We are pleased to announce that Elizabeth Lucas is joining IRE today as the new director of our National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) Database Library.

Liz comes to IRE from the Center for Public Integrity, where she analyzed data for investigative projects on political, environmental and health topics. Among the projects she worked on was Poisoned Places, which won the Sigma Delta Chi award for Public Service journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize and the IRE Award. 

She previously worked in the Database Library while getting her master's degree ...

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My news organization, Texas Watchdog, found thousands of dead people on our local county's voter rolls and dozens whose names may have been used to cast ballots after their deaths. We couldn't have conducted the investigation without the IRE and NICAR Boot Camp training in Columbia, Mo. Our story prompted local officials to remove two voters from the rolls whose names were used to vote after their deaths, and the story generated interest on the Drudge Report and Instapundit Web sites. Officials in Harris County, which encompasses Houston, have promised to meet with us post-election and have pledged ...

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The new truck accident data is available from the IRE and NICAR Database Library and, as with any data set, you need to learn the pitfalls of the data. Here are some tips for dealing with the problems in truck accident data and ways you can bulletproof your analysis that I learned working on a 2006 truck safety project at The Dallas Morning News:

• Compare state data to federal data. None of these will match up perfectly because of reporting and definitions, but they should not be drastically different. Problems at the local and state level will rise to the ...

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I knew the headline from the fatal luxury motor home crash would be short-lived, something like: RV loses brakes on mountain. One dead. I stuck a note inside my “when-I-have-time” file as a reminder to pursue the story later. Within two days, the accident fell off the local news media’s radar. When we returned to the story nearly a year later, our investigative team had not only uncovered new evidence about the RV crash itself, but also discovered apparent design flaws in an entire series of luxury motor homes. Lonnie Owens hammered the brake pedal of his nine-ton Monaco ...

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In most cases, when you want to match data from one table in a database to another, a common approach is to use a JOIN clause in your query. For example, if you had a list of candidates in one table, and a list of donations made to candidates (with one field having a candidate ID in it), you'd probably either use JOIN clause or a WHERE clause to match them together: (pseudo-code) SELECT * FROM candidates, donations where candidates.candidate_id = donations.candidate_id; But simple joins aren't the only technique available to journalists trying to learn more about their ... Read more ...