The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. Add to that more than 3,000 tipsheets from our national conferences on how to cover specific beats or do specific stories and you have a resource that no reporter or editor should be without. These stories and tipsheets are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Logged-in members can view the tipsheets free online:
Search results for "S" ...
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Connecting the dots with NodeXL
NodeXL is an add-in for Excel 2007 and 2010 that allows you to do network analysis (aka social network analysis) in a familiar spreadsheet environment. You'll learn how to use the software by turning data from 2007 on voting patterns in the US Senate into an informative graphic revealing the chamber's underlying dynamics - and highlighting the few senators who broke the partisan mold.
Tags: None
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Making timelines
Displaying a series of events can be as simple as drawing a straight line. But if you want to get fancier, there are a bunch of other options to display chronologies and storylines. In this talk, we'll take a tour of current timelines in the wild and walk you through three open-source tools to help you make your own: ProPublica's TimelineSetter, Zach Wise's TimelineJS, and WNYC's Vertical Timeline. http://lenagroeger.s3.amazonaws.com/timelines/timelines.html
Tags: data
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Git and Github: Learning to commit to version control
You need version control, and git is the answer. This class will introduce basic git commands and walk you through using the social coding site Github to store and organize your projects. It's ideal for anyone working on web development, scraping and scripting to gather or clean data. You should set up an account on Github before the class, and it's recommended, but not compulsory, that you be comfortable navigating the command line.
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ProPublica News Apps Desk Coding Manifesto
There's a lot to think about when it comes to news apps, but not all of it is coding. What story is it telling? Does it tell it consistently and in a fact-based way? Does the story it tells agree with the reporting (and if not who's got explaining to do!) What's the lede, what's the nut (yes, apps have those). https://github.com/propublica/guides/blob/master/coding-manifesto.md
Tags: news app; development; style; ProPublica
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The ProPublica news apps style guide
There's a lot to think about when it comes to news apps, but not all of it is coding. What story is it telling? Does it tell it consistently and in a fact-based way? Does the story it tells agree with the reporting (and if not who's got explaining to do!) What's the lede, what's the nut (yes, apps have those). https://github.com/propublica/guides/blob/master/news-apps.md
Tags: news app; development; style; ProPublica
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The Design and Structure of News Application
There's a lot to think about when it comes to news apps, but not all of it is coding. What story is it telling? Does it tell it consistently and in a fact-based way? Does the story it tells agree with the reporting (and if not who's got explaining to do!) What's the lede, what's the nut (yes, apps have those). https://github.com/propublica/guides/blob/master/design-structure.md#intro-the-design-and-structure-of-a-news-application
Tags: news app; development
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Inside baseball: What data journalism can learn from sports
This panel will identify areas for data journalism exploration by examining the current state-of-the-art baseball data analysis. Sports are the original form of data journalism -- box scores predate open government movements by about a century. And Joseph Adler's "Baseball Hacks" trained newbie Web CAR reporters how to scrape and analyze data sets using Perl and MySQL. Finally, sports analytics are a leading indicator for other kinds of analysis. Sensors, economic analysis, leverage are all de rigeur in baseball but still up-and-coming in data journalism. We'll take the concepts being used to analyze baseball, football, soccer and apply them to standard data journalism chores.
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No complaints: Navigating the New American Fact Finder, improvements and updates
Learn more about how to use the new American FactFinder, or AFF, which has compiled several censuses and surveys. Check out the new enhancements and more user-friendly features of AFF.
Tags: American FactFinder; AFF; censuses; surveys
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Bringing Excel to the web with Excel 2013 and SkyDrive
Learn some of Microsoft Excel 2013's new features and talk about how to improve your stories and how to engage viewers with your sites for free. Look at different examples of how Excel has been implemented in storytelling.
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Down and dirty with the DocumentCloud API
Welsh talks about how the Los Angeles Times uses DocumentCloud. Learn how to use DocumentCloud's API to interact with your documents and how to update or access documents' data with scripting.
Tags: DocumentCloud; DocumentCloud's API; documents; data; scripting