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January 1996: IRE sponsors a workshop on covering electoral campaigns, with an emphasis on fund raising and spending of incumbents and challengers. Neil Reisner of The (Bergen, N.J.) Record becomes training director. St. Martin's Press publishes Brant Houston's book, "Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide," which is now in its 3rd Edition. The how-to book is widely adopted by professionals and professors.
February 1996: Weinberg authors the third edition of "The Reporter's Handbook: An Investigator's Guide to Documents and Techniques." It is published by St. Martin's Press and copyrighted by IRE.
March 1996: IRE receives proposals from five universities to provide an IRE headquarters. The IRE board of directors considers offers from the University of Maryland, Columbia University, Northwestern University and American University.
June 1996: After months of debate, the IRE board of directors votes 7-4 to stay at Missouri rather than go to the University of Maryland. … Elected members on the IRE board of directors increase from 11 to 13.
July 1996: With a three-year grant of $540,000 from the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation providing the bulk of the funding, IRE begins operating IRE Mexico and training quickly broadens to operate a similar organization in Central and South America, with a Mexico City headquarters. Periodistas de Investigación will be directed at first by Lise Olsen, a bilingual computer-assisted reporting specialist. Mexico City journalist Pedro Enrique Armendares soon joins the staff.
December 1996: Rosemary Armao leaves as IRE executive director to work at The (Baltimore) Sun.
January 1997: Reisner leaves for a job at The Miami Herald. Sarah Cohen, recently of the St. Petersburg Times, becomes training director.
March 1997: Brant Houston becomes IRE executive director, in addition to running NICAR. Read the press release from 1997.
April 1997: IRE and NICAR create the Campaign Finance Information Center with a $342,000 grant from the Joyce Foundation.
May 1997: With so much expansion, IRE operates with a budget of approximately $1 million. The value of an IRE membership continues to soar as membership revenue accounts for only 12 percent of income, while IRE and NICAR conferences account for about 25 percent; NICAR training about 30 percent. Resource Center requests and publications about 5 percent; and outside money, including foundation grants, constitutes much of the remaining 28 percent.
July 1997: A book, "Investigative Environmental Reporting" by Mary Landers is billed as the beginning of the IRE Reporting Tips Series. It is published and marketed jointly with the Society of Environmental Journalists.
September 1997: Andy Lehren, who has conducted training and directed the database library while getting his master's degree at the Missouri School of Journalism, leaves for a job at Dateline NBC. He joins David Hinchman, a Missouri graduate who had worked for MICAR. Jo Craven, another recent master's degree recipient who worked in the database library, leaves to work for The Washington Post.
October 1997: The Campaign Finance Information Center, a training organization in campaign finance, expands its offerings online, including the publication of a quarterly newsletter called Tracker.
November 1997: IRE and its Mexican project, Periodistas de Investigación, organize the first "border gathering" aimed primarily at journalists in the El Paso and Juárez area. In addition, IRE's international training is increasing as staff members, board members and IRE members teach in other countries, including Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands.
May 1998: Newspaper editor Len Bruzzese joins IRE as deputy director and immediately sets to work revamping the Web site. He soon also becomes editor of The IRE Journal.
June 1998: The Open Society Institute awards IRE $173,000 to conduct conferences on investigative reporting for small- and medium-sized news organizations. The grant includes funding for a follow-up study to examine the effectiveness of the training. The conferences receive high marks.
July 1998: David B. Smallman, a New York City lawyer who handles freedom of information and other legal matters for IRE and NICAR pro bono, agrees to write regularly for The IRE Journal, and ask other lawyers to contribute columns as well. Edward DeLaney also continues as IRE's lawyer and as secretary of the board of directors.
December 1998: Broadcast journalists Mark Lagerkvist and Stuart Watson volunteer to collate and produce a videotape of investigative reporting for use by IRE members.
January 1999: Tom McGinty of The (Trenton, N.J.) Times joins IRE and NICAR as training director shortly before Sarah Cohen leaves for a database editor job at The Washington Post.
February 1999: A new version of the IRE Web site makes its debut, offering more extensive resources to journalists.
March 1999: IRE receives $250,000 from the Florence and John Schumann Foundation to support the Resource Center, the Web site and other operations. Jo Craven returns to the University of Missouri to teach CAR and serve as the NICAR adviser.
April 1999: IRE and the Pew Center on Civic Journalism collaborate on a workshop showing some of the overlap - particularly in social research methods and computer-assisted reporting - between investigative journalism and civic journalism.
May 1999: IRE and NICAR hold the first CAR boot camp aimed exclusively at newsroom managers - editors and news directors - in Columbia, Mo. … IRE and NICAR work with the University of North Carolina Journalism School to present an advanced statistics seminar for CAR-trained reporters and editors.
July 1999: IRE participates in the Unity Conference. Sponsored by four minority journalism groups, IRE directs four workshops on doing the best possible reporting and editing. … The Joyce Foundation donates $200,000 to IRE to support the Campaign Finance Information Center.
January 2000: Membership tops 4,000 journalists. Dues increase to $50 annually. … A redesigned IRE Journal, more than twice the size, debuts in a slicker magazine format. It also begins accepting limited advertising focused on services and resources of interest to journalists. Anita Bruzzese, a book author and syndicated columnist, soon joins as freelance managing editor.
April 2000: IRE and NICAR conduct the first of three workshops during the year on obtaining and using U.S. Census data. They are held in Tempe, Ariz.; Columbia, Mo.; and College Park, Md.
May 2000: The first of IRE's seven beat books, "Covering Aviation Safety: An Investigator's Guide," is published. It is written by Marie Tessier. The beat books, originally suggested by Jo Craven McGinty, are coordinated and edited by Len Bruzzese.
June 2000: At the national conference in New York City, IRE honors key people as part of its 25th anniversary: Myrta Pulliam, Bob Greene, Jim Polk, Ed DeLaney, Jan Colbert, John Ullmann and Steve Weinberg. … Through the efforts of Pulliam and DeLaney, IRE receives $500,000 from the Jane Pulliam Trust to support the Resource Center director and the director's related activities. This gift allows IRE to embark on a major endowment drive. IRE forms an advisory board of 16 well-known journalists to develop and guide plans for the endowment drive.
October 2000: The second IRE beat book, "Home Mortgage Lending: How to Detect Disparities," is published. The author is Jo Craven McGinty.
November 2000: IRE teams with the Education Writers Association on a workshop about thinking like an investigative reporter while covering the beat.
December 2000: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation contributes $250,000 to IRE for general operating support.
February 2001: The third IRE beat book is published: "Understanding Crime Statistics." The author is Kurt Silver. … The Carnegie Corporation of New York provides $250,000 for IRE's Campaign Finance Information Center for training and Web resources.
April 2001: IRE and DICAR, a Danish journalism organization, collaborate on the first four-day Global Investigative Journalism Conference. More than 300 journalists from 40 countries participate in the conference in Copenhagen. The conference was the idea of Houston at IRE and Nils Mulvad of DICAR.
May 2001: The fourth IRE beat book, "Numbers in the Newsroom: Using Math and Statistics in News," is published. The author is Sarah Cohen. … The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation pledges $100,000 to IRE's endowment drive, to be paid over five years.
June 2001: The Gannett Foundation gives $25,000 to IRE's endowment fund. Tom McGinty, who joined IRE in 1999 as training director, leaves for a job at Newsday. Ron Nixon, who has been the campaign finance director since November 2000, becomes training director. … Jeff Porter, a journalist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, joins IRE and NICAR as the first full-time database library director.
September 2001: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awards IRE $2 million with $500,000 for operations over a four-year period - $500,000 for the endowment and the second million dollars to be given out on a partial matching arrangement. … IRE reschedules a CAR conference for Philadelphia in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.
January 2002: David Herzog, an investigative reporter for The Providence Journal, starts teaching CAR at the Missouri School of Journalism and serves as the NICAR adviser. He later is named managing editor of Uplink.
March 2002: IRE publishes a new summary of annual contest entries, called "The IRE Collection: Winning Investigations." Rescheduled PhillyCAR conference held.
April 2002: IRE and The Society of Professional Journalists begin a three-year collaboration on one-day "Better Watchdog Workshops" with an initial grant of $100,000 from the SDX (Sigma Delta Chi) Foundation. IRE provides the administration and investigative training for the popular workshops while SPJ contributes training on open records. The number of workshops quickly grows to more than a dozen a year and continues with grants from other foundations and newsrooms.
June 2002: After a board retreat, the IRE board of directors streamlines its committee structure, reducing the number from 11 to six while also redistributing responsibilities.
September 2002: The Gannett Foundation donates a second $25,000 to IRE's endowment fund.
December 2002: The fourth edition of IRE's most popular book becomes available. Re-titled "The Investigative Reporter's Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases and Techniques," it is copyrighted by IRE and published by Bedford/St. Martin's. As an updated version of the 1996 edition, Houston, Bruzzese and Weinberg serve as co-authors/co-editors. It is designed to be a companion to Houston's "Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide," also published by Bedford/St. Martin's.
January 2003: The IRE and NICAR Database Library continues to expand its collection of government databases, which now reaches about 40. Recent additions include the National Practitioner Databank about transgressions by physicians and other health care professionals; the AIDS Public Information Dataset from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and the Adverse Event Reporting System from the Food and Drug Administration.
February 2003: IRE debuts daily Extra! Extra! feature on its Web site to recognize the latest investigative and computer-assisted work. The feature, originally written by IRE member and volunteer Derek Willis and coordinated by IRE Publications Coordinator Pia Christensen, quickly becomes one of the most popular sections of the IRE Web site.
May 2003: The second Global Investigative Journalism Conference is held in Copenhagen. Representatives from nearly 40 journalism organizations agree to create an international network of investigative journalists that will share techniques, tips and resources and help plan future conferences.
August 2003: Nixon leaves for work at the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune.
September 2003: The fifth IRE beat book is "Unstacking the Deck: A Reporter's Guide to Campaign Finance." The authors are Michael A. Weber, Aron Pilhofer and Derek Willis.
October 2003: IRE and the Canadian Association of Journalists collaborate on a conference exploring how to investigate issues of relevance on both sides of the border.
November 2003: The Nicholas B. Ottaway Foundation donates $20,000 to IRE to help minority journalists attend computer-assisted reporting boot camps in Columbia, Mo.
January 2004: Membership in IRE continues to range between 4,500 and 5000. David Donald from the Savannah Morning News begins as training director.
April 2004: IRE publishes "Interviewing the Interviewers," an expanded version of a series from The IRE Journal.
July 2004: The Nicholas B. Ottaway Foundation renews its support of minority fellowships to IRE and NICAR's CAR boot camps at the $20,000 level.
October 2004: The sixth IRE beat book, "Covering Pollution: An Investigative Reporter's Guide," is published with extensive help from the Society of Environmental Journals. Lead author is Lori Luechtefeld.
January 2005: IRE and NICAR continue to offer cutting-edge specialized training in the use of geographic information systems (GIS) software to analyze data for news stories. The training has been conducted for several years, originally as part of an advanced CAR boot camp.
February 2005: The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation grants $30,000 to IRE in support of the Better Watchdog Workshop series. This is the foundation's second grant to IRE in support of these workshops - the first was $20,000 in 2004. … The seventh IRE beat book, "Mapping for Stories: A Computer-Assisted Reporting Guide," is published. The authors are Jennifer LaFleur and Andy Lehren.
May 2005: The Gannett Foundation pledges $100,000 to IRE's endowment fund in support of computer-assisted and investigative reporting training sessions, to be paid over four years.
June 2005: Nearly 900 journalists attend IRE's Annual Conference in Denver. Over the past year, IRE has conducted or played a significant role in 75 conferences and seminars; collaborated with more than a dozen other news organizations; provided resources to more than 280 news organizations; provided data to more than 170 news organizations; and launched a new part of the Web site, IRE Español, that is aimed at providing resources to Spanish-speaking journalists in the United States, the Americas and throughout the world.
Commenting on IRE's 30th anniversary, Executive Director Brant Houston says IRE "does the most on-the-road training of any journalism organization, reaching out to members and newsrooms whose budgets leave little money for training or travel.
"IRE also collaborates with dozens of other journalism groups, hosting Web sites and listservs and creating new and relevant seminars," Houston says. "In addition, IRE takes strong stands on issues of protecting sources, secrecy and freedom of information, while picking our spots carefully since we are an educational organization, not a lobbying organization."
Houston also notes IRE "has managed to do all this in its 30 years with limited resources, a small staff, a dedicated board of directors and the overwhelming generosity of our members - members who consistently and happily volunteer to organize seminars, teach, write articles and beat books, and most of all help the organization and each other at every turn."
