The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Blog
Jill Riepenhoff of The Columbus Dispatch shares tips on investigating college sports, from how to examine the rule book and find story ideas to using the NCAA’s infraction database and digging into athletes’ mysterious departures from their teams. Watch it here. Riepenhoff has worked at The Columbus Dispatch since 1985 and as a projects reporter…
Read MoreLast week IRE’s Jaimi Dowdell and Liz Lucas led a four-day boot camp in data analysis at Temple University’s Center for Public Interest Journalism. The Center for Public Interest Journalism sponsored the training, lowering the cost from $800 to $200. Participants learned to clean and analyze data using Microsoft Excel and Structured Query Language with Microsoft…
Read MoreJournalists from an online news service in Hawaii have started a public service law center to help citizen’s navigate the state’s open record laws. Honolulu-based Civil Beat reports that Hawaii has decent public information laws, but in practice state and county government fail to follow and enforce the law. Patti Epler of Civil Beat describes…
Read More“As children’s birthday parties ballooned into themed events and pricey productions in recent years, bounce houses became must-have entertainment for some parents. But as the bounce house rental business has grown locally, so have the number of unlicensed operators. At least 170 of these businesses advertise their services in the Houston region, but only 30…
Read More“These days, Terry, (Mike) Newman and tens of thousands of other low-income Kentuckians feel under attack. Subsidies for child care and kinship care, the two state programs most central to their lives, which allow them to parent and prevent their fragile work routines from collapsing, were all but eliminated from this year’s budget. Earlier this week, families rallied in Frankfort,…
Read More“For decades, weapons confiscated by police in Texas were supposed to be repurposed for law enforcement use — or else destroyed. Starting next month, Texans will be able to purchase some of them instead,” according to a Texas Tribune report.
Read MoreThe Minneapolis Star Tribune reports: “If candidates for mayor of Minneapolis were running in Boston, they would file a report online of their campaign contributions every two weeks for six months before the election. If they were running in Seattle? Once a week. And in a range of other cities with a mayoral election this fall, they…
Read MoreThe Wall Street Journal reports: “National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said. The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.”
Read More“Even the best national data on chemical accidents is wrong nine times out of 10. A Dallas Morning News analysis of more than 750,000 federal records found pervasive inaccuracies and holes in data on chemical accidents, such as the one in West that killed 15 people and injured more than 300.”
Read More“The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America’s military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.”
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