IRE

With tight newsroom budgets, open-source software comes at the right price: free. This year’s Computer-Assisted Reporting conference March 11-14 in Phoenix offers several new hands-on classes:

· CrimeStat. Analyze crime incident locations with a free spatial statistics program.

· Flex free visualization software. Build Web applications with open-source software that works like Flash.

Three major investigative reports that used social science research methods as key parts of their probes were named today as winners of the 2009 Philip Meyer Journalism Award.
USA Today took first place with “The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America’s Schools.” Reporters Blake Morrison and Brad Heath spearheaded a project that examined the levels of [...]

In a video interview with IRE, Manny Garcia of The Miami Herald explains how Twitter and Facebook are helping his newspaper’s ongoing coverage of the earthquake in Haiti. His advice applies to using social media tools on any breaking news story. Garcia shared his tips and advice during an IRE Ethnic Media Watchdog Workshop in January in [...]

Earlier this month, Sarah Cohen of Duke University and Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica helped uncover some of the mysteries of stimulus reporting in a one-hour IRE webinar. A recording of this session is now available for purchase and download here.
During the webinar, Cohen and LaFleur explain stimulus basics and how to follow the dollars from [...]