As part of an effort by three journalism organizations to maintain public access to an important database of physician discipline records, that data is now being made available free of charge through the IRE website.

Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Association of Health Care Journalists and theSociety of Professional Journalists have protested the government’s decision to cut off access to The National Practitioner Data Bank, which has been used by reporters for many years to investigate issues involving lax oversight of physicians. The version of the data that has traditionally been publicly available does not identify doctors, but ...

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Your average CAR geeks - especially the old timers - follow a predictable route in tools they use for data analysis and sharing.

You start with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and everything’s going fine. But then someone tells you about relational databases, and suddenly you notice all of the things you can’t easily do in Excel.

Step up to Microsoft Access database manager and pretty soon you’re joining tables right and left, slipping terms like "Group By" and "normalization" into conversations and generally feeling pretty good about yourself.

But at some point, someone in your newsroom looks over your shoulder ...

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One of my personal annoyances came to a quiet end last week, when the U.S. Senate decided to begin publishing vote information in XML rather than the HTML that had been its format for years. The House, usually the institutionally more nimble of the chambers, began publishing vote information in XML back in 2003 (view the source on this page to see an example). Here's a Senate vote - it has information on the date and time of the vote, plus all of the individual positions. This makes it easier to parse the information into a spreadsheet or database ... Read more ...