by Lise Olsen

Twenty leading journalists gathered in Mexico City on Feb. 18 to exchange information and discuss ways that Investigative Reporters & Editors can continue helping reporters who, under pressure and often at great personal risk, continue to do investigative reporting on transnational (U.S. – Mexico) topics such as cartel violence, wasteful government spending, political corruption, and the economic and social costs of the war on drugs. The event was the fifth in a series of bilingual workshops that IRE conducted from 2009 -2012, which were supported in part by grants from the Ford Foundation. To discuss next steps, IRE ...

Read more ...

Hundreds of attendees and dozens of speakers descended on St. Louis for the 2012 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference, for a weekend packed with data analysis, web development, other sessions, and a panda costume.

We had a full team of students attending and blogging about panels throughout the conference. In all, the bloggers covered dozens of sessions, on topics ranging from web scraping to best data visualization practices to how to find stories in data. Those blog posts are archived at the CAR Conference Blog.

Tipsheets for all sessions are currently being collected and added to the system, and will soon be ...

Read more ...

IRE will be collecting tipsheets from the conference and storing them in the Resource Center for members to search and download. Chrys Wu, a journalist and engagement editor, is collecting online resources from the conference, as she did during the 2011 CAR Conference. Here is the beginning of her online post:

One of the most popular posts on Ricochet was the collection of dataviz tools, slides and links from last year’s NICAR conference.

It was so popular, in fact, that people have asked me to make a similar collection again. So from Feb. 23–26, I’ll be updating ...

Read more ...

By Anna Boiko-Weyrauch
@AnnaBoikoW

It’s been nothing but unrequited love between computational linguists and journalists, until now. For years, linguists have parsed the English language by examining news articles, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Noah Smith, said at the NewsCamp::Text as Data workshop on Thursday morning.

“You may not know this,” he said, “but there’s a creepy field out there that watches what you do, gathers your articles and then goes and does science with it.”

The media finally showed some love and paid attention to Smith’s research a few years ago. His team analyzed ...

Read more ...

More than 100 panels, demos and hands-on training sessions will be offered at the 2012 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference. From the basics of data analysis using Excel and Access to editing a news app and mining unstructured text for stories, this year’s conference has panels for all skill levels of data journalists, as well as general panels for working with data on a variety of beats.

Early registration has ended, but on-site registration will be available Wednesday evening through Saturday. If this is your first conference, don’t be overwhelmed by the number of panels. The sessions are geared toward ...

Read more ...

Surviving rickshaw "bumper cars" and helping local journalists gain data analysis tools were all in a week’s work for IRE Executive Director Mark Horvit and Training Director Jaimi Dowdell, who recently returned from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

"What was nice about the training was how quickly a lot of the journalists seemed to see the value of using the tools," Horvit said. "Several of them were already talking about potential story ideas or ways they could use this to go back and do stories."

The training was similar to IRE's computer-assisted reporting seminars conducted in the the U.S. Horvit ...

Read more ...

As tens of thousands of soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan, journalists will have their hands full reporting on topics from veteran homelessness to mental illness. How better to hold the government accountable than by arming yourself with the tools to decipher complex data and the steps to finding compelling stories.

March 5 to 7 the New England Center for Investigative Reporting will offer a free training at Boston University where journalists, bloggers and citizen journalists can learn from veteran affairs experts.

IRE Executive Director Mark Horvit will present during the workshop, along with James Dao, of The New York ...

Read more ...

It was an unbelievable record for anyone, let alone a public employee. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that one Opa-Locka, Fla., officer had been:

“Fired five times and arrested three, he was charged with stealing a car, trying to board an airplane with a loaded gun and driving with a suspended license.…(He) split a man's lip with a head butt. He opened another man's head with a leg sweep and takedown. He spit in the face of a drunken, stumbling arrestee. One time, he smacked a juvenile so hard the boy's face was red and swollen the ...

Read more ...

More than 850 journalists, educators and other professionals learned new skills, shared ideas and discussed best practices for journalism at the 2011 IRE Conference. Whether you made it to the conference or not, there are tips and tools that can be used in daily reporting and long-term projects.Now that the conference is in the past, it's time to dig in and get to work. Here are some resources that can help:

Tipsheets from the conference, which are still being organized by IRE's staff, can be found in the Resource Center by searching for 2011 IRE Conference (Orlando ...

Read more ...

From plane parts cracking to air traffic controllers snoozing, there's plenty to investigate in the aviation industry. Join NPR's Robert Benincasa to learn about tools that can help you better cover the ever-growing issues in the sky. Learn how to expore the web to track down an aircraft's history, problems with particular aircraft models and much more. This webinar is free to IRE members and will begin April 19 at 3 p.m. (Eastern), 2 p.m. (Central), 1 p.m. (Mountain) and 12 p.m. (Pacific). Benicasa will highlight the FAA's Air Traffic Activity System ... Read more ...