Developers will demo a beta version of the newsroom appliance at the 2012 CAR Conference.

Tucked away on reporters' computers are dozens of details that could benefit news coverage, if only other journalists knew where to look.

Newsrooms are swimming in data. Journalistic organizations big and small continue to collect data from local, state and federal governments, and dozens of other places. As the collection grows, making sense of that information can become more difficult.

That's what the PANDA project, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, wants to solve — make data analysis easier for journalists and make sharing ...

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Open government advocates were outraged when the Department of Health and Human Services decided to cut off access to The National Practitioner Data Bank, a data set that has long been used to investigate lax oversight of physicians. After criticism by multiple organizations, the department relented and put the data bank back online.

However, with the return of the data came a new set of restrictions that sharply limit how journalists can use that data to inform investigations and stories. These restrictions make the data all but useless for most journalists.

In response, representatives from IRE, the National Association of ...

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Join Kristen Lombardi and David Donald of The Center for Public Integrity in a one-hour webinar that will help you understand how to investigate the ways colleges and universities handle allegations of sexual assault. This session is free but space is limited. To register please send an email to campus@ire.org. After 12 months of reporting, the Center has reached some troubling conclusions about how some colleges and universities collect and report sexual assault statistics, and how sexual assault cases are adjudicated in the campus judicial system. You'll learn how to make sense of federal mandatory crime data ... Read more ...

The Dallas Morning News ran a probing article that examines how the Dallas Police Department classifies what most people would think of as burglaries. The newspaper found that the police department often called it vandalism if someone broke into a home but didn’t take anything. The FBI, in the UCR Handbook (warning: big PDF here) that’s used by law enforcement agencies to classify crimes, calls burglaries “The unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or a theft.” The UCR handbook further distinguishes between burglary and vandalism: “A forcible entry or unlawful entry in which no theft ... Read more ...

I’ve come to the realization in the past couple of years that teaching computer-assisted reporting requires first teaching how to approach stories with a "data state of mind" — a term that I’ve co-opted from the famous Barlett and Steele phrase, "document state of mind." There are certainly many reporters who already do this — even if they don’t do their own data analysis — and these reporters are most likely the ones to eventually gravitate to CAR. Typically it starts when they come to the realization that they want to do their own analysis to measure something or find ... Read more ...

Change is good, especially for journalists looking to dig into the news. The change of administrations in Washington, D.C., will mean many, many other changes both great and small. Here are some data sources to help track the new regime and to determine just how substantive are the effects of the Barack Obama presidency. First, one of the best ways to watch and quantify changes in federal priorities is how the White House assigns federal personnel. That is monitored accurately at the Office of Personnel Management FedScope Web site. Voices inside the Department of Homeland Security wanted to shut ... Read more ...