If you fill out the "Forgot Password" form but don't get an email to reset your password within 5-10 minutes, please email logistics@ire.org for assistance.
Our annual data journalism conference will be taking place March 8-11, 2018 in Chicago — and we want your input!
Use this form to share ideas, suggestions and other comments you think will help us plan the best possible conference. The only required field is your contact information (in case we want to follow up). No suggestion is too small.
Here are a few ways you can use this form:
Have several ideas? Great! Feel free to fill out the form as many times as you’d like. And help us spread the word by sharing this form with friends and colleagues.
Make sure to get your ideas in by Sept. 22.
Please direct questions to conference@ire.org.
Chris Vachon will join IRE on Sept. 18 as director of partnerships to lead efforts involving fundraising, sponsorships, fellowships and scholarships, business partnerships and related new initiatives.
For the past 13 years, Vachon has worked at the national SPJ headquarters in Indianapolis, including the past 11 years as associate executive director. She brings a wealth of experience and an impressive track record to her new role. At SPJ, her work included grant management, fundraising, conference and event planning, conference sponsorships, business partnerships and scholarships. As associate executive director, she helped manage a staff of 12 employees.
One notable example of her many accomplishments: An SPJ partnership with Google News Lab that has trained 8,000 journalists during the past two years on how best to use Google tools for reporting and storytelling. She has managed all facets of the program.
“IRE will benefit from her deep network among foundations, funders, other journalism groups and journalists across the country,” IRE Executive Director Doug Haddix said. “I’ve seen Chris’s work firsthand for several years and have been impressed with her energy and dedication to strengthening journalism.”
Previously, Vachon worked as a sales representative for Standard Register Co. and assistant dean of students at Purdue University. She earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Ball State University in Indiana and a master’s degree in higher education administration from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
DocumentCloud will have a new home at Temple University under the leadership of Aron Pilhofer, one of the platform’s co-founders.
Effective Aug. 1, DocumentCloud will be housed at an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit and operate in collaboration with Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication in Philadelphia.
The organization has received $250,000 in new funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to build additional features and develop a payment plan allowing users to support the platform directly.
The IRE board of directors voted unanimously to transfer DocumentCloud, a cloud-based platform that allows users to share, analyze and publish documents online.
"DocumentCloud's impact on journalism has been profound. But it's time to evolve the platform beyond IRE in an environment that makes the service its singular priority,” said Matt Goldberg, president of the IRE board of directors. “We are thrilled that Temple and the Knight Foundation have answered that call.”
DocumentCloud was founded in 2009 with a grant from the Knight News Challenge. After two years as an independent nonprofit organization, DocumentCloud became a project of Investigative Reporters and Editors in June 2011.
With the transfer, there will be no interruption of service or features in the open-source platform.
“DocumentCloud has achieved a level of adoption well beyond anything we could have imagined when we first launched,” said Pilhofer, the James B. Steele chair in journalism innovation at Temple. “It has become an indispensable tool journalists around the world use every day. Now our priority is to ensure that DocumentCloud is around for the long haul. This support will help us do just that, while at the same time enhancing learning opportunities for our students.”
DocumentCloud hosts more than 3.6 million source documents, which have been used by 8,400 journalists in more than 1,600 organizations worldwide. High-profile stories produced through use of the platform include coverage of Wikileaks, Panama Papers and the Edward Snowden documents.
Jennifer Preston, Knight Foundation vice president for journalism, said that the platform gives journalists an important tool for transparency and trust.
“At a time when trust in news is at an all-time low, DocumentCloud helps journalists build connections with the public by allowing them to publish original documents and be fully transparent with readers about what they know and don't know,” Preston said. “We must work to ensure this important tool stays strong into the future.”
Pilhofer will serve as executive director of DocumentCloud. The board will include DocumentCloud co-founder Scott Klein, deputy managing editor at ProPublica.
Read more about DocumentCloud’s future on the Knight Foundation website.
Editor's Note:
This article first ran on July 20, 2017 on the Investigative Reporting Workshop's website.
By Clairissa Baker and Yang Sun, Investigative Reporting Workshop
A new citywide data policy in Washington, D.C., shows there is no simple way for cities to clearly budget open data initiatives.
Meanwhile, as the city works this summer to implement its newly formed data policy and decide what’s releasable, experts say when more data sets are made available online the result will be better access to information, better journalism and more government transparency.
For investigative journalists, the upcoming data release — expected within nine months after the issuance of the order and adding to the 900 sets already available online — means greater access to information on everything from traffic patterns to invaluable health statistics.
“Just knowing the government has that data is a huge step,” said Kate Rabinowitz, founder of the DataLensDC blog that works to help citizens better understand and access the city’s open data.
But Washington officials can’t seem to determine how much the massive data availability will cost taxpayers. The work being done now at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer is in response to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s April 27 executive order, which calls for an inventory and classification of all government data.
Open data matters differently to each citizen, but it can matter a lot.
One example is Google Maps. Many use this tool every day, and it is based on open transit data from city governments, allowing people to determine best routes and commute times.
Rabinowitz also acts as one of the co-captains of Code for DC, a civic hacker community that translates data sets into content usable to average citizens.
One project Code for DC works on is called Housing Insights. The city has a massive amount of data on affordable housing, “but they are all over the place and it’s kind of messy,” Rabinowitz said.
A team of coders and data scientists collected all the relevant data sets and created interactive visualizations, allowing policy makers and the public to understand what affordable housing looks like in the District and what the challenges and opportunities are.
By sharing civic data, people will become more informed of city services, journalists will tell better stories of the city and institutes will advance their research, said Stephen Larrick, the open cities director for the Sunlight Foundation.
Quantifying the benefits of open data, however, can be as hard as measuring the costs.
“How can you put a price on an informed public,” Larrick said. “And how can you put a price on people having the facts that they are relevant to the decisions that are being made?”
It’s not the first time the city has made data public, but this new policy is an important step in making the government more transparent and accountable, experts say.
A decade after the debut of the city’s online data portal, there are more than 900 data sets available online on a range of subjects from information about 311 calls to crime reports to others on health care and government spending.
As city leaders work to implement the policy, there’s no clear cost associated with the rollout.
“It can be a real irony,” said Larrick. “Many open data programs are about being transparent about things like cost,” yet the cost of the program is obscure.
A number of aspects contribute to the inability to quantify costs of open data.
“Open data is a new thing, and very often it is the thing that is a part of someone’s job, but it’s not someone’s full-time job,” Larrick said.
Employees might work on data infrastructure or web services, among other assignments. Some of these tasks fall into the costs of open data, but unless employees track exactly how many hours they spend working on open data, it is not clear how much.
Not knowing how much open data programs costs is often a barrier to implementing policies.
The city is not at fault for lacking a concrete budget, Larrick said, but “the government should do a better job” of examining and listing these costs.
An analysis of the 2017 budget and the 2018 proposed budget for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer shows multiple line items related to open data, including “data transparency and accountability” and “data governance and analytics.” Even in those line items, however, it’s unclear what is related to the mayor’s new initiative.
Each agency is responsible for finding and categorizing its own data, so the costs are spread out and vary widely depending on the city, a Sunlight Foundation survey found.
One of the biggest differences between cities is whether they use a contractor — two include Socrata and Junar — to host the websites that contain this data.
Washington creates everything in-house; the city pays its staff to create and maintain a website to host the city’s data.
In January 2016, Bowser announced the Open Data Initiative and created the Chief Data Officer position.
About seven months later, Barney Krucoff filled the position, leading a team of more than two dozen people who will reach out to each agency and coordinate data collection.
Before Bowser’s 2017 executive order, technical teams were already in place. After, those were rearranged with staff from Business Intelligence, Geographic Information System and the Citywide Data Warehouse.
“D.C. was the leader of open data in general, but we didn’t have a data policy,” Krucoff said.
He said the District posted its data sets in the early 2000s and built a website hosting data sets published by the government in 2007, both among the earliest in the country. The city even led a hackathon, called Apps for Democracy, in 2008, which Krucoff described as “new and novel of the time.”
US City Open Data Census, research co-conducted by the Sunlight Foundation, Code for America and Open Knowledge International, in 2015 ranked D.C.’s data openness 27th out of 100 cities, as San Francisco, Las Vegas and New York City took the top three positions.
Washington leaders hope to get back to the cutting edge of government transparency with the new data policy. Krucoff said what separates this administrative action from others is that it’s a data policy rather than an open data policy.
The government will not only log and categorize all of the data, but also create a system in which enterprise data is “freely shared among district agencies, with federal and regional governments,” and with the public when the information allows it, according to the data policy.
All city agencies’ data sets will be classified on a scale from zero to four, where level zero data sets have no confidentiality concern and should be completely disclosed to the public.
Significant steps will be taken to ensure the safety of information with privacy and security concerns. The policy includes a host of security protocols for agencies to follow while handling sensitive data sets.
Feedback from the public, such as transparency advocates and civic hackers, helped shape the District’s final version. The drafting team also looked at New York City, San Francisco and the state of Maryland, Krucoff said.
The government will proactively publish a whole class of non-confidential information. This will complement, but not replace, the Freedom of Information Act.
FOIA legally requires government’s reaction on individual requestors and covers items ranging from hard-copy documents to videos.
“I think FOIA will always cover a wider set of material, and open data will cover a more specific set of what we can be proactive,” Krucoff said.
However, there is a gap between the technical language of open data and the accessibility of it by citizens without a computer background.
To bridge the gap, data intermediaries, such as researchers and developers, play an important role. They use the data to make recommendations and tools that the public can understand and use.
Journalists use this resource to find information about their communities. Having information available online makes journalists’ jobs a little easier because the government can place data online that is asked for many times over, instead of responding to requests every day or every month.
“That transparency leads to, I think, a better relationship between government agencies and the public,” said Charles Minshew, data services director at the Investigative Reporters & Editors.
Opening up data is beneficial to both the government and the public, Minshew said, and “it is a true public service.”
Besides the promise of a citywide data inventory, the city also redesigned the online data portal by incorporating more functionality, including visualizations, search functions and interactive tools.
Michael Kalish, Rabinowitz’s counterpart at Code for DC, appreciates the city’s efforts in increasing the website’s usability.
“So I think they’ve very quickly went from something that was not very user friendly to a very approachably useful tool to the community, ” Kalish said.
More needs to be done, however, to make data truly open.
Rabinowitz encounters data inconsistencies and missing records while working with city's open data.
In terms of improving the open data quality, Larrick’s primary suggestion for cities is to reach out to communities and listen to their needs.
“It really makes the benefits of open data a lot more tangible,” Larrick said.
Krucoff hopes going forward that the data policy will empower analysts of each agency to explore the value of data and develop a community in which agencies have a common set of tools and data-minded individuals.
“We generally believe that data is sort of an important asset to the city that we’ve never really known,” Krucoff said.
The deadline to apply for the IRE training job has been extended to Aug. 8.
System upgrades at the University of Missouri, where IRE is based, took down the HR application portal for five days. The system is expected to open again on Tuesday, August 1.
Here's our original post with information about the training director position:
Help us improve watchdog reporting across the United States and around the globe!
IRE is hiring a training director to help journalists bolster their investigative and data skills. The trainer will help organize and conduct watchdog workshops and customized newsroom training; help plan national conferences; and develop innovative instructional materials in investigative and data journalism.
While IRE is based at the University of Missouri, the trainer can work remotely.
What IRE needs: The position requires spreadsheet and watchdog skills, excellent public speaking ability, a passion for investigative reporting, frequent travel (including weekends) and the ability to work successfully from a remote office.
What IRE offers: Collegial, creative and funny colleagues; a collaborative team atmosphere; and high impact in bolstering watchdog journalism around the world. The salary range is $60,000 to $70,000, depending on skills and experience. IRE staff members are employees of the University of Missouri, with attractive health insurance, retirement and other benefits.
Apply online by Aug. 8.
The University of Missouri is an equal access, equal opportunity, affirmative action employer that is fully committed to achieving a diverse faculty and staff. Equal Opportunity is and shall be provided for all employees and applicants for employment on the basis of their demonstrated ability and competence without unlawful discrimination on the basis of their race, color, national origin, ancestry, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, genetic information, disability, or protected veteran status.
If you have questions, please contact IRE Executive Director Doug Haddix by email (doug@ire.org) or phone (614-205-5420).
Projects investigating the U.S. war on terror, immigration and American business practices in Mexico have been awarded IRE Freelance Fellowships this year. The winners of the 2017 competition are:
The generosity of an anonymous donor has allowed IRE to award fellowships for the last 10 years. The fellowships give independent journalists a financial boost to pursue investigative work.
Visit our online library of Freelance Fellowship winners to see some of the work they’ve produced.
IRE continues to build the endowment that provides this fellowship, so please consider supporting the fund. If you’d like to donate, click here to make a secure credit card donation or get information about other ways to give. Please designate "Freelance Fellowship."
About the award:
These fellowships are for journalists who make their living primarily as freelance/independent journalists. Applications are scrutinized by three experienced freelance journalists; they are ineligible for the award while serving on the committee. Proposals are judged in part on the breadth, significance and potential impact of the investigative project. At the request of the donor, proposals dealing with whistleblowers, business ethics and/or privacy issues will receive priority; projects involving other topics will be given serious consideration by the committee as well. The freelance projects must be published or aired primarily in U.S. outlets.
Please join The Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters & Editors, Online News Association, Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists - L.A. and CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California /National Association of Hispanic Journalists to mix, mingle, mega schmooze, socialize, have fun and network.
WHEN: Tuesday, July 11 at 6 p.m.
WHERE: Molly Malone's, 575 S Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles, CA
COST: The mixer is free and open to all. Complimentary appetizers. Cash bar.
RSVP by following the instructions listed online, and join the IRE Los Angeles group if you haven’t already.
IRE has member-organized Meetup groups in six cities. Learn more about them on our IRE Meetups page.
By Ashley Sutherland, Arizona State University
Delays. Excessive redactions. Fees. These are just some of the issues journalists and other citizens face when requesting public records from the government.
David Cuillier, director of the University of Arizona School of Journalism, and Miranda Spivack, a professor of journalism at DePauw University, offered tips and strategies on how to obtain public records during a session at the IRE Conference in Phoenix.
Spivack started by sharing a few public records that she has found hard to obtain, such as the most dangerous highways in a state, and body camera and dashboard camera footage.
Cuillier suggested different tools journalists can use to ease the public records process:
Every week, reporters should submit one public record request using the services and tools available to them, Cuillier recommended. He also called for a reframing of the process. Reporters should not request records, they should “order” them, he said, reminding attendees that “the people” have the power in open records processes.
“It’s like ordering food at a restaurant,” Cuillier said. “It’s like ordering a book at the library. It’s like ordering something from the store or Amazon. You just put in an order for what you’re entitled to.”
When filing a public record “order,” Cuillier suggested not to be neutral or nice, and to instead use legal language in the request letter. Additionally, both the Student Press Law Center and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press have online record request letter generators.
Cuillier mentioned “soft” psychological tactics journalists can use to obtain public records:
If these “soft” tactics don’t work, you can try some “hard” tactics to get public records:
Finally, Cuillier suggested attendees support the cause by donating to funds that fight for journalists’ rights.
You can check out the handouts from the panel here and here.
Mining data and digging for documents can be powerful tools for finding families who may not be getting the best special education services. David DesRoches of WNPR in Connecticut, Brian Rosenthal of The New York Times and Heather Vogell of ProPublica shared this tip and more during their IRE Conference panel, “Investigating special education.”
“Remember that the story is still about real people,” said Rosenthal, who previously worked at the Houston Chronicle and investigated Texas students who were denied special education. His reporting caused ripple effects in state law and won him a top award or finalist position in nearly every major journalism competition.
Rosenthal stressed that, after seeing trends in data, finding real families can seem daunting. However, an active community of educators, activists and parents who care about special education policy can help reporters understand the quality of care and instruction students are getting in schools.
Once reporters review any relevant data and documents that may show a troubling trend, pounding the pavement is usually the next step. Look for families and children affected by any malpractice.
Vogell cited some key places to find voices:
Vogell’s presentation focused on two major areas of interest when it comes to accountability journalism and special education in schools: restraint and seclusion, and abuse and neglect, particularly in private facilities charged with taking care of students with developmental disabilities.
Again, she emphasized data as a way to frame concern. For example, she cited federal data that showed that while students with disabilities make up 12 percent of all U.S. students, approximately 67 percent of students subjected to restraints or seclusion had special needs. Those numbers help add context to whatever may be going on in a reporter’s own backyard, she said.
“There are very few centralized documents or data when it comes to private placements,” Vogell said. “A federal bill to create a more centralized registry of these places has gone nowhere.”
She said some key documents may help unmask systemic abuse of children in such placements:
DesRoches has extensively covered special education and explained that some districts have made sustainable improvements by using a process known as “response to intervention,” or RTI.
“Few districts actually understand it. Districts often use it to delay services, and so kids languish, fall farther behind,” DesRoches explained.
While the subject area may feel overwhelming, DesRoches offered a helpful breakdown on where to start when reporting on special education:
“Be compassionate to the subjects; be angry at the injustice,” he concluded.
Francisco Vara-Orta is a data specialist/staff writer at Education Week, based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
By Ashley Sutherland, Arizona State University
Although mental health-related police shootings and violence against law enforcement occur nationwide, there’s limited data on these kinds of cases.
During the “When mental health and criminal justice collide” session at the 2017 IRE Conference, Eric Wieffering of the Star Tribune, Kimbriell Kelly of The Washington Post and Josh Hinkle of KXAN-TV in Austin discussed how to collect and create data on a variety of cases involving mental health.
Wieffering discussed the lack of police statistics on mental-health related cases and the process the Star Tribune took to create their database, “Fatal Encounters.” This database documents all the deaths that occurred since January.
The Star Tribune looked at the following records and data to build their database:
The Star Tribune collected these reports and then contacted family members of the deceased to determine the prevalence of mental health-related police shootings in Minnesota. The investigation found that, in Minnesota, 45 percent of people who died during forceful encounters with law enforcement had a mental illness or a history of one.
Wieffering said presenting the mental health stories in a fresh way and finding people to illuminate the problem were key to the Star Tribune’s project.
Kelly spoke about The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series that investigated the number of people who were killed by on-duty police officers.
Their investigation found that approximately 1,000 people were killed by on-duty officers in 2015 and that one fourth of these people had a mental health issue. The Washington Post has continued to update this database for 2016 and 2017.
Kelly, a member of the “Fatal Force” team, shared how she starts an investigation:
Kelly also suggested:
Looks like you haven't made a choice yet.
