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The truth hurts, especially when the truth is contained in receipts from bars, hotels, spas, and luxury vehicle dealers. Israel Piña, from Quien Compro website. A group of five young Mexican journalists has spent the past year or so sifting through thousands of expense reports of Mexico's senators and deputies (congress) to see how they are using taxpayers' money. Among their scoops: Members of the Senate bought 10 Harley-Davidson motorcycles at a cost of 2.12 million Mexican pesos, or about US$130,000, in order to serve their constituents better.  Senators spent 43,800 pesos on 210 bottles of wine , or US$2,700 in a four-month period. One senator bought a loaded Yukon Denali SUV for 890,000 pesos, or $60,000, for the use of an obscure agency whose purpose is to "do studies to help the Congress make decisions." The senator declined to respond to numerous requests for comment.  Cartoon that accompanied the Harley-Davidson exposé. Versión en español These journalists,...

Getting laid off is not always a bad thing for a journalist. In the case of Manuel Benito Ingelmo, it created an opportunity for him to develop something he had been thinking about for a long time. Manuel Benito Ingelmo. Photo by Villanueva.edu He was a business journalist in Salamanca, Spain, with an interest in statistics and data visualization .  He felt that print newspapers were definitely on the way out, he told me in an interview via Skype. "I wanted to make the jump to a digital publication but I did not want to do the same thing as we were doing on paper." Versión en español So when he was laid off from a small daily in 2012, he took his severance package and began to experiment with how to take advantage of the strengths of digital media -- interactivity, instantaneous publication, potential massive audience -- to create a journalistic product or service that would build on databases that were already available. He and a handful of partners started out by giving aw...