IRE Journal
The IRE Journal, the award-winning magazine of Investigative Reporters & Editors, is published four times a year and contains journalist profiles, how-to stories, reviews, investigative ideas and backgrounding tips. Our audience is journalists from all media, journalism educators or students who want to hone their investigative skills — from tried-and-true Watchdog fundamentals to the latest innovations that help you get the story. The answers come from the reporters, editors or producers writing in the Journal about their own experiences with investigative projects.
Each print issue offers "centerpiece stories" exploring the techniques behind investigations on a single theme, chosen to reflect major news trends, outstanding investigative work, and core topics relevant to journalists. The centerpiece package is accompanied by a list of IRE Resources, past stories, and Web resources to jumpstart your coverage of this issue. Other popular Journal features include "Member News" updates; "FOI Files" focusing on access to public information; investigative journalism book reviews; and selected articles from Uplink, our online computer-assisted reporting newsletter.
The Journal is included with IRE membership. It keeps members updated on the latest news, upcoming events and training opportunities from IRE and NICAR. Members may also submit items for the Member News column. Members may download full, archived issues of the the Journal.
Back issues of The IRE Journal may be purchased for $10 each. An additional $10 user fee is charged to nonmembers. Contact the Resource Center at 573-882-3364 to check on availability.
How to subscribe
Nonmembers may purchase a one-year subscription for $70. Institutional subscriptions for libraries and other organizations are available. International individual subscriptions may be purchased for $90.
Subscription help
If you have a question about a new or existing subscription, please send an e-mail or call John Green at 573-882-2772.
The IRE Journal Blog
Crimes in the classroom
By Susan Snyder and Dylan Purcell
The Philadelphia Inquirer
A series of racial attacks at a Philadelphia high school in late 2009 – and the school district's inadequate response – prompted The Inquirer to launch an investigation into school violence. Its seven-part series, "Assault on Learning", and follow-up stories published throughout the past year, showed that violence is widespread and underreported in the city's schools.
The five-member reporting team looked at violence among young children, how the district's main intervention system for helping students failed and how violent acts occurred in classrooms on a regular basis, disrupting the school ...
Read more ...Campaign cash flow at the state level: Look at contributors, ballot measures
By Beverly Magley and Anne Sherwood
National Institute on Money in State Politics
For your stories about 2012 state elections, check out free campaign-finance information at The National Institute on Money in State Politics (followthemoney.org), a nonpartisan not-for-profit organization. In addition to downloadable data sets, you can mine reports on trends and anomalies, as well as overviews that compare and contrast campaigns and elections in all 50 states.
Here are the trends and issues the Institute is watching this year and some resources that can help you report on them:
- Independent spending is on everyone’s radar since the ...
National: Home in on top donors, bundlers, super PACs
By Viveca Novak
Center for Responsive Politics
The 2012 election promises to be the most expensive on record. One important way in which it differs from the 2008 contest: the presence of more outside groups, spending much more money, thanks to the Supreme Court's opinion in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 and subsequent legal developments. It's now legal for these groups – ostensibly independent of any candidate – to accept, and spend, unlimited amounts of money from virtually any source, including corporations, unions and trade associations.
That makes it more important than ever for reporters to examine not just ...
Read more ...