In this free-read article from Uplink, Gavin Off of the Tulsa World shows how he used local school crime report data to uncover a rise in incidents at local elementary schools. The article provides useful tips for journalists who'd like to cover school crime in their own areas.

After several years of negotiations, the NICAR Database Library has updated its copy of the FAA Enforcement Information System. This useful database documents cases where airlines, airports and pilots are accused of breaking FAA Regulations -- examples include drug-test failures and alcohol abuse on the job. Only two months into 2009, there have already been two major airplane crashes that have attracted heavy media attention. When covering such events, reporters have the opportunity to get at the "how" and "why" of the story by using some of the Federal Aviation Administration's public databases.  While many of these databases are freely ... Read more ...

As IRE has grown and evolved, so have the services offered to our members. Just a few years ago, one of the most common requests of our Database Library was a conversion of electronic information from tape to disc. Nowadays, Database Library staffers are working with open-source database technology, Web scraping and dynamic mapping. Recently  we reached yet another milestone in the services we are offering our members: the Database Library can now create interactive maps for news Web sites connected to investigative projects. In our first venture, we worked with reporter and IRE board member Phil Williams and created ... Read more ...

NICAR's copy of the Housing Mortgage Disclosure Act dataset for 2007 has been updated. This dataset, maintained by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, provides information about property loans in the United States, including, for each loan application:

• the race, ethnicity and gender of the applicant
• how much money was requested in the loan
• the annual income of the applicant
• if the loan was considered "subprime" -- defined in this dataset by being three points higher than the prime rate -- how much higher its interest rate was
• The U.S. Census tract for the property location -- highly useful for mapping ...

Read more ...

A great deal of the news coverage surrounding this week's Democratic National Convention touched on whether the party could recover from a close primary election between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Articles focused on the desire from the Obama campaign to reach out to Clinton supporters, and whether a rift remained in the party. But ABC News decided to dig a little deeper. They reasoned: campaign finance records are, of course, public -- can we use them to take a look at Clinton supporters who may not be so enthused with Obama's nomination? ABC Reporter Marcus Baram knew ... Read more ...

By Julie Karceski NICAR Data Analyst

One year later, and we’re back where we started.

The one-year anniversary of the Minnesota bridge collapse, Aug. 1, sparked a flurry of articles -- more than 100 in the anniversary week -- reflecting on the event.   Many revealed that bridges in certain states are in worse condition now than one year ago.

Newspapers across the country published stories with updates on the victims and investigations into what caused the collapse.  Many journalists also put a local angle on the anniversary by investigating bridges in their own communities and bringing public safety into question ...

Read more ...

I am proud to announce that purchases of datasets completely online, without the use of a phone or fax machine, is now available to members for most of the data we sell at the NICAR Database Library. The new online store can be found via links on our main site at www.ire.org, or you can go directly to data.nicar.org. To enforce the long-standing policy of only allowing journalists who are IRE Members to purchase data from the library, the online store requires visitors to register for the site. (It's worth the effort; you can save ... Read more ...

U.S. roads and waterways get more dangerous over the summer months as vacationers hit the highway or fire up their boat motors. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), fatal vehicle accident rates typically inch up during the summer months and then decline during the fall. It’s much the same on the waterways, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. The high number of boating accidents mirrors the summer vacation season. So, if your news organization is reporting on these accidents, two databases offered by the IRE and NICAR Database Library ... Read more ...

With the sad news about flooding in the Midwestern United States this week, the Database Library received more than a few requests for the National Inventory of Dams. Not only does this dataset list the name and location of all federally-inspected dams in the United States, it has information useful for journalists, including when, exactly the last inspection date was for each dam and whether the dam is near a populated area. More than a few good stories have come out of the dam data, which is still used for training purposes in IRE's computer-assisted reporting class. In 1995 ... Read more ...

Three years ago (in November 2005, to be exact, according to the Wayback Machine), Investigative Reporters and Editors updated the look and feel of its Web site from something resembling early Craig's list to something looking more like, well, this.

At the time, the site administrators, who no doubt had their hearts in the right place, put this thing on the main page:

Some people are probably looking at the image on this post, which is a snapshot from the old home page (pre-today), and a link to the even older page (pre-2006) and thinking nothing's wrong with ...

Read more ...