The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Blog
Every year, the federal government makes thousands of requests for court-ordered electronic surveillance, often without a warrant. And long after the investigations that spawned them have ended, the vast majority of these legal proceedings are sealed indefinitely from public view—unlike nearly all other aspects of American judicial proceedings. The Wall Street Journal surveyed 25 of…
Read MoreSee this post and more like it at NICAR talk, our data blog: ire.org/nicar Mike Soraghan is an oil and gas reporter at EnergyWire (an arm of E&E Publishing) and former NICAR bootcamper from 2013. For those of you who have been to bootcamp, you remember Open Lab, held (almost) every night after class wraps…
Read MoreWe’re offering more than 100 sessions focused on honing specific skills, covering key beats, digging into data and documents and much more. Here are a few highlights we recently added to the schedule: This year’s Showcase Panel will focus on government surveillance – how to cover it as a story and how those prying eyes…
Read MoreVideo by Ryan Kath and John Woods, KSHB KSHB-Kansas City’s year-long investigation into a widespread real estate fraud scheme started simple – with a tip from an observant neighbor. But when reporter Ryan Kath started looking into the housing documents, he spotted a bigger problem. Someone had been stealing homes by forging signature of both the living…
Read MoreEight Houston Police Department detectives have been disciplined for failing to properly investigate more than two-dozen homicide cases spanning almost a decade. The victims were as young as 11 months old. They were nearly all black or Hispanic. They were walking along the sidewalk or just answering their door when they were killed. When news…
Read MoreIn the weeks leading up to a botched execution, an Oklahoma assistant attorney general referred to defense attorneys’ warnings that the execution could go awry as “hysterical speculation,” records released to the Tulsa World show. Assistant Attorney General John Hadden also wrote in a March 21 email that he was “not eager to answer a…
Read MoreIRE and the University of Missouri Journalism School are offering a special workshop Sept. 4-7 that will introduce the basics of newsroom programming by teaching how to build one of the simplest but most useful tools in a data journalist’s toolbox: a web scraper designed to automate the downloading of data. The workshop will also…
Read MoreOf the Wyoming Legislature’s 90 members, only 28 lawmakers got one bill passed in this year’s legislative session, according to a Casper Star-Tribune analysis. Thirty-nine didn’t succeed in getting any bills passed. Fourteen didn’t sponsor anything. But passing bills is only one way to measure a lawmaker’s effectiveness. “There are a lot of legislators who…
Read MoreNeed help with a federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request? Wondering how the whole FOIA process works? Want to better understand an agency’s response to your request? Sign up for a short one-on-one session with a representative from the federal FOIA Ombudsman’s office. The Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) is a neutral office…
Read MoreThere’s still time to register for the IRE Conference in San Francisco. But if you’re still on the fence, we hope this will help. We asked some of our members to tell us why they think you should go to IRE14.
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