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CAR Conference: Mini-Boot Camp Schedule

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For CAR beginners, special morning panels will be coordinated with hands-on classes in the afternoon. The combination will give participants a mini-boot camp experience with plenty of opportunity to apply what they learn to reporting and writing news stories. Beginners' track participants are automatically signed up for the following classes, following the IRE and NICAR boot camp curriculum. This will offer 10 hours of hands-on instruction in Internet, spreadsheets and database management. The 36 participants will be divided into two teams: Red Team and Green Team.


Friday
Time Panel or Hands-On Class
9-10:10 a.m. Internet 101: Better search techniques for the Web
• Benjamin Lesser, The Record
• Neil Reisner, Florida International University
10:20-11:30 a.m. Investigating business
• David Dietz, Bloomberg Markets
• Brant Houston, IRE and NICAR
11:40-12:50 p.m. Census: American Community Survey, American Housing Survey and other new
releases and tools
• Paul Overberg, USA Today (moderator)
• Dave Davis, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer
• Paula Lavigne, The Dallas Morning News
2-3:10 p.m. Excel 1: Performing simple calculations and sorting
3:20-4:30 p.m. Excel 2: Calculating ratios and rates
4:40-5:50 p.m. Importing data into Excel
Saturday
Time Panel or Hands-On Class
9-10:10 a.m. Year in review in CAR
• David Donald, IRE and NICAR
10:20-11:30 a.m. Dealing with denials of FOI data requests
• David Burnham, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
• David McCraw, The New York Times
• Jo Craven McGinty, The New York Times
• David Smallman, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz PC
11:40 a.m.-12:50 p.m.

20 years later: CAR and strategies for changing newsroom cultures
• Brant Houston, IRE and NICAR
• Anne Saul, Gannett Co., Inc.
• Terry Schwadron, The New York Times

OR

Writing the data-heavy story
• Jason Method, Asbury Park Press
• Mc Nelly Torres, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
2-3:10 p.m. Moving into Access: An introduction to filtering with Access
3:20-4:30 p.m. Access 2: Summarizing databases with counting and summing
4:40-5:50 p.m. Access 3: How to join tables, matching information from file to another
6-7:20 p.m. OPEN LAB for mini-boot camps: A session on finding, downloading and importing data (limited seating available; students might have to share computer time)
Sunday
Time Panel or Hands-On Class
9-10:10 a.m. Build your own database: The ins and outs of how to structure and maintain a database you create.
10:20-11:30 a.m. A final Q&A session, exercise, and how to take it all home.