By Sarah Morris
@smorris198888

In Integrating CAR: Story Ideas for the Whole Newsroom, Mark Wert of The Cincinnati Enquirer and Jaimi Dowdell of IRE/NICAR gave ideas and tips relating to different beats that would require CAR skills.

Some of the tips they shared included:

• Build your own database.
• Use two databases to tell a story.
• Have the newsroom ready for breaking news by knowing where different types of databases are, such as OSHA records, bridge and dam databases and the Aircraft Registry.
• Use Guidestar and Foundation.org to find information about nonprofits

They also suggested ways to create a ...

Located just south of Chicago, Indiana's Lake County has long been a hot-bed of political corruption, bloated government and patronage jobs. County government spending became so rampant that the largest corporate taxpayers in 2005 commissioned a study that recommended cutting government spending or consolidating services to save taxpayers millions. Few of the recommendations were adopted, and about two years later, the Indiana General Assembly forced a frozen tax levy specifically targeting the county's wasteful ways.

Times of Northwest Indiana reporter Bill Dolan and I spent four years collecting a decade's worth of electronic spending records for all ...

I had long suspected that the Clean Air Act was not only being routinely violated in Indiana, but that those violations were rarely being punished. Proving that suspicion, however, seemed impossible — until I read The New York Times’ Sept. 12, 2009, piece about violations of the Clean Water Act. The interactive graphic that accompanied the story linked to an U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database called ECHO, Enforcement and Compliance History Online , which I discovered also tracks Clean Air Act violations. Jackpot.

That meant that someone had already built a database showing not only every violation of the Clean Air ...

It's always nice to get a tip, but we found our local overtime pay leaders by goofing around in some online records. I came across an online database of public employee salaries offered by SeeThroughNY, a non-profit transparency portal.

And like any curious journalist, I pulled out our county government and sorted it top to bottom in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

This was not the typical payroll information we routinely get from government payroll offices. This database of 4,727 records originated from the state pension system, run by the state comptroller’s office. It wasn’t just a ...