A practitioner and teacher | Jon Alpert wins 2009 I.F. Stone Medal SHOWCASE Veteran reporter and filmmaker is cited for ‘tackling topics that others feared to cover and reporting on matters crucial to our society and the international community.’

'DocumentCloud' | Coming soon: Data mining made easier
SHOWCASE| July 192, 2009
New York Times and Pro Publica editors have won a $700,000 grant, the Knight News Challenge’s largest award, for designing an archive that makes documents used in investigative reporting available for future use by reporters and others. As one of the designers puts it, it will provide tools that "there’s no way they would have had access to otherwise.”

‘Boundless potential’ | The future of watchdog reporting brightens as nonprofit groups organize a new network SHOWCASE| July 184, 2009 Charles Lewis, a longtime innovator in investigative reporting, describes what he calls “a seismic event in the annals of American journalism”—the formation of the new Investigative News Network.

Finding flackery | An online group, the Center for Media and Democracy, stays on the lookout for spin
SHOWCASE
The public-interest, non-profit organization exposes fake news and PR twisting of events. It works directly with reporters who request help. Sounds like a good resource for journalists.

From Nieman Reports | Mining the coal beat: Keeping watch over an 'outlaw' industry
SHOWCASE
In its Summer 2009 issue, Nieman Reports continues to focus on investigative reporting. In one piece, Ken Ward, Jr., a leading writer on the coal industry, explains how a coal firm reported, on its own, that it violated water pollution limits 4,500 times over a 5-year period—and how, in response, regulators did absolutely nothing. Nada. (From Nieman Reports.)

9 reporters doing watchdog work | Following the stimulus money in Wisconsin
SHOWCASE
Mark Katches’s investigative unit in Milwaukee is producing many news articles, databases and interactive items that track what happens to federal stimulus dollars that go to Wisconsin. It’s a main watchdog project at the Journal Sentinel, but by no means the only one.

An interactive series | The Arizona Republic exposes some high-overhead charities
SHOWCASE
Working a year on the story, the newspaper uncovers a network linked to a Phoenix televangelist that, on paper, sends donations from one charity to another, taking out great chunks of money along the way.

From Nieman Reports | If murder is metaphor SHOWCASE On the one hand, muses Steven A. Smith, this generation’s mentors are leaving before their job is done. On the other hand, as some younger journalists argue, who needs these oldsters anyway?

From Nieman Reports | Ethical values and quality control in the digital era
SHOWCASE
Bob Steele at Poynter sees a significant erosion of ethical standards. Blogs, Tweets, social networking, citizen-submitted content and multi-media storytelling offer great promise, he writes—but they also carry considerable peril.

From Nieman Reports | Why bother to do what we do? Because it matters.
SHOWCASE
In advance of a new round of expected cuts at the Miami Herald, editor Nancy San Martin deals with the "why bother" questions: Why work long days for jobs that are fading away; why try to hold together a newsroom that may be dying? And citing Herald coverage from Haiti and Cuba, her answer is: "We do it because it matters."

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