The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Blog
NICAR received 21 submissions for its annual T-shirt contest, and voting is now open! Voting will stay open for about two weeks, ending Sunday, Nov. 2 at midnight. The proposal with the most votes will be sold as a T-shirt at the upcoming CAR Conference, March 5-8, 2015 at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis. Runners-up will be…
Read MoreIt’s not easy prying information out of hospitals and health departments. On our podcast this week we’ll hear from journalists who successfully negotiated for the data or documents they needed to fuel an investigation. Here’s the lineup: Gary Dotson of the Belleville News-Democrat shares the paper’s 2012 story about the state’s failure to investigate after…
Read MoreThe executive director of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting was detained in Russia Thursday “for allegedly illegally conducting a journalism workshop in St. Petersburg,” according to the center’s website. Joe Bergantino was kept for several hours along with University of South Carolina professor Randy Covington. The two men were teaching a journalism workshop to…
Read MoreThe Democrat & Chronicle is fighting a county’s denial to provide license plate information about seven newspaper employees and a couple government-owned vehicles, the paper reports. The Rochester, New York-based paper has reported that Monroe County is indiscriminately amassing license-plate information from high-speed cameras. During the summer, a reporter filed a Freedom of Information Law…
Read MoreChris Baxter Chris Baxter and NJ Advance Media wrestled out a compelling and untold story, let the digital presentation take the lead and came away with a “smashing” investigative success. Using a system he developed to keep tabs on lawsuits involving state police, Baxter came upon the stifled story of Kenwin Garcia, a Newark man…
Read MoreInterested in learning more about the story behind the new movie, “Kill the Messenger“? Listen to this panel from the 1997 IRE National Conference in Phoenix, Ariz. titled “Can Investigative Reporting Go Too Far?”. In the early 90’s investigative reporter Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News dug into the CIA’s involvement of cocaine…
Read MoreNICAR is looking to add new data sets to its collection, and we’re interested in your suggestions. We’re looking for national, multi-state, or multi-country data sets that are potentially valuable to reporters and are not easily accessible. Our goal is to enable access to and use of important data, and we need help identifying targets…
Read MoreYou’ve done all of your reporting and now it’s time to write, but how do you structure your story? Jacqui Banaszynski, winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, explored this issue during the 2014 IRE Conference in San Francisco, demystifying the process and offering insight on how to think beyond the traditional inverted…
Read MoreYou don’t have to be a full-time sports reporter to investigate athletes. This week we’re looking at sports investigations on several levels: college, military and professional. Join us for tips on getting around secretive athletics departments and digging deeper when players get in trouble. Here’s the lineup: Tom Roeder of the Colorado Springs Gazette discusses “Broken…
Read MoreThis week we launched Story Shorts, a new series of web videos designed to help journalists share tips and techniques they’ve used on a variety of investigative stories. We’ve paired the minute-long videos with related resources (tipsheets, stories, webinars and audio) curated by IRE staff. We’ve even made a few of our tipsheets free for a…
Read More