CAR Conference Blog

By Tyler Fisher Many NICAR sessions feature journalists telling other journalists how they can improve their lives and work. On Thursday, Ben Balter from GitHub made a pitch to journalists from the outside: Become familiar with git and GitHub and you’ll be able to make better products on the web. Balter said his goal was…

By Rebecca Lai Since the dawn of Wikileaks, the public has come to expect original documents. Often, however, government agencies refuse to cooperate and prevent reporters from getting their hands on original records. Even though the Freedom of Information Act and other statutes provide journalists with tools to negotiate, these laws still have flaws and…

By Irina Ivanova Why Medical Data Matters from IRE/NICAR on Vimeo.   Veteran investigative journalists Peter Eisler, Dan Keating and Charles Ornstein blitzed through a slew of national databases in “Wading through the sea of data on hospitals, doctors, medicine and more” Friday morning. After the session, Eisler and Ornstein talked about their journey to covering…

[View the story “Protect your work from prying eyes” on Storify]

By Donovan Harrell Edwin Bender, executive director of The National Institute on Money in State Politics, and John Perry, a data specialist at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, offered online tools for journalists looking to gather expanded data on campaign finance and donations during “Follow the money: Lead the pack in tracking campaign finance.” Created in 1999,…

By Rebecca Lai Journalists love and hate documents. It’s a pain to sift through thousands of pages of documents, but it’s also what makes for great stories. Based on complaints from reporters and problems in newsrooms, some folks in the NICAR community developed easy-to-use tools to help you file, index and search various types of…