Monday April 30, is the deadline to join IRE or renew your membership and you'll be entered in a drawing for one of three prizes:

* Three hotel nights and free registration for the IRE Conference in Boston, June 14-17

* Two additional years of IRE membership at no cost

* $50 in merchandise from IRE's store (can be used online or at the conference)

You'll get access to our library of more than 3,000 tipsheets, 25,000 investigative stories, the IRE Journal and new online features we'll be unveiling in the coming months that will provide more ...

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Congratulations to several IRE members who won Pulitzer Prizes today.

Members Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong of The Seattle Times were awarded the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting for their project, “Methadone and the Politics of Pain.”-an investigation that exposed Washington State’s push of the cheaper painkiller methadone.  Berens and Armstrong were also awarded the Selden Ring Award and an IRE Award for this story. The two presented at IRE’s Watchdog Workshop in Los Angeles this past Friday. For their tips on how to find, start and write a great story click here.

Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman ...

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Longtime IRE member David Dietz, president of our organization in 2001-02, passed away Wednesday, June 1,  after a battle with cancer. Dave was a beloved colleague and friend to many of us, and was honored last year with IRE's Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his many contributions. Over the past decade, Dave worked as a San Francisco-based investigative reporter for Bloomberg Markets magazine. He had a 40-year career in journalism, including positions at TheStreet.com, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner. He won more than 30 national and regional reporting awards for investigating corporate fraud ... Read more ...

We'd like to thank everyone who helped make IRE's membership drive a success and announce the winners in the drawing. More than 440 people joined IRE, renewed expired memberships or signed on for another year during October. We also received several thousand dollars in donations, made by those of you who chose to offer additional support when you joined or renewed. Much of this success was due to the many members who volunteered to recruit and who held informational sessions in their newsrooms or on their campuses.  IRE is only as strong as its membership, and we are ... Read more ...

Holly Whisenhunt Stephen was the best executive producer an investigative reporter could ever ask for. [caption id="attachment_149" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Holly Whisenhunt Stephen"][/caption] Holly, an award-winning journalist and a longtime IRE member, died Nov. 28 after a long battle with cancer. She was 38. Holly spent much of her career in Texas, working for TV newsrooms in Stephenville, Waco, Austin, Houston and San Antonio, before moving to WTHR in Indianapolis. While in Indianapolis for the past three years, Holly helped lead WTHR’s 13 Investigates unit to national recognition, including an IRE Award, a Peabody award ... 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 ...

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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 ...