Ellen Smith: Mine Safety and Health News.

Unless your business involves mining--doing it, regulating it, protesting it--chances are you've never heard of Mine Safety and Health News, an industry newsletter owned and edited by Ellen Smith. Long before the disaster at the Sago mine, Smith and her team of investigative reporters were busy shining a bright light on some of the industry's soot-covered safety and health practices and the lackluster government agency charged to oversee them. One Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA)inspector, the newsletter reported in November, now faces a five year jail term for falsifying inspection reports for mines he never even visited. And while investigating government malfeasance is always difficult, Smith and her colleagues face an additional challenge: "In MSHA's continuing rollback of public information," they wrote," the agency is hiding timely information about mine injuries in the name of 'personal privacy/even though that same information is often publicly released in other sections of the MSHA website."

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