July 2, 2009

Final stretch for $50,000 Challenge

We are within sight of a $50,000 Challenge Fund for Journalism matching grant that will help IRE better deliver resources and services to our membership in an extremely challenging fiscal year. Within sight, but not quite there yet: we need to raise about $15,000 more in the coming weeks.

Please consider supporting this effort with a donation before August 8, our deadline.

If you have donated to IRE at some point in the past three years, only the amount above your largest annual donation during that period will count. If you are a first-time giver, or you haven’t donated to IRE in the past three years, your full donation will count.

Please visit the IRE Web site to make your tax-deductible gift today to help IRE continue our critical work. Or you may send a check payable to "IRE" to: IRE, Missouri School of Journalism, 141 Neff Annex, Columbia, MO 65211. Please write “donation” in the memo field. (Read more about IRE’s challenge.)

Cronkite School to host 2010 CAR

The 2010 CAR Conference, which offers hands-on training, panels on the latest trends and insight into cutting-edge developments, will be hosted by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University from March 11-14.

The training provided at the conference helps journalists stay ahead in a competitive environment, exploring the tools you need to dig deeper into stories and give readers, viewers and your online audience the information they're demanding.

“We’re honored to be hosting IRE’s 2010 CAR conference here at the Cronkite School,” said Chris Callahan, dean of the school. “I attended my first CAR conference back in 1995, and have always found the sessions to be among the very best concentrated journalism training experiences in the world. With our new digital media complex in downtown Phoenix and faculty members such as Knight Chair Steve Doig, we hope to help IRE deliver a first-rate CAR training experience next spring.”

Registration and hotel information will be posted soon at www.ire.org. Watch for upcoming opportunities to suggest panel topics and speakers, too.

IRE helps launch nonprofit network

A group of journalists representing investigative reporting organizations throughout the nation gathered this week to take the first steps toward forming a non-profit investigative news network.

Representatives from the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting, IRE, the Investigative Reporting Workshop, several newly formed regional investigative centers and other groups met at the Pocantico Conference Center in New York. The goals of the network, as stated in a declaration issued by the group, are to "aid and abet, in every conceivable way, individually and collectively, the work and public reach of its member news organizations…And, more broadly, to foster the highest quality investigative journalism, and to hold those in power accountable, at the local, national and international levels."(Read the full declaration here)