Send us your creative, inspired ideas yearning to be on our website or a T-Shirt.

The 2012 IRE Conference is coming to Boston, and we're looking for your help. After the success of the Computer Assisted Reporting Conference  T-shirt contest, we want to hear more design ideas from our members. IRE staff and students are working on the program and other design work and we want to hear from you as well.

What would you like to see in a confernece logo for Boston? The design will be used on T-shirts, conference posters and some printed materials. This won ...

By Jon McClure
@JonRMcClure

What is real-time anyway?

The Guardian’s Alastair Dant discussed the concept in terms of a continuous feed of information and provided a few tips on how journalists should approach it during "Dealing with real-time data."

Chaos is raw real-time data, Dant said. To render it journalists must first conceptualize the continuous feed in measured discrete segments.

It’s useful to think of real-time feeds in terms of sequences, cycles, and streams, Dant said.

• Sequences represent discrete measures of real-time data streams, like those that bound any common news event.
• Cycles are discrete and repeatable feeds ...

Patrick Sweet, a CAR reporter at the The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., and formerly at The Citizens' Voice, shared some of his favorit sessions from the conference on his blog. Here are his thoughts on NewsCamp: Investigating text in the wild and Locating the story: The latest in mapping as well as other panels. His thoughts:

NewsCamp: Investigating text in the wild

 I was super excited for this panel. Picture having to analyze hundreds of government documents. And, we’re not talking about a tab-delimited table; just raw text.

Sarah Cohen from Duke University walked through some fantastic examples ...

By Kyle Deas
@KyleDeas

News organizations looking to enter the mobile space are confronted with a bewildering array of formats, devices, and operating systems. In a late-day session on Thursday, Daniel Lathrop and Will Sullivan talked through some of the options and the reasons why newsrooms could take one approach or another. Lathrop is the news apps editor at the The Dallas Morning News, and Sullivan is the director of mobile news for Lee Enterprises.

Apps vs. e-books

Between the Kindle bookstore and the Apple App Store, there's a thriving market for both e-books and apps. So how should ...

There are several ways to access the 2012 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference schedule. The official schedule will be updated online to reflect any changes from the addendum to the printed program.

There are also two options to view the schedule on mobile devices. Michelle Johnson, professor at Boston University, created a mobile app on Guidebook, which can be downloaded here and works with most smart phones. Johnson put the app together with a .csv file that was scraped and compiled by Tom Meagher, CAR editor at The Star-Ledger. Johnson has updated the schedule to reflect changes with the most recent addendum ...

The 2012 CAR Conference begins in just a few days.  Below are a few bits of information to help you prepare for this great conference!

For the latest up-to-date information about panels, speakers, and special events at the conference, please visit our conference pages.
 

Hotel Information
The conference is taking place at the St. Louis Union Station Marriott, One St. Louis Union Station, St. Louis, MO 63103.

Registration
Registration opens Wednesday at 3pm and will be open Thursday, Friday and Saturday in the Atrium, located on the 2^ndfloor of the hotel’s conference center. 

Weather
It looks like ...

Tired of government agencies that care more about protecting their data than the public?

Frustrated by official websites that defiantly offer no easy way to download vital data sets?

It’s time to fight back.

Join IRE and Scraperwiki for a 12-hour data liberation marathon during the 2012 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference in St. Louis on Feb. 23-24.

We’re soliciting your nominations for data sets that you’re longing to crunch but haven’t been able to get your hands on. We’ll build a list of prime candidates for liberation. Then, on the opening evening of the CAR Conference ...

There are two things we know data journalists love: nerdy jokes and T-shirts.  When we asked for suggestions for a NICAR T-shirt to be sold at the 2012 CAR Conference in St. Louis, we didn't expect it there to be any shortage of ideas.

The first round of submissions are in, and they're pretty much what we expected: mostly groan-worthy, occasionally cryptic, and generally awesome. Check out what has been proposed so far by IRE members.

The contest is still open! We'll keep adding your suggestions as long as you keep sending them. Ideas can be submitted ...

Jill Abramson, who took over as executive editor of The New York Times in September, will deliver the keynote address at the 2012 IRE Conference in Boston. She is the first woman to hold that position in the newspaper's more than 160-year history. 

More than 800 journalists and journalism educators are expected to attend the four-day conference that focuses on accountability reporting techniques and trends. Abramson will deliver the keynote speech during annual IRE Awards luncheon on Saturday, June 16, 2012. She follows CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager, who was the keynote speaker at the 2011 IRE Conference. 

"Jill ...