
A legal loophole has allowed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to strike pollution from clean air tallies in more than 70 counties, enabling local regulators to claim the air was cleaner than it really was for more than 21 million Americans. Regulators have exploited a little-known provision in the Clean...
How we compiled and analyzed air pollution data for ‘Smoke, Screened’
The Clean Air Act is the primary U.S. federal air quality law dating back to the 1960s. Among other things, the law sets standards for concentrations of certain pollutants in outdoor air and, according to climate experts, is responsible for a substantial improvement in air quality since its inception. The Clean Air Act’s exceptional events rule was passed into law in 2005 and allows local air agencies to flag data from regulatory air monitors, for possible exclusion from federal air quality standards, when the pollution is caused by “natural” or “uncontrollable” events. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality System, or AQS, is a repository of all of the air pollution data that the federal government collects from monitors and regulatory stations across the country.
What is the exceptional events rule? The loophole letting U.S. regulators wipe air pollution from the record
When smoke from the Camp fire poured down over northern California in 2018, schools across the region closed to protect kids from breathing dangerous air. When wildfires blanketed the Willamette valley with soot and ash in 2020, hundreds of Oregonians sought urgent care for shortness of breath, headaches and asthma. When Canadian wildfire smoke made its way to Michigan last year, ozone levels in Detroit spiked to levels that caused officials to warn residents sensitive to air pollution to take extra care.
Q&A with Justice Department Office of Information Policy’s Bobak ‘Bobby’ Talebian on the future of FOIA
With the closing of FOIAonline last week, FOIA.gov is now the central hub for FOIA requests and information about federal agencies. As the site sees more traffic and use, users might have questions about how to navigate through the site’s various features. Bobak “Bobby” Talebian, director of the Department...
After a decade, FOIAonline is shutting down. What’s next for FOIA requestors?
For more than a decade, the Environmental Protection Agency hosted a portal for Freedom of Information Act requests used by dozens of federal agencies. The site, FOIAonline.gov, has been the key hub many journalists, academics, activists and the general public use to request and access public records. But on Sept....
Release Notes: A new way to upload documents from your MuckRock requests to DocumentCloud, new OCR tools and Python wrapper improvements
The DocumentCloud team is pleased to introduce a new way to upload responsive documents from MuckRock requests directly to your own DocumentCloud account, three powerful new OCR tools and several enhancements to our Python wrapper for the DocumentCloud API. These updates will help you upload documents more efficiently and provide better error tracking.
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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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