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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There are only three days left to take advantage of the early-bird rate to attend IRE’s Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference. The deadline to register for the early rate of $195 ends Monday, Feb. 14, at noon. You’ll still be able to register on-site, at a rate of $225. Registration information can be found here. Come and learn about tools you need to dig deeper into stories and give readers, viewers and your online audience the information they're demanding. The CAR conference offers something for everyone, from beginners to those on the cutting edge of digital reporting. We'll ... Read more ...

In this free-read article from Uplink, Gregg Hennigan of The Gazette in Cedar Rapids explains how he used FEMA data and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet tricks to examine the flood aid flowing into eastern Iowa last year. Hennigan, a local government reporter, completed the story after attending and IRE and NICAR computer-assisted reporting boot camp. - David Herzog

IRE and NICAR are once again offering substantial discounts on ArcView mapping software. And your first opportunity to take advantage of the almost $2,000 in savings comes next month. ESRI is offering ArcView single-use licenses at no charge to IRE members who agree to attend a GIS training event conducted by IRE and NICAR or ESRI. Purchasers must sign a three-year maintenance agreement with ESRI at a cost of $400 a year — with the first year’s fee waived. ArcView, the GIS program most widely used by journalists, lists for $1,500. During the maintenance agreement period purchasers will ... Read more ...

A great deal of the news coverage surrounding this week's Democratic National Convention touched on whether the party could recover from a close primary election between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Articles focused on the desire from the Obama campaign to reach out to Clinton supporters, and whether a rift remained in the party. But ABC News decided to dig a little deeper. They reasoned: campaign finance records are, of course, public -- can we use them to take a look at Clinton supporters who may not be so enthused with Obama's nomination? ABC Reporter Marcus Baram knew ... Read more ...

By Julie Karceski NICAR Data Analyst

One year later, and we’re back where we started.

The one-year anniversary of the Minnesota bridge collapse, Aug. 1, sparked a flurry of articles -- more than 100 in the anniversary week -- reflecting on the event.   Many revealed that bridges in certain states are in worse condition now than one year ago.

Newspapers across the country published stories with updates on the victims and investigations into what caused the collapse.  Many journalists also put a local angle on the anniversary by investigating bridges in their own communities and bringing public safety into question ...

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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 ...

Three years ago (in November 2005, to be exact, according to the Wayback Machine), Investigative Reporters and Editors updated the look and feel of its Web site from something resembling early Craig's list to something looking more like, well, this.

At the time, the site administrators, who no doubt had their hearts in the right place, put this thing on the main page:

Some people are probably looking at the image on this post, which is a snapshot from the old home page (pre-today), and a link to the even older page (pre-2006) and thinking nothing's wrong with ...

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