Introducing the 2026 IRE Conference Fellows!
By Jackie Spinner, CJR Editor’s Note: This article first ran on October 6, 2016 on the Columbia Journalism Review’s website. After five mystifying (and let’s be honest, pretty wretched) years under the ownership of wannabe journalism mogul and investor Michael Ferro, the city’s No. 2 newspaper signaled a fresh start and a new direction late…
Read MoreIt’s once again time to enter the Philip Meyer Journalism Award contest. Entries are now being accepted online, through Nov. 18. Established in 2005, the award was created to honor Philip Meyer’s pioneering efforts to utilize social science research methods to foster better journalism. The contest recognizes stories that incorporate survey research, probabilities, and other social…
Read MoreAs part of our NICAR-Learn video series, we’ve released three new training videos on working with election data, specifically campaign finance and advertising. We’ve made the videos – and a few others we think might be useful for election coverage – free and available to everyone between now and Election Day. After that, the videos…
Read MoreEditor’s Note: This article first ran on the California Civic Data Coalition’s website on Oct. 8. Ben spoke at our San Diego Data Watchdog Workshop, a program funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. By Ben Welsh Last weekend, I traveled to the campus of San Diego State University to join a journalism workshop put on by Investigative Reporters…
Read MoreDoug Haddix Investigative Reporters & Editors, a worldwide organization representing more than 5,500 journalists, has named Doug Haddix as its new executive director. Haddix, director of the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism, previously worked as a training director for IRE and as an investigative editor at The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio. “The entire IRE…
Read MoreAlison Flowers (left) and Sarah Macaraeg (right) You might think you have to kill someone to be charged with murder. But at least in Illinois, you’d be wrong. In an investigation for the Chicago Reader, independent journalists Alison Flowers and Sarah Macaraeg spent several months looking into a controversial law called the “felony murder rule,”…
Read MoreProPublica recently relaunched its data store. As part of the relaunch, ProPublica also announced a partnership with IRE to manage sales of data sets maintained by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR), a program of IRE and the Missouri School of Journalism. ProPublica will begin marketing five of IRE’s most popular data sets to…
Read MoreView of Hurricane Katrina destruction in the city of New Orleans. (Photo by NOAA / Creative Commons) In the wake of any natural disaster, there’s a seemingly endless number of public service and accountability stories to chase. You want to know when the power is going to come back on. How many people have been…
Read MoreImage by Justin Grimes. Used under Creative Commons License. In September, New York Times reporter Susanne Craig checked her mailbox. Checking for snail mail wasn’t abnormal for her, but what she found was: a copy of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns. The document led to a notable scoop for the Times and plenty of lessons for reporters. Craig…
Read MoreBy Philip Eil, CJR Editor’s Note: This article first ran on September 28, 2016 on the Columbia Journalism Review’s website. I filed my first Freedom of Information Act request on February 1, 2012. I was 26 years old, and chasing a story about my father’s med-school classmate, Dr. Paul Volkman, who had been convicted of a…
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