IRE

We’d like to thank everyone who helped make IRE’s membership drive a success and announce the winners in the drawing.

More than 440 people joined IRE, renewed expired memberships or signed on for another year during October. We also received several thousand dollars in donations, made by those of you who chose to offer additional support when you joined or renewed. Much of this success was due to the many members who volunteered to recruit and who held informational sessions in their newsrooms or on their campuses.  IRE is only as strong as its membership, and we are significantly stronger today thanks to each of you.

As part of October’s membership drive, we gave away several prizes. Here are the winners:

3^rd Place - $50 IRE Book Store purchase

Ryan Duffy

First Coast News, Jacksonville, FL

2^nd Place - $150 toward Database Library purchase

Dan Ferber

Freelancer (science writer), Indianapolis, IN

1^st Place – Three nights hotel and free registration for the 2010 IRE Conference in Las Vegas in June

Michael Cetera

Sun-Times News Group, Aurora, IL

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.