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 "neighborhoods" ...
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A Neighborhood In Peril
Fallon's Powerpoint presentation lays out how he covered the secret chemical spill that happened years ago and the story that followed: "A Neighborhood in Peril, How New Jersey environmental regulators failed the people they were supposed to protect".
Tags: pollution; environment; EPA; chemical spill
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10 Mortgage Default Stories You Can Do At Home
Track the foreclosure money trail with these great tips from Shanklin. See what neighborhoods in your community are at risk, and start searching for the inconsistencies (they're there)!
Tags: mortgage default; foreclosure; inflated values; subprime lending; loans
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Real Estate Data with Tableau Public
In this demo we'll create a workbook describing the real estate trends of a city or neighborhood. While we use a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. (Shaw), the techniques and dashboard could be applied anywhere with real estate data.
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Back to basics: Finding stories in what is readily available but rarely examined
This tipsheet points to readily available information which is ripe for investigative stories. The tipsheet touches on everything from depopulation of rural areas and neglected neighborhoods to sales tax revenues.
Tags: investigative reporting; quick-hits; data sets; story ideas; computer-assisted reporting; CAR
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Starting in the Neighborhood
Hall describes how to build a network of sources, and dig into data and reports, and examine the performance of local government. He talks about proactive reporting through attending public meetings and meeting people.
Tags: sources; public meetings; data; FOIA; public records; beats; statistics; interviewing
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Neighborhoods for Sale
The authors explain a recent Chicago Tribune investigation which tracked all zoning changes approved by the Chicago City Council in the past decade. They discuss how they acquired raw data and built their own database, as well as the steps they took to make the final story compelling for Tribune readers.
Tags: zoning; housing; city politics; city government; urban development
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Neighborhood basics
"10 steps to figure out which areas of your community are thriving and getting their fair shares of resources -- and which aren't."
Tags: beat reporting; city government; county government; government; neighborhoods; funding;
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A Neighborhood Built to Fail
Mellnik discusses how to identify foreclosures, starter homes and lenders from various public records. He explains how to use the register of deeds, county property records, FHA data, building permits, bankruptcy filings, and consultant reports to find data for a story about property records. He also includes some tips about mapping foreclosures.
Tags: property; foreclosure; mapping; data analysis; public records; real estate; beat reporting
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CAR for covering natural disasters
Maines offers many suggestions for incorporating CAR into fast-paced disaster investigations. For instance, he suggests using mapping to show the extent of damage in certain areas or neighborhoods. Maines also discusses some of the surprises that reporters for the Sun Sentinel faced after Hurricane Wilma, and how in the future journalists can anticipate similar surprises and work around them.
Tags: hurricane; natural disaster; mapping; GPS; computer-assisted reporting; demographics; FOIA
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American FactFinder: Getting just a little local census data
This tipsheet teaches you how, with just a web browser and a spreadsheet, you can narrow census data down to just one mall area like a county or a neighborhood. The trick is using American FactFinder, the Census Bureau's data dissemination site. This tipsheet goes over the basics of that site and how to navigate through it.
Tags: www.factfinder.census.gov; data sets; census information