The May/June issue of Uplink highlighted the television, special categories and other media winners and finalists of IRE's annual investigative reporting contest that used computer-assisted reporting. Here we feature the newspaper, FOI and Tom Renner award winners and finalists that used CAR.

Local circulation weeklies Finalist:

Atlanta Business Chronicle: "Northern Arc: Road to Riches" by Sarah Rubenstein and Walter Woods. Rubenstein and Woods exposed how the planned construction of a new highway north of Atlanta, called the Northern Arc, would benefit government officials who owned property along the proposed road. The reporters based their investigation on land parcel maps and corresponding Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for the counties through which the Northern Arc would pass. Rubenstein and Woods were named journalists of the year by the Atlanta Press Club and the story won Best Scoop from Atlanta Magazine. (Story No. 19576 in the IRE Resource Center)

Small newspapers (Circulation less than 100,000)

Finalists:

Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette: "The Long Haul/Broken Promises" by Eric Eyre and Scott Finn. This investigation examined the effects of school consolidation in West Virginia, including the increased amount of time students had to spend traveling to and from school. Eyre and Finn requested bus logs under FOIA for 35 counties. With the information, they built a spreadsheet of 1,569 bus runs, forming the foundation for the story. The series won the Education Writers Association's Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting. See "Measuring long bus rides for rural children" in the September/October 2002 Uplink for a full account of the data analysis. (Story No. 19601)

Tri-City Herald (Pasco, Wash.): "Bitter Harvest" by Mike Lee. This story investigated a series of deaths, environmental damage and accidents that were all traced back to one Columbia Basin farm, the largest organic farm in Washington state. Lee showed how the farm's owners ignored environmental regulations, and he exposed the government's failure to take any decisive action. Lee used spreadsheets to track story threads and piece together information from a dozen agencies. The story - which relied on more than 20 public document requests from state and federal agencies - won in the investigative reporting category in Sigma Delta Chi's competition for newspapers with a circulation under 100,000 and first place for agriculture/business reporting in the Inland Northwest SPJ competition. (Story No. 19608)

Medium newspapers (100,000-250,000 circulation) Certificate:

The Fresno Bee: "Last Gasp" by Russell Clemings, Barbara Anderson and Mark Grossi. This special report traced how California's San Joaquin Valley air basin became one of America's most polluted. The reporters used FOI requests to acquire information from many sources, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They then used Access, Excel and FoxPro to compare current levels of pollution with historical estimates and eventually to understand the growing toxicity of the basin. "Last Gasp" also won first place in the Associated Press News Executives Council's contest for public service reporting; first place in the Best of the West explanatory reporting category; the Meade Clean Air Prize; the Coalition for Clean Air's Corporate Clean Air Leadership Award; and the EPA's Environmental Achievement Award. See the September/October 2003 issue of The IRE Journal for details of their investigation. (Story No. 19677)

Finalists:

The Birmingham News: "The Black Belt: Alabama's Third World" by John Archibald, Jeff Hansen, Carla Crowder, Thomas Spencer and Marie Jones. This piece focused on a small region of Alabama called the "Black Belt." People in this region, mostly poverty-stricken African-Americans, live in conditions much worse than those in the rest of the state. The reporters relied on databases of all land records for 10 Alabama counties as well as census records, mortality and birth records, data from the Alabama Department of Public Health, property tax records, and other state databases. The authors built many of their own databases using Excel and Access. This series also won awards from the Alabama Associated Press Managing Editors, Alabama Press Association and the Medical Association of Alabama. (Story No. 19724)

Dayton Daily News: "Deadly Consequences, Ohio's Broken Mental Retardation System" by Tom Beyerlein and Steve Bennish. The Dayton Daily News identified 30 cases of neglect within Ohio's mental retardation system by matching death cases against addresses of group homes for the mentally retarded. The reporters used Excel and Access to analyze 400,000 death records and develop their own database of deaths in group homes. (Story No. 19107)

The Virginian-Pilot: "Operating Behind Closed Doors" by Liz Szabo. This story illustrates the failures of Virginia's system for protecting patients from dangerous doctors by highlighting the last decade in the