Lesson: Tough Sledding: One reporter’s dogged pursuit of data from Calif.’s dangerous psych hospitals
California's psychiatric hospitals can be highly dangerous places, both for patients and staff. Lost work days and overtime pay are huge. But reporters looking to track down reliable data on assaults face an uphill climb.
Project: At California psychiatric hospitals, epidemic of patients’ assaults on staff goes untreated
At California’s state psychiatric hospitals, ongoing assaults on staff by patients can make it nearly impossible to provide a therapeutic environment.
Reporter Liza Gross was seeking a fresh way to convey the risky environmental conditions facing California farming communities. But after running into a series of data swamps, she turned to experts for help and unexpectedly found her story in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, Calif.
Project: Fields of toxic pesticides surround schools of Ventura County — are they poisoning the students?
Oxnard and surrounding Ventura County grow more than 630 million pounds of strawberries a year. The pesticides that growers depend on—a revolving roster of caustic and highly volatile chemicals called fumigants—are among the most toxic used in agriculture.
Lesson: Following the Money in Politics
How could legislation designed to protect people from suspected cancer-causing compounds in furniture foam fail to pass? Experts say lobbying money had a lot to do with it. Here's how I tracked the millions of dollars spent by the chemical industry to defeat the bill.