Skip to content

The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients

Election 2016: Watch free videos on campaign finance, advertising analysis tools

By Alena Rehberger | October 17, 2016

As part of our NICAR-Learn video series, we’ve released three new training videos on working with election data, specifically campaign finance and advertising. We’ve made the videos – and a few others we think might be useful for election coverage – free and available to everyone between now and Election Day. After that, the videos…

Read More

Learn how to explore data with Python’s Jupyter Notebook

By Alena Rehberger | October 14, 2016

Editor’s Note: This article first ran on the California Civic Data Coalition’s website on Oct. 8. Ben spoke at our San Diego Data Watchdog Workshop, a program funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. By Ben Welsh Last weekend, I traveled to the campus of San Diego State University to join a journalism workshop put on by Investigative Reporters…

Read More

IRE names Doug Haddix as new executive director

By Alena Rehberger | October 13, 2016

Doug Haddix Investigative Reporters & Editors, a worldwide organization representing more than 5,500 journalists, has named Doug Haddix as its new executive director. Haddix, director of the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism, previously worked as a training director for IRE and as an investigative editor at The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio. “The entire IRE…

Read More

Behind the Story: How a little-known law can send you to prison for a murder you never committed

By Alena Rehberger | October 12, 2016

Alison Flowers (left) and Sarah Macaraeg (right) You might think you have to kill someone to be charged with murder. But at least in Illinois, you’d be wrong. In an investigation for the Chicago Reader, independent journalists Alison Flowers and Sarah Macaraeg spent several months looking into a controversial law called the “felony murder rule,”…

Read More

NICAR, ProPublica partner to sell data to non-members

By Alena Rehberger | October 11, 2016

ProPublica recently relaunched its data store. As part of the relaunch, ProPublica also announced a partnership with IRE to manage sales of data sets maintained by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR), a program of IRE and the Missouri School of Journalism. ProPublica will begin marketing five of IRE’s most popular data sets to…

Read More

Track the economic impact of Hurricane Matthew

By Alena Rehberger | October 11, 2016

View of Hurricane Katrina destruction in the city of New Orleans. (Photo by NOAA / Creative Commons)  In the wake of any natural disaster, there’s a seemingly endless number of public service and accountability stories to chase. You want to know when the power is going to come back on. How many people have been…

Read More

When checking your mailbox isn’t enough: 3 tips for investigating local elections

By Alena Rehberger | October 10, 2016

Image by Justin Grimes. Used under Creative Commons License. In September, New York Times reporter Susanne Craig checked her mailbox. Checking for snail mail wasn’t abnormal for her, but what she found was: a copy of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns. The document led to a notable scoop for the Times and plenty of lessons for reporters. Craig…

Read More

Six lessons from a five-year FOIA battle

By Alena Rehberger | October 4, 2016

By Philip Eil, CJR Editor’s Note: This article first ran on September 28, 2016 on the Columbia Journalism Review’s website. I filed my first Freedom of Information Act request on February 1, 2012. I was 26 years old, and chasing a story about my father’s med-school classmate, Dr. Paul Volkman, who had been convicted of a…

Read More

IRE Radio Podcast | Fostering Disparity

By Alena Rehberger | October 3, 2016

Brandon Stahl has spent years reporting on foster care for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. But at a meeting with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he stumbled across a fact he’d never heard before: Minnesota places a higher share of American Indian kids into foster care than any other state. A year-long investigation with data journalist…

Read More

IRE looks to hire new director of data services

By Alena Rehberger | September 27, 2016

Investigative Reporters and Editors is looking for someone with data analysis skills who enjoys tackling a variety of projects, leading workshops, working with smart and motivated students, and helping shape the future of data journalism. We’re seeking a new director of data services for IRE and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting(NICAR), a worldwide leader in computer-assisted…

Read More

Categories

Archives

Scroll To Top