After I learned the banks that had been bailed out by taxpayers had become the main purchasers of tax liens in Arizona, I knew I was onto a potentially big story.

I began interviewing several tax lien buyers and found that this was a common practice not only in Tucson and throughout Arizona, but all over the country. My goal was to use what was happening here as a window into the larger story.

From the beginning, I thought the key to the story was the fact that the bailed-out banks were using money to buy up tax liens rather ...

Utah is considered one of the healthiest states in the country. We enjoy some of the lowest rates of smoking, binge drinking, preventable hospitalizations and cancer deaths.

But the state's relative good health masks the reality that Utah has some of the worst disparities when you look at health outcomes and access to healthcare by where people live, their income and their race and ethnicity.

The Salt Lake Tribune launched the series Healthy for Whom in January to explore why some neighborhoods are ghettos of poor health. The latest installment was about how certain neighborhoods have higher rates of ...

The web now offers numerous free tools that give non-programmers the ability to create data-driven applications. Among those with the most promise, especially for journalists, is Google Fusion Tables.

Fusion Tables essentially is a free database manager in the cloud, allowing anyone to upload large data sets, merge them with other tables and create visualizations. It’s much more, though. The service has a detailed application programming interface (API), and basically can serve as a free back end to serve data and mapping applications. The service also is customizable while simple, with extra capabilities for more experienced users.

Of course ...

Fred Steed has a six-figure income as a top official with the Montgomery County health district. The 66-year-old African-American director of community health has a wife with a good job at a local hospital. He has an 820 credit score. He owns the 1,344-square-foot home in West Dayton where he grew up.

What he doesn't have and can't get: a $35,000 refinance loan.

Steed is one of hundreds of upper-income blacks to be denied loans in the Dayton, Ohio region. A statistical analysis by the Dayton Daily News found that in 2008, upper-income blacks in the ...

For journalists hoping to analyze geographic data, the cost of geographic information system (GIS) software can be prohibitive. Fortunately, there are open-source, free solutions available for cost-cutting journalists who want to do spatial analysis.

Pursuing an open-source option is easier said than done. Often, open-source software can be difficult for the lay journalist to install and even begin to understand.

PostGIS for PostgreSQL database manager offers a solution that is free, robust and easy to use — assuming you know what you're doing.

Granted, when I received the assignment to install PostGIS for PostgreSQL on my Mac to handle spatial ...

Gary Sherman's Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools

When journalists are looking for software, they usually greet the words "open source" in one of two ways: with confusion, because open source software is still a daunting mystery; or with delight, because the software is available for free.

Open source software is simply software that is available at no cost and has its source code available to the public. A network of users and developers constantly enhances and expands the program.

Journalists doing CAR have been using robust open-source tools for editing documents, analyzing spreadsheet data and ...

Des Moines Register reporters Chase Davis and Perry Beeman spent months compiling and making sense of data for a series on air pollution in Iowa. But, with more than 1,600 polluting facilities across the state, there simply wasn’t space in the stories to mention any but the most noteworthy. That’s where data editor James Wilkerson and digital projects editor Michael Corey came in. They developed an interactive map that allowed users to see information about the facilities near them. "It localized the story to basically every community in Iowa," Davis said of the map. It also gave ...

Every day, cities buy land to make way for parks, streets, sewer lines and flood plains. It’s often more than they need. Sometimes they buy full lots in fairness to property owners who may not have use for the leftovers and sometimes they buy excess to prepare for future growth. In some cases, cities buy swaths of land for projects that may never happen. All these transactions can add up to hundreds of millions dollars worth of unused land, including worthless patches along highways and large plots of “conservation” land that developers covet. The Wichita Eagle found all these ...

I drive by an elementary school on my way to work every day. More than once there’s been a police cruiser idling in the school’s parking lot with lights flashing and the officer standing nearby. Although those incidents never involved a major crime, on several occasions this year the Tulsa World has chronicled arrests at schools. In January, police arrested an 18-year-old man found with a stun gun, two samurai swords and six knives in his car in a high school parking lot. In February, police arrested a 59-year-old man after he pointed a gun at students standing ...

The latest installment of The Associated Press’ PharmaWater investigation seemed unlikely at the initial story conference: no ready data and seemingly nothing to expose. Our national investigative team had broken the story this past year that tens of millions of Americans drink from water supplies that test positive for trace pharmaceuticals. They cover the gamut from antibiotics to psychiatric drugs to sex hormones, mostly in the form of unmetabolized medicines excreted by people. They are found in concentrations far below medical doses, but some aquatic species already have been hurt, and research is raising questions about the effects on humans ...