IRE

Holly Whisenhunt Stephen was the best executive producer an investigative reporter could ever ask for.

Holly Whisenhunt Stephen

Holly, an award-winning journalist and a longtime IRE member, died Nov. 28 after a long battle with cancer. She was 38.

Holly spent much of her career in Texas, working for TV newsrooms in Stephenville, Waco, Austin, Houston and San Antonio, before moving to WTHR in Indianapolis. While in Indianapolis for the past three years, Holly helped lead WTHR’s 13 Investigates unit to national recognition, including an IRE Award, a Peabody award, a National Headliner, a Scripps Howard Award for excellence in broadcast journalism, and SPJ’s national Sigma Delta Chi Award for public service in journalism, among many other honors.

Several years ago Holly won a scholarship to attend one of IRE’s computer-assisted reporting boot camps. The experience sparked a passion to do investigative reporting in which the backbone of the story was the data she analyzed. In that spirit, and in Holly’s memory, WTHR is establishing a scholarship fund to help connect other broadcast journalists to the hands-on IRE training that Holly loved (see details below).

Holly’s husband, Josh Stephen, is an award-winning photojournalist at WTHR. Holly was the proud “momma” to Maxwell, Zeke and Etta, her three English bulldogs.

A memorial service will be held 3 p.m. Dec. 13 at the S. 11th & Willis Church of Christ, 3309 S. 11th St., Abilene, Texas, under the direction of Piersall Benton Funeral Directors. A second service will take place at 7 p.m., Dec. 17, at WTHR-TV, 1000 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis. For more information on the memorial services, contact Bob Segall at 317.408.3397 or Bsegall@wthr.com.

The scholarship being created in Holly’s name will help send broadcast journalists to IRE’s computer-assisted reporting boot camps. To donate, checks may be mailed to the following address, and please be sure to specify that the donation is in Holly’s honor. WTHR and Dispatch Broadcast Group is matching donations for the fund up to $5,000:

Investigative Reporters and Editors
Attention: Heather Henry, Fiscal Officer
141 Neff Annex
Missouri School of Journalism
Columbia, MO 65211

You can also donate online at www.ire.org/endowment/contribution.html

– IRE Member Bob Segall, WTHR-Indianapolis

As IRE has grown and evolved, so have the services offered to our members. Just a few years ago, one of the most common requests of our Database Library was a conversion of electronic information from tape to disc. Nowadays, Database Library staffers are working with open-source database technology, Web scraping and dynamic mapping.

Recently  we reached yet another milestone in the services we are offering our members: the Database Library can now create interactive maps for news Web sites connected to investigative projects. In our first venture, we worked with reporter and IRE board member Phil Williams and created a Google maps mashup for WTVF in Nashville, allowing site visitors to explore how gas station ownership in the Nashville metro area has become more homogenous.

Shortly after finishing the project for Williams, Database Library staff members completed an interactive map of daycare inspections in metropolitan Southeast Florida for  WFOR, Miami’s CBS 4. IRE member and WFOR I-Team reporter Stephen Stock worked on the story.  Stock and his co-workers painstakingly entered more than 7,000 inspection records into Microsoft Excel for analysis.

Projects like this are a continuation of IRE’s work with mapping. Maps provide journalists with a powerful tool to help their audience see and feel the story. By giving audiences for WTVF and WFOR a way to work with the information that provided a foundation for their story, the stations definitely “showed” rather than “told” their stories.

“The work of everyone at NICAR was wonderful in helping me to visualize the issues and to provide a means for our viewers to do their own research,” Williams wrote in an email to IRE staff.

“I showed off the map to our morning editorial meeting and the room was ABUZZ…they were knocked off their seats,” Stock wrote in a message to IRE staff. “This is a hard crowd and they were wowed! Way to go!”

Since both projects launched Nov. 18, IRE’s mapping server has logged more than 348,600 hits (as of Dec. 1).

In addition to making available a collection of more than 40 federal databases to IRE members, we can assist with:

1) SQL queries and general database analysis;

2) Web scraping of some public information;

3) Mapping out data with GIS tools to explore the “where” of your story;

4) Parsing those stubborn text files into a database-friendly format.

For more information, contact the Database Library at 573-884-7711 or visit data.nicar.org.

– Jeremy Milarsky, Database Library director

NICAR’s copy of the Housing Mortgage Disclosure Act dataset for 2007 has been updated. This dataset, maintained by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, provides information about property loans in the United States, including, for each loan application:

• the race, ethnicity and gender of the applicant
• how much money was requested in the loan
• the annual income of the applicant
• if the loan was considered “subprime” — defined in this dataset by being three points higher than the prime rate — how much higher its interest rate was
• The U.S. Census tract for the property location — highly useful for mapping

Reporters have used HMDA data for years to report housing trends with authority; in the current economic climate, that effort has become all the more important. Did lending institutions in your state grant fewer subprime loans than last year? By how much? This dataset can help answer those questions. Please contact the Database Library with any questions.

I am proud to announce that purchases of datasets completely online, without the use of a phone or fax machine, is now available to members for most of the data we sell at the NICAR Database Library.

The new online store can be found via links on our main site at www.ire.org, or you can go directly to data.nicar.org.

To enforce the long-standing policy of only allowing journalists who are IRE Members to purchase data from the library, the online store requires visitors to register for the site. (It’s worth the effort; you can save it for accessing new features as we continue to improve our site.)

Within 24-48 hours, IRE staff members will verify whether a registrant is, in fact, an IRE Member.  Members in good standing will then be able to make purchases with a credit card using our new shopping cart.

On a personal note, it is my hope that this new Web application will enable us to better serve our members, who work daily in an ever-challenging environment where every minute counts.

Of course, you’ll still be able to purchase data the old fashioned way — and we certainly encourage people to call the library for our analysis and consultation services. But this new feature will hopefully be a boon to those members interested in purchasing datasets quickly.

Questions? Please feel free to email (datalib@nicar.org) or call us
573-884-7711.

- Jeremy Milarsky