Robert Benincasa
Robert Benincasa is a computer-assisted reporting producer in NPR's Investigations Unit.
Since joining NPR in 2008, Benincasa has been reporting on NPR Investigations stories, analyzing data for investigations, and developing data visualizations and interactive applications for NPR.org. He has worked on numerous groundbreaking stories, including data-driven investigations of the inequities of federal disaster aid and coal miners' exposures to deadly silica dust.
Prior to NPR, Benincasa served as the database editor for the Gannett News Service Washington Bureau for a decade.
Benincasa's work at NPR has been recognized by many of journalism's top honors. In 2014, he was part of a team that won an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award, and he shared Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards with Investigations Unit colleagues in 2016 and 2011.
Also in 2011, he received numerous accolades for his contributions to several investigative stories, including an Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, an Investigative Reporters & Editors Radio Award, the White House News Photographers Association's Eyes of History Award for multimedia innovation, and George Polk and George Foster Peabody awards.
Benincasa served on the faculty of Georgetown University's Master of Professional Studies program in journalism from 2008 to 2016.
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Heat has killed hundreds of workers in the U.S., many in construction or agriculture, an investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations found. Federal standards might have prevented them. -
Landfills are among the nation's largest sources of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. But accurately measuring methane is a major challenge to reducing it. -
The government's Paycheck Protection Program was intended to help small businesses during the pandemic keep workers on staff. But a lot of the recipients weren't exactly small businesses. -
Car traffic took a big dip beginning in late March, and headlines celebrated clean air around the U.S. But an NPR analysis of EPA data tells a more troubling story. -
On March 13, President Trump promised to mobilize private and public resources to respond to the coronavirus. NPR followed up on each promise and found little action had been taken. -
NPR analyzed records from a Federal Emergency Management Agency database of more than 40,000 buyouts and found that most went disproportionately to whiter communities. -
The federal government spends billions of dollars each year helping communities rebuild after disasters and to prevent future damage. But that money isn't always allocated to those who need it most. -
More than 2,000 miners in Appalachia are dying from an advanced stage of black lung. NPR and Frontline have found the government had multiple warnings and opportunities to protect them, but didn't. -
This year, new international regulations on rosewood have reverberated through the music industry, costing tens of millions in lost sales and extra administrative costs. -
City officials had evidence that the rally would be violent, but they didn't use that evidence in court. Instead, they tried to move the rally to another location. The judge denied the request.
