During the weeklong IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting Boot Camp you wake up thinking about spreadsheet pivot tables and practice so many database queries that you never want to ask another question that requires a “WHERE” statement. But the most important lesson that gets drilled into your head is a simple one: practice, practice, practice.

After I left the January 2011 boot camp, I tested out my skills on some smaller stories.  I took a look at the public and private colleges that received Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits, which was primarily an exercise in cleaning up a Microsoft Excel ...

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Every day, thousands of Muskegon County residents pour into their favorite restaurants to dine with friends and family. Yet until now, little was known about whether those restaurants followed practices aimed at preventing people from getting sick.

While looking through more than 22,000 electronic health-inspection records spanning four years, I found numerous instances where restaurants repeatedly violated rules that help prevent foodborne illness. Schools, hospitals and food stands were cited for breaking the rules, too.

Raw chicken and crabmeat sitting out at room temperature. Food kept past its expiration date. Cockroaches, mice and fruit flies living in kitchens. Employees ...

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Somewhere in the tilting tower of boxes that passes for my personal archive are the files from my first attempt at data journalism—an investigative piece about the Minneapolis Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit. You’ll find no CDs with database files in there. No printed spreadsheets either; just a small stack of hand-drawn grids with case counts, closure stats, and other vitals. I don’t even know if I had Microsoft Excel installed on my work computer at the time. It never occurred to me that there might be a better way to store and process the information ...

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For 20 years, an obscure Virginia regulatory board has forced thousands of landowners to lease their mineral rights to private energy corporations.

The corporations who drain natural gas belonging to landowners are required to pay them royalties. But whenever conflicts arise over gas ownership, the Virginia Gas and Oil Board places royalties into escrow accounts. Landowners receive no accounting of these royalties and cannot collect them without clearing enormous legal hurdles. Only two state employees monitor payments into the escrow, which now contains $25 million and has never undergone a compliance audit.

When I started my reporting, I wanted to ...

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I was warned prior to IRE and NICAR’s CAR Boot Camp that many attendees leave feeling overwhelmed. And at the end of the five-day class in Minneapolis in early October, I felt … overwhelmed. But with my employer, The Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, having spent a decent amount of money sending me to the camp, I was not in a position to return home and not produce. So I got right to work on my first day back. By that Friday I had an 1A story filed, and in the days in between was surprised by how much ...

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During the 2007 - 2008 Arkansas hunting season, Mark A. Mann, 46, killed a deer in a county southeast of Little Rock. Mann, a resident of North Little Rock, Ark., said he uses a .50-caliber muzzleloader to hunt. "I hunt as often as I can, until I fill all of my tags," he said. Normally that's fine, but Mann was convicted in 1989 of felony theft of property and then was convicted in 1994 of another felony: being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was one of more than 850 felons — including more than 100 violent criminals — I ...

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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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In March, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court published new rules in a legal publication directing state courts to omit more information from their public records including birth dates, addresses, work history, status as a crime victim and medical and financial details. The action came after other court records and proceedings were being moved out of public view, including one that involved a state legislator attempting to keep his divorce proceedings closed. While the new rules from the state’s Supreme Court were suspended after vocal public opposition, the issue of how much is being sealed started to bubble. The anecdotal trend ... Read more ...

It began with an email while I was on vacation. “Not to distract you,” my boss wrote, “but wanted to pass along that when you get back, you’re going to be taking on a … massive nationwide subprime data crunch.” At first, I wondered what I had done to deserve such a chore. It should have been obvious: Five months earlier, I had abandoned my job for a week to attend a CAR Boot Camp, where I muddled through the lessons, returned to work bragging about how much I had learned, but then did little to show I had spent ...

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In February 2007, Milwaukee Magazine published an investigation of financial conflicts of interest by Milwaukee County circuit judges. In a three-year period, four local judges heard more than 200 cases involving companies in which they owned stock, and the state watchdogs never monitored the conflicts. The story ran nearly 10 months after I first called editor Bruce Murphy to pitch a simpler idea: Let’s look through 424 private civil cases overseen by the five local federal district judges during the 2006 fiscal year. But, Murphy was on assignment steroids that day, and he wanted to know how many state ...

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