FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Brant Houston, Acting Executive Director, 573-882-2042, brant@ire.org
IRE gains support for its Web site with $10,000 grant from UCG
Sept. 19, 2007
Columbia, Mo. -- Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) announced today that UCG, a Rockville, Md., publisher of business newsletters, electronic magazines and directories, pledged $10,000 over a two-year period to support the upgrading and further development of IRE's Web site.
"UCG and IRE have the same values, that training is important and investigative journalism matters, so we're delighted to support IRE with this donation," said UCG corporate editorial director Lisa Getter, a former IRE board member.
Getter joined UCG in 2005 after a successful newspaper career at the Los Angeles Times and The Miami Herald, where she was a member of two Pulitzer-prize-winning teams. Her role at UCG is chief editorial talent recruiter and trainer for the company, which employs 700 people.
IRE's Web site, www.ire.org, has more than 40,000 visitors per month and connects thousands of journalists, journalism educators and journalism students to IRE's resources and training that includes a library of government databases and rich index of investigative stories and tip sheets. UCG's support will help the organization make the site easier to navigate and use.
"We are deeply appreciative of this support at a time that IRE is making sure to keep us with latest Web technology," said Brant Houston, acting executive director of IRE.
IRE has more than 4,500 members and is a grassroots, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting in the United States and elsewhere. It was formed in 1975 to create a forum in which journalists could help each other by sharing story ideas, newsgathering techniques and news sources.
UCG, one of America's leading business information publishers, puts a premium on groundbreaking independent journalism. One of its reporters broke the WorldCom corporate scandal in 2002, an investigation that won him top honors from the Society of Professional Journalists. More recently, a telecom investigation into corporate practices at Avaya won this year's best exclusive newsletter award from the National Press Club. An investigation into misleading coding advice won the 2006 Excellence in Health Care Journalism award from the Association of Health Care Journalists.
Unlike many news outlets today, UCG invests in training for its journalists. IRE's computer-assisted reporting instructors traveled to company headquarters in Rockville, Md, just outside of Washington, D.C., to put on a Mini Boot Camp for reporters and editors. UCG's media outlets include newsletters, magazines, books and Web sites in such niche areas as oil pricing, healthcare, telecom, financial services and the funeral industry.
UCG has won 103 journalism awards from the Specialized Information Publishers Foundation, a winning streak that has remained unbroken since the foundation gave out its first journalism award in 1980.
