Get the tools and the tricks of the trade you need to be a better, faster watchdog journalist.

Each Watchdog Workshop will include several core sessions designed to improve your ability to quickly find information on the Web, work with key documents and data that will help you add depth to your daily work, and produce quick-hit enterprise stories. In addition, these workshop will give you tips on bulletproofing stories, digging deeper on the Web with social media, search engines and much more.

Sessions are designed for reporters, editors, and producers from small, midsize and large publications, TV, radio stations ...

Insult to injury | Tampa Bay Times

Trauma patients, who have no choice in where the ambulance takes them, are being charged as much as $33,000 the moment they enter a Florida trauma center. That money doesn’t account for X-rays or treatment; it’s just a cover charge, and thousands of patients have been billed more for it than for their actual medical care. The Tampa Bay Times, in an unprecedented data analysis, found that this fee, pushed a decade ago by industry lobbyists, has spiraled out of control. Taking it to unprecedented heights: One of ...

Couldn't make it to all of the sessions on your NICAR Conference wish list? We've got audio from nearly every panel and session. Full-length recordings are only available to IRE members. Some short audio clips will be made available to the public using Soundcloud.

To access conference audio, log in to IRE website and go to the CAR Conference schedule page. Find the session you'd like to listen to and click through to the landing page. If you don't remember the name or date of the session, try using the speakers page to look up a ...

Ohio, like many others, is a highly gerrymandered state.

Although it’s a considered a swing state in presidential politics, the state’s congressional delegation, Ohio House and Senate are overwhelmingly Republican. In 2012, for example, President Barack Obama beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney by 3 percentage points, but three fourths of the state’s 16 congressional districts were won by Republican candidates.

That’s because the state Legislature draws the congressional districts in Ohio, and Republicans have been in charge since 1990. The Republicans packed as many Democratic voters as possible into four safe Democratic districts with large urban ...

Global News obtained 11 years of collision data and found that “Torontohenge,” when the setting sun aligns with Toronto’s east-west street grid and forces drivers to squint through salt-crusted windshields, coincides with the third-worst day of the year for car accidents.

Get the full story and graphic.

By Brittany Collins

Michael Pell, a reporter on the Reuters data team in New York, and Joce Sterman, an investigative reporter for WMAR-Baltimore, showed journalists at the 2014 CAR Conference how to mine inspection reports for data.

Several departments hold inspection documents, Sterman said.

• Local health departments keep inspection files on restaurants, schools, airport facilities, school cafeterias and convenience stores.
• State departments of labor, license and regulation keep documents on elevators, amusement park rides, bounce houses and railroad companies.
• State departments of education keep records on daycare facilities and childcare.

Pell suggested reporters look for data in several places:

• Inspector ...

By Kimberly Fields

Tor Ekeland, an attorney who represents defendants in federal prosecutions under the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act; Scott Klein, senior editor of news applications at ProPublica; and Isaac Wolf, a national reporter for Scripps News, talked about the ethical issues surrounding web scraping during the session “Hacks or Hackers?”

Here are some of the highlights:

• Assume you are going to be challenged: Wolf recently was threatened under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) after he and his news team scrapped 170,000 files, finding a data breach and fraudulent signatures. CFAA prohibits unauthorized access to protected computers ...