The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
If you’re tasked with covering business, you might want to check out a new feature from Sqoop. The document-mining site recently announced a new geographic search/location filter feature for SEC filings. That means that reporters can look for all SEC form types, or just a subset such as Form Ds or 8-Ks, in their state.…
Read MoreInvestigative broadcast journalists across the country gathered at the 2016 CAR Conference and shared some of their secrets for bringing data to life on TV. 1. Get raw data KXAS-TV producer Eva Parks explained how her team requested complaint and violation records concerning noise at the Dallas Love Field airport. Unfortunately, the city of Dallas…
Read MoreDear Friends: I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mark Horvit has decided to take an exciting new job at the University of Missouri and will be stepping down as IRE’s executive director at the end of the summer. While this represents a huge loss to IRE, the board is hopeful that we’ll still…
Read MoreNICAR’s Small Business Administration (SBA) Disaster Loans data is now updated with loans approved through February 18, 2016. The disaster loans are the only form of SBA assistance not limited to small businesses; the loans help homeowners, renters, businesses and nonprofit organizations finance their rebuilding after a federally-declared disaster has destroyed their property. The data…
Read MoreFreelance journalist Samantha Sunne and Helena Bengtsson, data projects editor for The Guardian, spent an hour at the 2016 CAR Conference going over free, open-source tools that can replace expensive data cleaning, analysis and visualization programs. Here are some of my favorite tools the speakers mentioned: 1. Google Sheets Google Sheets is a widely known…
Read MoreThere are certain pieces of advice you hear over and over again at our annual computer-assisted reporting conference: Get out there, take risks and experiment. So at our recent conference in Denver, we sent University of Missouri journalism student Jack Howard to do just that. On this bonus episode, you’ll hear his five-minute experiment: capturing…
Read MoreBy Raven Nichols Training a newsroom to look for data and interactive ideas isn’t always easy. At the 2016 CAR Conference, Dana Williams of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and Rachel Schallom of Fusion explained how to introduce these concepts to your newsroom. The first step is to hold a training session. Here are a few suggestions:…
Read MoreNow updated for 2015, the National Bridge Inventory database can help you assess the soundness of bridges in your area. Journalists can use the data to investigate bridges by identifying those with structural problems, or that haven’t been recently inspected. Other key fields include average daily traffic and overall sufficiency rating. The records represent information from the…
Read MoreBy Daniela Sirtori-Cortina Doubt quickly took over me when the “Build Your First News App” session kicked off Friday morning of the CAR Conference. During the six-hour class — split into two three-hour seminars — Derek Willis from ProPublica and Ben Welsh from the Los Angeles Times guided the group through the process of building…
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