Experienced reporters have some rising stars to keep an eye on, thanks to the Campus Coverage Project.

Just last week, a story edited by 2011 project participant Chelsea Boozer, now managing editor of The Daily Helmsman at the University of Memphis, was published on IRE’s “Extra Extra” blog.

The Campus Coverage Project teaches college students investigative reporting techniques by training them to examine their own college campuses. Students are encouraged to publish their work and submit it to the project’s website.

Seven articles that participants reported, edited and published since January’s training conference have been featured on ...

Don't miss out as some of the best data journalists in the world come together for IRE's annual conference devoted to computer-assisted reporting. Pre-registration ends Monday, Feb. 13, at 5 p.m. (Central Standard Time). On-site registration is accepted, but the fee increases.

Register online before the deadline to reserve your space.

This year's conference, held at the St. Louis Union Station Marriott, offers dozens of hands-on training sessions for beginners to journalists on the cutting edge of digital reporting. In addition to the full schedule of training, this year's conference will feature a 12-hour "Liberate ...

Investigative Reporters & Editors  was awarded $100,000 Monday to continue its Watchdog Workshop series. The Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation in Oklahoma City chose IRE and 18 other journalism organizations to receive a total of $1.5 million in grants. The foundation awarded more than $1 million of that to investigative reporting projects, including many programs run by IRE members.

"The Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation is playing a pivotal role in fostering investigative journalism," IRE Executive Director Mark Horvit said. "Citizens in communities throughout the country are better informed thanks to the foundation's work."

IRE’s Watchdog Workshop ...

Megan Luther joins IRE today as the newest member of our training team. She will work with training director Jaimi Dowdell to run our workshops, in-newsroom training and other initiatives.

Megan has worked in radio, TV and most recently, newspapers. Before she joined IRE, Megan was a government reporter for the Argus Leader in South Dakota and a computer-assisted reporting specialist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Previously, she worked at IRE and NICAR in the Database Library while completing her master’s degree at the University of Missouri.

Her investigations included abuse of government credit cards, farm subsidies and a loophole ...

Three major investigative reports that used social science research methods to: expose serial killings, shine a light on school cheating, and reveal truths about the home foreclosure crisis were named winners of the 2011 Philip Meyer Award.

First place is awarded to "Murder Mysteries" by Thomas Hargrove of Scripps Howard News Service. The series resulted in what experts say is the most complete database available of unsolved murders. Hargrove developed a unique algorithm to identify the likely traces of serial murders. Police in at least eight cities have acknowledged that the clusters found by Hargrove are either confirmed serial cases ...

Learn how to quickly visualize data and publish it interactively to the web without programming.

Tableau Public will host two, four-hour hands-on training sessions Thursday, Feb. 23, at the CAR Conference on how to use the free software to visualize data and post it online. The sessions will cover the basics of Tableau to create interactive data visualizations on short deadlines, as well as how to create more complex visualizations. 

Tableau for Beginners will cover:

• Connect to Excel files and other data
• Create maps and charts
• Format them beautifully
• Make them interactive

Tableau for Pros will cover:

• Clean and format ...

As tens of thousands of soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan, journalists will have their hands full reporting on topics from veteran homelessness to mental illness. How better to hold the government accountable than by arming yourself with the tools to decipher complex data and the steps to finding compelling stories.

March 5 to 7 the New England Center for Investigative Reporting will offer a free training at Boston University where journalists, bloggers and citizen journalists can learn from veteran affairs experts.

IRE Executive Director Mark Horvit will present during the workshop, along with James Dao, of The New York ...

Don't forget to submit your best investigative reporting to the 2011 IRE Awards contest. The postmark deadline is January 13th, 2012.

2011 marked the 33rd year for the IRE Awards, which honor the best in investigative reporting in all types of media. This year, to better reflect the evolving nature of the industry, and the challenges inherent in the categories as they existed, we have restructured the categories for our awards.

For more information on how we've changed or for details on how to enter, click here.

Tired of government agencies that care more about protecting their data than the public?

Frustrated by official websites that defiantly offer no easy way to download vital data sets?

It’s time to fight back.

Join IRE and Scraperwiki for a 12-hour data liberation marathon during the 2012 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference in St. Louis on Feb. 23-24.

We’re soliciting your nominations for data sets that you’re longing to crunch but haven’t been able to get your hands on. We’ll build a list of prime candidates for liberation. Then, on the opening evening of the CAR Conference ...

There are two things we know data journalists love: nerdy jokes and T-shirts.  When we asked for suggestions for a NICAR T-shirt to be sold at the 2012 CAR Conference in St. Louis, we didn't expect it there to be any shortage of ideas.

The first round of submissions are in, and they're pretty much what we expected: mostly groan-worthy, occasionally cryptic, and generally awesome. Check out what has been proposed so far by IRE members.

The contest is still open! We'll keep adding your suggestions as long as you keep sending them. Ideas can be submitted ...