Until recently, getting arrested in Philadelphia for possession of crack cocaine and admitting drug dependency would not preclude being hired or continuing to work as a police officer in the public school system.

A month-long, data-driven investigation  by The Philadelphia Inquirer found that in more than a dozen cases school police were themselves getting into trouble with the law. Even an open bench warrant issued for one officer charged with a drug offense failed to trip the school district's alarm.

In another case, an officer who showed up in court to face charges after her second arrest for drug ...

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Welcome to IRE’s new website.

All the resources you count on are still available, from tipsheets and the vast story library to our unmatched data collection. Our goal with this redesign is to streamline the site and make our deep reservoir of resources easier to find and use. We’ve also added many new features.

Here’s a quick guide to some of the resources you’ve enjoyed for years, as well as some of the new offerings:

• Tipsheets can now be searched more easily. We’ve added plugins that highlight the newest additions to the collection and the ...

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Your average CAR geeks - especially the old timers - follow a predictable route in tools they use for data analysis and sharing.

You start with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and everything’s going fine. But then someone tells you about relational databases, and suddenly you notice all of the things you can’t easily do in Excel.

Step up to Microsoft Access database manager and pretty soon you’re joining tables right and left, slipping terms like "Group By" and "normalization" into conversations and generally feeling pretty good about yourself.

But at some point, someone in your newsroom looks over your shoulder ...

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When the California legislature passed a law to drastically increase funding to nursing homes, it came with a promise that worker wages would rise, staffing would soar and patient care would improve.

The law passed in 2004. When I started working on investigative articles for California Watch in the fall of 2009, it seemed like a good idea to take a close look at whether the promises attached to hundreds of millions of dollars came true.

What we found was noteworthy. State and federal funders poured an additional $880 million into nursing homes over five years, moving the annual funding ...

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Data entry hell.

We’ve all been there. It’s the place where a team of 17 enters information off of handwritten expense forms into a database. It’s the no-man’s land where your summer interns type in the results of three months’ worth of records requests. It’s you combining summer camp listings from no fewer than 12 spreadsheets, each with its own adorable little quirks and styles.

Often, newsrooms tackling these kinds of monster projects turn to the least-common denominator method in the name of convenience. Generally, that means using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or an Access database ...

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The web now offers numerous free tools that give non-programmers the ability to create data-driven applications. Among those with the most promise, especially for journalists, is Google Fusion Tables.

Fusion Tables essentially is a free database manager in the cloud, allowing anyone to upload large data sets, merge them with other tables and create visualizations. It’s much more, though. The service has a detailed application programming interface (API), and basically can serve as a free back end to serve data and mapping applications. The service also is customizable while simple, with extra capabilities for more experienced users.

Of course ...

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A new specialty in newsrooms is emerging that’s giving data new reach. It’s separate from computer-assisted reporting but shares much of the same DNA. Like CAR, it involves working intensively with data, but the end product is a web-based software application, not a story. A formal name for this field hasn’t completely gelled, but at ProPublica and some other newsrooms we call them “news applications.”

What are news applications? How do they relate to CAR? How can CAR nerds work with news apps nerds?

Simply put, news applications are journalism done with software development, much like photojournalism ...

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I had always wanted to write a story about police chases after I watched a crazy high-speed pursuit unfold on local television. I wondered how often these chases go bad, and how the San Antonio Police Department kept track of that information.

Law enforcement agencies usually churn out tons of paperwork. For instance, I learned that officers must fill out a pursuit-evaluation form after they chase someone. The reports have check boxes for different categories of information, such as whether someone was injured during the chase.

When you see boxes like that on a report, chances are, someone at the ...

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Des Moines Register reporters Chase Davis and Perry Beeman spent months compiling and making sense of data for a series on air pollution in Iowa. But, with more than 1,600 polluting facilities across the state, there simply wasn’t space in the stories to mention any but the most noteworthy. That’s where data editor James Wilkerson and digital projects editor Michael Corey came in. They developed an interactive map that allowed users to see information about the facilities near them. "It localized the story to basically every community in Iowa," Davis said of the map. It also gave ...

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The central African country of Chad includes what some call the most beautiful, untouched wilderness areas in the continent—Zakouma National Park. The park is one of the last safe refuges for elephants in the continent. Poachers continue to hunt them for their ivory. National Geographic joined with the park’s rangers for a story called "Ivory Wars" and tracked the elephant’s movements, set up cameras throughout the park and documented the deaths of elephants in the area. The story is a perfect example of how creating your own database can add context and depth to reporting. It could ... Read more ...