I've heard a few NICARians lament that the IRE Conference isn't for them, that there isn't much that would excite a data journalist. In actuality there are many sessions I think you'd find interesting at the conference in San Antonio from June 20-23. We've also got hands-on classes in Tableau (a full day), Excel, Access (SQL and the grid), ArcGIS, Fusion Tables, Open Refine and more.

• Demos on sensor and drone journalism from Matt Waite
• An Introduction to Tabula: A PDF ...

Fresh out of CAR 2013 and itching for data to work with? The NICAR database libarary is offering discounts on popular federal databases to help you get started. The data library updates databases on a variety of topics. You can explore our data by searching for a specific database, or looking for data by topic or by agency.

Here are the databases we're offering at a discount:

$50 for SBA disaster loan data
Recently updated to include Hurricane Sandy! Track money provided to businesses and homeowners for disaster losses. A large database with more than a million records and ...

Fun does not equal fluff. Spice up data viz and you can “take a wonky topic and personalize it,” said Tasneem Raja of Mother Jones in the “Making interactives fun” session.

Also, fun interactives build your credibility for the hard-nosed investigations down the line. When readers see how you deftly handle dog license data they think, “We can trust these guys when it comes to data journalism,” Raja said.

Some examples of varying degrees of difficulty:

Doable
Mother Jones made a “choose your own adventure” app on how non-US citizens can get a green card, and a quiz on various ...

Think of a data dashboard as a bird’s-eye view of data that gets automatically updated in real-time. It’s like a news app meant only for internal use, and the ultimate goal is to make repeat reporting processes more efficient. Aaron Bycoffe of The Huffington Post and Derek Williams and Jacob Harris of The New York Times explained this on Saturday.

Dashboards work best when reporters and developers collaborate to determine the information that would be most useful to display. And they’re flexible: If things change, you can always go back and add new fields or take others ...

Not all data reporting needs to be a long-term project. Quick-hit queries are helpful for feeding the beast with substance, and they’re a great way for reporters new to computer-assisted reporting get used to the process.

The best advice, regardless of beat, is to develop what IRE Training Director Megan Luther calls an “arsenal.” This is a set of your go-to databases that you are likely to call on most often. Public employee compensation, crime reports, jail admissions, felony convictions, accidents, calls for service from local emergency services and voter rolls are all examples of databases that can serve ...

Reporting and app development don’t have to be separate processes. In fact, the earlier these workflows are integrated, the more efficient both processes can be. This makes for better reporting and presentation, which amplifies your value for your audiences.

This was the main take-away from a power-panel of Lena Groeger, Ted Mellnik, Charles Ornstein, Serdar Tumgoren, Derek Willis, and Sarah Cohen, moderated by Troy Thibodeaux of The Associated Press. These folks, who have produced some of the best CAR projects and news apps around, shared what they’ve learned on the job, as the field of news apps has ...

Lightning Talks moderator Derek Willis of the New York Times kicks off the event filled with fast paced, pithy presentations. Organized by Willis and New York Times colleague Aron Pilhofer, lightning talks debuted at the 2010 CAR Conference in Phoenix and have grown in popularity -- this year's lightning talks had an overflow crowd.

Ben Welsh of the Los Angeles Times channels Lewis Black during his lightning talk "Django Retrained: Five ways coding like a Web developer can make you a better investigative reporter."

The Lightning Talks was a packed event, with the audience spilling out into the hallway. Other ...

Take a ride to understand inspection data. Megan Luther of IRE said.

Buckle up next to an inspector and get to know their world: how often they inspect, how do they do it? How often? Do they inspect everyone on a set timeline, or just the new kids on the block? What is the inspection process? How long does it take? Do they announce the inspections, or just pay surprise visits?

Get the forms, too. Pretend you’re a business-owner and take a mental trip through the inspection process. The structure of the forms translates into the structure of the ...

John Keefe of WNYC said anticipate question before your audiences asks them. Is a hurricane headed my way? Am I in a flood zone?

Preparing for an emergency should happen before the storm sirens start blaring. The same goes for your data visualizations, Keefe said. His newsrooms uses Google Fusion tables, Mapbox and Google Spreadsheets to answer listener’s questions in crisis situations.

“Learn and play with (the software) now, because that will help you when things go crazy,” Keefe said. Do it daily, weekly, monthly.Build yourself a library of templates.

Here’s a list to start mapping emergencies ...

A nine year-old girl was beaten to death by her foster brother in Kentucky, but the tragedy did not become a statistic. The state agency in charge of counting abused children didn’t categorize it as a death, attorney Jon Fleischaker said in the “Legal issues, access and big data” session.

Local and state government goes to great lengths to hide what they find disparaging from people who want to see it, like reporters, he said.

A legal battle eventually pried the data from the recalcitrant agency’s hands, but Fleischaker said the case is instructive.

“The data that goes ...