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If you’re planning on attending the 2015 CAR Conference make sure to check out the special workshops and training opportunities that require pre-registration. You can learn more about each of these events by visiting our Special Training page, but here's a look at some of our offerings.
Techraking 10 <=: Bootstrapping the News
Sponsor: The Center for Investigative Reporting
When: Wednesday, March 4 from 1-5 pm
Cost: $50
What: Veteran data crunchers and programmers from The Center for Investigative Reporting will give you a virtual playground on your personal laptop that will allow you to explore all the tools you'll gather throughout the conference. In this four-hour workshop, you’ll learn crucial programming concepts and tools and -- most importantly -- why we use them. (Make sure you check out the required equipment for this training.)
Sponsor: The Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism
When: Wednesday, March 4 from 2-5 pm
Cost: Free
What: Money is in every story, from education to politics to metro, sports and entertainment. Learn how to explore the money across many beats. The workshop will be led by Brandon Quester, co-founder and executive director of the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonprofit media organization dedicated to statewide accountability journalism in Arizona. Learn more and register.
The following sessions are hosted by Tableau Public, a free tool for journalists. Unless otherwise noted, no previous experience with Tableau is required. Laptops will be provided for all participants. Seats are limited!
Interactive data graphics in Tableau Public
When: Thursday, March 5 from 9-10:30 am
Cost: Free, but must be registered for the conference
What: Learn how to create beautiful, interactive data visualizations on short deadlines. No programming required. You'll learn everything you need to build data visualizations and publish them to your website just like a video.
Advanced design and interaction in Tableau Public
When: Thursday, March 5 from 11-12:30 pm
Cost: Free, but must be registered for the conference
What: Analyzing data and coming up interactive visualizations is easy in Tableau but sometimes getting everything looking polished isn’t. In this session you will learn how to break away from the default formatting in Tableau Public to create interactive data graphics that match your style guides and engage your readers.
*Some familiarity with Tableau is recommended
Intro to data stories in Tableau Public
When: Thursday, March 5 from 1:30-3:30 pm
Cost: Free, but must be registered for the conference
What: Got a dataset and an impending deadline to write a story on it? Find the scoop and convey it with beautiful, interactive visualizations in a serial narrative using Tableau Public. It’s a fast, easy to use, and free tool for journalists. Visualizations will publish using any CMS and no programming is required.
Advanced calculations and analysis in Tableau Public
When: Thursday, March 5 from 3:30-5 pm
Cost: Free, but must be registered for the conference
What: Learn how to use Tableau to dive deeper into your data and ask powerful questions. We’ll be starting with a “messy” dataset and learn how to explore trends that would normally be difficult to see without further analysis and calculations.
Despite concerns over government surveillance, a recent survey of IRE members found that few have let those worries prevent them from pursuing a story or reaching out to a source.
In December the Pew Research center surveyed journalists who are IRE members about issues including electronic surveillance and digital privacy. Today Pew released its findings, based on confidential responses from 671 journalists, in a report and interactive.
Here are some of their findings:
How many times a year do police kill people? And what happens to officers after they fire a fatal shot? Those were just some of the questions prompted by the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. On this episode of the IRE Radio Podcast we’ll be talking to some of the journalists working to answer those questions.
Here’s the lineup:
Rob Barry and Coulter Jones walk through how they found and reported on a problem with the FBI’s system for tracking police killings. The story ran in the Wall Street Journal.
Sarah Ryley, Nolan Hicks and Dareh Gregorian of The New York Daily News discuss their investigation into NYPD-involved deaths.
You can find and download previous podcast episodes on iTunes or our new podcast page.
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
Part 1: Wall Street Journal
Part 2: New York Daily News
Additional resources for IRE members:
Rob Barry and Coulter Jones set out to analyze police killings, not poke holes in the system that tracks them.
But when their sources started questioning the way they’d looked at the numbers – questioning, really, the numbers themselves – the two decided there was a more fundamental issue to be explored.
Their December report for the Wall Street Journal found that the FBI’s national tally of police killings didn’t include hundreds of such incidents from the six-year period they examined. Barry and Jones received information from 105 of the largest police agencies in the country and found that more than 550 police killings recorded at the agencies from 2007 to 2012 didn’t make it to the FBI’s tally. Because the FBI’s numbers are believed to be the most accurate available, the findings show it’s next to impossible to get an accurate grasp on how many homicides, justified or otherwise, occur at the hands of police each year.
In the aftermath of Ferguson, Barry and Jones sought data that reflected how many times each year police kill someone. They’d heard that the FBI had the most accurate tally, so they started there. They got the info, ran some analyses, and took what they had to academics.
"Pretty much across the board, we were told, 'Well, you can’t use the data like that,'" Barry said. "'You can’t look at it like that. That’s just not right; it’s not going to work.'"
Hit with the realization that any story derived from these stats would be inherently flimsy, Barry and Jones made a decision: Instead of finding meaning in the data they had, they’d try to find out why the data had almost no meaning.
The findings show it’s next to impossible to get an accurate grasp on how many homicides, justified or otherwise, occur at the hands of police each year.
Barry and Jones turned their attention toward the inconsistencies in the reporting process.
The FBI receives data on justifiable homicides from the states, which collect tallies from individual police agencies. Barry and Jones first reached out to several agencies that they expected, through some lapse in process, weren’t accurately getting their numbers to the FBI. They asked for the number of times police had killed in the respective agencies from 2007 to 2012.
Through careful correspondence with the departments, Barry and Jones weeded out the rare non-justifiable homicides in order to produce an apples-to-apples comparison to the FBI’s numbers.
Their targets – 20 in the first round – were easy to pick out.
"An agency might have had five incidents two years in a row, and then suddenly there’s nothing,” said Jones, who is now a data reporter for MedPage Today. “So that means that either this agency has either really improved in that area of justified homicides, or they’re just not reporting.”
When Barry and Jones put their local numbers up against those from the FBI, problems with the federal statistics became clear. But they wanted to make the story more objective and the sample bigger, so they decided to expand their search to the 110 largest police agencies in the country. Their goal was to receive responses from 90 to 100 of them.
The process was taxing. Although some agencies posted the information online, Barry and Jones still had to send out more than 80 informal requests for information. They dealt with the gamut of responses. Some agencies shot the information back within the hour. Others asked for FOIAs, some claiming the info would cost thousands of dollars. Others said they didn’t have the info, which is typically compiled in year-end reports.
"I think when you request from 100 different agencies, you’re going to end up getting pretty much every excuse that every journalist has heard at some point," Jones said.
Many of the agencies said they had the information but were wary of giving it to the Wall Street Journal.
"So I told them: we’d asked for this information from a lot of agencies," Barry said. "We hadn’t singled them out. We were coming to them because they were one of the larger agencies in the country. And I think knowing that this information was in a broader context made a lot of agencies feel better."
As they became more familiar with the data, one city stood out as an interesting case study and ended up serving as the setting for the story’s lead.
In 1998, the Washington Post had reported that Washington D.C. had one of the highest rates of police killings in the country. The city didn’t report the data for the next decade.
And while plenty of incidents from the years Barry and Jones examined did make it to the FBI, the city didn’t report any police homicides in 2012. The reporters decided to lead the series with a 2012 incident in Washington D.C. that seemed to be a clear case of an agency failing to report to the FBI.
"I think when you request from 100 different agencies, you’re going to end up getting pretty much every excuse that every journalist has heard at some point."
- Coulter Jones
The two selected the case of 24-year-old Albert Jermaine Payton, who wielded a knife and was killed by several responding officers.
"They wouldn’t even tell me the number of officers involved in the case, which is information that would have been included in what’s reported to the FBI," Barry said. "So it was just this strange incident where two and a half years ago almost, this guy was killed by police and it’s still kind of this black hole of information that we just don’t know anything about."
Some of the biggest gaps in reporting came from Florida, New York and Illinois, three states that weren’t reporting any of their agencies’ justifiable homicides.
After the Journal’s story ran, New York said they’d start collecting and reporting the information in 2015. Florida hinted it would do the same.
And, probably more importantly: the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013, which mandates that agencies report incidents in which individuals die in police custody or during the process of arrest, was signed into law by President Obama on Dec. 18. It had passed the House before the story ran and cleared the Senate shortly after.
"There’s no question that it will include a lot of the cases that we looked at, though there is some question as to whether or not every case falls under its definition," Barry said.
For Barry and Jones, the story provided plenty of lessons. The two said they benefited from allowing the opinions of their expert sources to change the story entirely – a decision that, after already investing hours on an analysis of the FBI’s data, would have been easy to overlook.
"Certainly this data was perfectly fair game to use in a story, to say, 'Here’s the breakdown,' and I think that’s fine to do," Barry said. "But I think it’s also important for us to, when we’re told that it’s not right, that the information is wrong, that we take a hard look at that."
Shawn Shinneman is a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism and a student employee at IRE. Prior to graduate school, he spent two and a half years reporting daily news at a newspaper in the Chicago suburbs. You can follow him on Twitter here or email him at shawns@ire.org.
Listen to Barry and Jones discuss the story and learn more about reporting on police killings on the next episode of the IRE Radio Podcast, out Friday.
IRE members are amazing.
Last year, we launched an effort to help students get access to our resources and events through a Student Sponsorship Program. We knew that many of you were aware of either sharp journalism students, or programs that produce them, and we asked you to help by sponsoring memberships for those students. Nearly 100 of you took part, and the results have been spectacular. Today we're launching a second drive to bring in more of those young journalists. Our philosophy is that the sooner we can expose them to IRE and our members, the more likely they are to choose career paths that make them the next generation of investigative journalists.
So if you know of a student – or students – or of a school that produces great young journalists – please consider joining the sponsorship program. For only $25, you can give an IRE membership to someone – and quite literally change their lives.
If you decide to sponsor a student, please promote the program through social media. Use the hashtag #SponsorIRE and Tweet a link to our student member sponsor page. The tweets will be compiled on IRE's website.
We asked a handful of student sponsorship recipients to tell us how the donation made a difference in their careers. Here’s what Will Drabold, a student at Ohio University, had to say:
I'm now a junior at Ohio University, but I joined IRE during spring 2014 while I was interning at The Columbus Dispatch. While there, I got to know Jill Riepenhoff, now an IRE board member. Jill was a mentor for me at the Dispatch and kept pushing me to dig deeper in my stories. Eventually, she told me about IRE and her past involvement and it intrigued me. She bought me a membership and pushed me to apply to OU for funding to go to the conference in San Francisco. I got the money and went there with a fellow OU student.
The conference has changed my career path in two ways: it solidified my interest in deep-dive, investigative reporting and introduced me to a wealth of nationally-recognized journalists. The sessions were fascinating and I took notes constantly. But the biggest thing I took away from the workshops was the massive number of stories that are dying to be written but haven't been. I was actually in the middle of working on a several month project for the Dispatch about failed foster care adoptions in Ohio and had hit a road block before I went to the conference. Hearing from so many people who had been in the same position as me but had soldiered on was really encouraging and helped me punch through when I got back.
As for networking, I met top editors from newspapers of all shapes and sizes. I had one-on-one time with the editor of USA Today, the VP of Recruitment for Gannett and others. Most were impressed I was there before my junior year of college and that helped me build connections I've fostered since then. More specifically, I met Jim Neff, the investigations editor of the Seattle Times, while I was at the conference. When internship season started a few months later, I got back in touch with him. Long story short, I'll be working at the Times this summer on the I-team — literally a dream come true.
Far more student journalists need to get involved with IRE. If you love journalism, are ambitious — yet humble — and want to write the story no one else is, IRE will open doors for you to achieve your dreams.
IRE is proud to announce the 2014 Philip Meyer Award winners.
Three data-driven investigative reports were named today as winners of the 2014 Philip Meyer Journalism Award. The projects, using social science research methods, revealed how tens of billions of dollars were being used improperly by the Medicare Advantage system; discovered that temporary workers are increasingly being used to fill some of America’s dirtiest and more dangerous jobs with few, if any benefits; and exposed that government at all levels remains unable or unwilling to address the problem of rising sea levels while continuing to incentivize growth in those areas most at-risk.
First place is awarded to "The Medicare Advantage Money Grab," by Fred Schulte, David Donald, Erin Durkin, and Chris Zubak-Skees of The Center for Public Integrity. The project revealed nearly $70 billion in “improper” Medicare payments to health plans from 2008 through 2013. The investigation exposed how federal officials missed multiple opportunities to corral overcharges and other billing errors.
Second place is awarded to ProPublica’s "Temporary Work, Lasting Harm" by Michael Grabell, Olga Pierce, Jeff Larson and Lena Groeger. This series combined street-level reporting with sophisticated social-scientific analysis to expose a disturbing, little-noticed trend taking hold in industrial America -- major companies have turned to temporary workers to fill dangerous jobs in factories, warehouses and processing plants, and they face a much greater risk of injury than other workers.
Third place is awarded to “Water's Edge--The crisis of rising sea levels,” by Ryan McNeill, Deborah J. Nelson and Duff Wilson of Reuters. These stories examined the continuing effects of rising seas on the United States and the country’s response to an increasingly watery world.
The 2014 judges were:
Sarah Cohen, The New York Times
Brant Houston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Philip Meyer, Knight Chair emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of "Precision Journalism"
Read the entire press release.
IRE is looking to you for input in planning sessions for the upcoming IRE Conference, June 4-7, 2015 in Philadelphia.
Please let us know what you'd like to learn – and who you'd like to hear from – at this year's conference. You can submit panel topics and suggest speakers. The more we hear from you, the better the conference will be.
Proposals for sessions will be accepted from January 12 - February 6. It will not be possible to include every panel submitted in the program. If your panel is selected, you will be notified no later than mid-April. At that point, we will ask you to confirm your proposed speakers and provide more detail about the session. Since we are not able to accept every proposal, we do not recommend that you confirm each speaker in advance.
Because of the large number of speakers participating in the conference, IRE will not be able to cover travel and lodging.
When putting together your panel ideas and suggesting speakers, please keep in mind that IRE values diversity in many ways, including race, gender, nationality, geography, organization size and type of medium.
Please include as much detail as possible when submitting your proposal. To submit your proposal, click here.
Please note: This program is currently full. Please fill out this form if you'd like to be added to the waiting list. We'll contact you if a spot becomes available.
It’s time to sign up for mentoring at the CAR Conference in Atlanta, where IRE will offer in-depth coaching on data-driven investigative reporting techniques, news applications and tools. IRE is one of the largest networks of journalists in the country, and many experienced reporters, editors and developers are willing to share their vast knowledge.
These private, one-on-one sessions allow conference attendees to seek advice on challenging reporting projects, get ideas for further professional development and to forge connections for the road ahead. They are unique in that they are not designed for job seekers, but instead focus on teaching and sharing information.
IRE will pair you with a mentor, and contact information will be exchanged so that mentors and mentees can agree on a time and place to meet at the conference.
Space in this popular program is limited, so sign up by Monday, February 16, 2015. In order to participate, you must be registered for the conference.
Mentees should come prepared with questions, examples of work and story ideas. (Note: IRE is unable to provide private access to audiovisual equipment for broadcast mentoring. Please make your own arrangements if your mentor agrees to review a work sample.)
Join us for the first-ever IRE Seattle Meetup! We’ll be joining with AAJA and SPJ and gathering at The Diller Room (1224 First Ave. in Seattle) on Wednesday, Jan. 21 from 5-8 p.m. As with all of our Meetups, you don’t have to be an IRE member to attend. So bring a friend, colleague or anyone you know who loves investigative reporting/data journalism.
Please RSVP online for the event and join the IRE Seatle Meetup group if you haven’t already.
Not in Seattle? We have six Meetup groups across the country.
DocumentCloud is pleased to announce that Anthony DeBarros is joining our team as Director of Product Development.
DeBarros joins DocumentCloud from Gannett Digital, where he was Director of Interactive Applications, leading a team that built data-driven interactives for investigations, elections and the Gannett platform as well as publishing tools for the company's journalists. Before joining Gannett Digital, he spent 15 years with USA TODAY as a database editor and investigative journalist, working alongside the newsroom's database team on demographics analysis and investigations. He began his news career as a radio reporter in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and a reporter and editor at the Poughkeepsie Journal. He's a 2012 winner of an IRE Service Award for making Census data easily available to journalists. He's also been part of teams whose investigations have received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award, an Education Writers Association award, a Gerald Loeb award and other honors. A native New Yorker transplanted to Virginia, in his spare time he enjoys family, gardening, guitar, film and art.
He can be reached at anthony@documentcloud.org.
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