▶ MuckRock project wins INN award: Uncounted, MuckRock's investigation into the hidden death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic in collaboration with the USA TODAY network and other local newsrooms, won the Institute for Nonprofit News' Community Champion Award for Large Newsrooms. In their award announcement, the INN judges said, "This collaboration among five newsrooms revealed stark disparities in the way medical examiners reported cause of death during the pandemic and introduced a new method of analyzing mortality data." Congratulations to all the 2022 winners.
▶ Jeremy Singer-Vine launches the Data Liberation Project: This new project is "an initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest," essentially making currently-inaccessible government data easier for the public to find and use. Singer-Vine has already filed several data requests to federal agencies, with request letters shared publicly on DocumentCloud. For updates on the project, you can subscribe to its newsletter.
▶ Boston uses its own tardiness to excuse closing requests: Earlier this year, the city of Boston's public records office closed several requests due to "no recent activity" on the requests—after the records office itself had failed to act on those requests for months—reports Sean Philip Cotter at the Boston Herald. City officials suggested these request closures were rare, but the activity is still another example of far-from-transparent behavior at a "notoriously unresponsive public records office," Cotter writes.
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