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Posts by adam@ire.org
Despite attacks, industry turmoil, journalists declare: We are staying
By IRE staff Editor’s note: Legendary journalist James B. Steele was one of the first to join IRE after it started in 1975 and has stayed active throughout the years in the organization, serving as a mentor for countless young journalists and participating in dozens of conference sessions, among other roles. A former contributing editor at…
Read MoreReporting on an American health crisis
By Nakylah Carter, IRE & NICAR When investigating topics with large data sets, reporters have to become creative and proactive in order to include all the crucial information to make the story pop. In this edition of Data Dive in The IRE Journal, we feature two investigative data pieces about the American health crisis. In…
Read More5 essential data journalism guides from Ben Welsh’s palewire
By Nakylah Carter, IRE & NICAR This edition of “Show Your Work” compiles five essential data journalism resources from Ben Welsh’s website, palewire. Welsh, a longtime IRE member, frequently speaks at IRE and NICAR conferences. His website offers transparent guidance for others to build their data journalism skills, while also providing tips and tricks for…
Read MoreProbing the ethics of controversial brain research
By Audrey Carleton, Bruce Gil, Emily Nadal and Zachary Smith The four of us met in a classroom in midtown Manhattan in the fall of 2021 — donning masks during the throes of the pandemic. Then final-semester graduate students at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, we…
Read MoreNew survey reveals state of investigative journalism
By Gerry Lanosga, Indiana University, and Brant Houston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Continued expansion in the nonprofit sector, a diversifying investigative workforce, and growing pessimism about the future of journalism are among the main takeaways from a broad national survey of IRE members conducted in 2023. Our survey of membership — made possible through the…
Read MoreHydrogen sulfide hotspots, regulatory failure
By Will Evans, The Examination, and Caroline Ghisolfi, Houston Chronicle We knew we had a story when Sam Birdwell answered our call and began talking openly. Birdwell had retired after a long career with the state of Texas, patrolling oil fields to make sure companies followed the rules concerning hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a toxic gas…
Read MoreReverse engineering Medicare, Inc.
By Christopher Weaver, The Wall Street Journal One doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to reverse engineer the federal government’s convoluted Medicare Advantage payment system. Taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year on excessive payments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage, but it is shrouded in secrecy and fueled by vast reams of…
Read MoreUnearthing a broken promise
By April Simpson, Pratheek Rebala and Alexia Fernández Campbell Every investigative journalist has been there. It’s early in an investigation, and the problem is the size of 27 football fields. That’s how much space the documents could cover if we laid them out. Where do we begin? That’s how we felt at the beginning of…
Read MoreMapping preventable death in “Bleeding Out”
By Lauren Caruba, The Dallas Morning News In the back of an ambulance in San Antonio, I watched as paramedics worked on a man they had pulled from a house with bullet-riddled windows and blood-smeared tiles. He had been shot twice, in the arm and chest. When I looked down at my shoes, I saw…
Read MoreInvestigating how loopholes and middlemen are breaking America’s H-1B visa system
By Jason Grotto, Bloomberg News In December 2023, with the migrant surge at the US-Mexico border dominating the national conversation, Bloomberg data investigations reporter Eric Fan was crafting a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that would crack open another problematic part of America’s immigration system — the skilled-worker visa program known as H-1B.…
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