Congratulations to reporters at the The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The National Law Journal whose computer-assisted stories won 1992 IRE awards for investigative reporting.
"Unequal Protection: the Racial Divide in Environmental Law," by Marianne Lavelle, Marcia Coyle and Claudia MaClachlan of The National Law Journal won in the category for newspapers with circulation less than 75,000.
The National Law Journal reporters used computerized records to prove that a community's color influences the way the federal government cleans up toxic waste sites and punishes polluters. They used pre-collected data and also built two of their own databases for the story.
"Lethal Doses - Radiation That Kills," by Dave Davis and Ted Wendling of the Plain Dealer won in the category for newspapers with circulation over 75,000. Davis and Wendling used several Nuclear Regulatory Commission data files to show how the agency has failed to protect the public from radiation overexposures and accidents in the nation's hospitals. The February issue of Uplink featured a story by Davis and Wendling on how they did the series.