The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
Get the tools and the tricks of the trade you need to be a better, faster watchdog journalist. Each Watchdog Workshop will include several core sessions designed to improve your ability to quickly find information on the Web, work with key documents and data that will help you add depth to your daily work, and…
Read MoreReports of scheduled ER visits raised a concern internally that some cardiologists might be using the emergency department to get the costs of uninsured patients’ procedures covered, according to hospital correspondence. In some cases, the government’s Medicaid program and private insurers will pay for procedures done via an emergency-room visit that wouldn’t be covered otherwise,…
Read MoreGlobal News obtained 11 years of collision data and found that “Torontohenge,” when the setting sun aligns with Toronto’s east-west street grid and forces drivers to squint through salt-crusted windshields, coincides with the third-worst day of the year for car accidents. Get the full story and graphic.
Read MoreBy Mariya Moseley Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica; Lawrence Lanahan, an independent journalist working in Baltimore; and Steve Doig, Arizona State University, shared tips and resources for investigating racial inequality during a session at the 2014 CAR Conference in Baltimore. Lanahan, who launched a year-long multimedia examination of regional inequality, offered three steps for beginning the investigation process: Get…
Read MoreBy Brittany Collins Michael Pell, a reporter on the Reuters data team in New York, and Joce Sterman, an investigative reporter for WMAR-Baltimore, showed journalists at the 2014 CAR Conference how to mine inspection reports for data. Several departments hold inspection documents, Sterman said. Local health departments keep inspection files on restaurants, schools, airport facilities,…
Read MoreCouldn’t make it to all of the sessions on your NICAR Conference wish list? We’ve got audio from nearly every panel and session. Full-length recordings are only available to IRE members. Some short audio clips will be made available to the public using Soundcloud. To access conference audio, log in to IRE website and go…
Read MoreBy Kimberly Fields Tor Ekeland, an attorney who represents defendants in federal prosecutions under the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act; Scott Klein, senior editor of news applications at ProPublica; and Isaac Wolf, a national reporter for Scripps News, talked about the ethical issues surrounding web scraping during the session “Hacks or Hackers?” Here are some…
Read MoreThe Pentagon spends about $100 million a year to find men like World War II POW Arthur “Bud” Kelder, following the ethos of “leave no man behind,” ProPublica reports. Yet it solves surprisingly few cases, hobbled by overlapping bureaucracy and a stubborn refusal to seize the full potential of modern forensic science. Last year, the military identified just…
Read More[View the story “Highlights: The next generation of data viz” on Storify]
Read MoreBy Donovan Harrell Three journalists offered advice to students struggling with public records requests during a brown bag session at the 2014 CAR Conference. Student attendees talked about attempts to outmaneuver their respective universities, which had been denying public records requests using laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the…
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