InsideClimate News became the third, and smallest, web-based organization to win a Pulitzer Prize, placing first on Monday in National Reporting for "The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of." Months ago, reporter Lisa Song brought a database of pipeline spills to and IRE/NICAR boot camp and began learning to work with the data. She later wrote a piece for Uplink, IRE's Journal of computer-assisted reporting, about her reporting. It's republished below:

First Venture: Probing pipeline leak detection

By Lisa Song, InsideClimate News

I became interested in pipeline data after reporting on ...

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With a housing market once dubbed “ground zero” for mortgage fraud, Atlanta is still very much in the midst of the foreclosure crisis.

Even the nicest neighborhoods have been hit hard; the anecdotal evidence is everywhere. In poorer neighborhoods, entire blocks are deserted.

We initially had envisioned a series of reports quantifying the number of abandoned homes in a five-county area and explaining the reasons these houses sit neglected.

We brainstormed about which records would indicate a house had been abandoned.  We requested past due utility bills, code enforcement violations and unpaid property taxes. In Microsoft Excel, we built individual ...

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It didn't take too many records for us to realize that teacher absenteeism was a problem in western Pennsylvania public school districts. Districts were paying millions of dollars every year to place (sometimes under-qualified) substitute teachers inside classrooms, while paying teachers for taking time off for reasons that ranged from field trips to maternity leave, professional training to family sickness.

To gather the data needed for this project, we submitted state Right-to-Know Act requests to 73 school districts in seven counties.

One of the first challenges we faced was simply obtaining the requested public records.

In Pennsylvania, public agencies ...

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I don't remember how the subject came up, but at one point in a conversation with a mover and shaker in Sioux Falls, we started talking about hospital helicopters.

Sioux Falls is home to two hospital systems. Each system has smaller hospitals in South Dakota, as well as other states in the Upper Great Plains. The Mother Ship hospitals in Sioux Falls have medical helicopters, and it's pretty common to see them flying around.

The mover and shaker told me about a meeting he had with executives at one of the systems. During the meeting, a helicopter started ...

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Airport numbers and trends seem to be a hot topic everywhere because flight activity is so directly tied to the economy and local businesses and is a concern for people who just want to fly for pleasure.

Our airport in Boise often gives us information and is very easy to work with. However, no reports broke down the actual numbers at the airport by flights and passengers.  Once I dug through some easily available federal data, I found the airport wasn’t performing at pre-recession numbers like many thought or expected, but was doing worse than than 10 years ago ...

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My palms become sweaty just thinking about math. Taking on a dataset of 25,000 records? Turn on the armpits.

I’m a fellow with an investigative news organization in Pittsburgh called PublicSource. At 30, I’m a pup reporter on nearly every level. My first crack at a data story was terrifying. And incredibly empowering.

After a three-day IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting Bootcamp, I was hooked.

Back in the newsroom, we used records from Pittsburgh’s 311 non-emergency call center to analyze how the city was handling pothole complaints. We found that between 2006 and 2012, the amount ...

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Military affairs reporter Jeremy Schwartz had come across an interesting article in the Bay Citizen where they found the rate of death of veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was outstripping the number of deaths on the battlefield. While not a surprising fact, given the growth of veterans returning home and the waning of the conflicts abroad, it was interesting. Half of those who had died had done so within two years of the end of their service.

But for Schwartz it begged a more questions: How did these veterans die? We knew that suicide rates for soldiers ...

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Our newspaper’s analysis of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data revealed that 131 providers in the Atlanta metropolitan area claimed a UPS Store mailbox as their medical office.

In turns out, Atlanta medical providers were not conducting medical procedures in mailboxes. Most of these providers filled out the federal paperwork incorrectly.  But dozens of others committed fraud by  using the UPS Store mailboxes as purported real offices. With a sham provider number and a UPS Store address, they could also provide what looked like a real physician’s approval for unnecessary or non-existent medical services and equipment ...

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In this free-read article from Uplink, Gavin Off of the Tulsa World shows how he used local school crime report data to uncover a rise in incidents at local elementary schools. The article provides useful tips for journalists who'd like to cover school crime in their own areas.

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