CAR Conference Blog

By Alexis Allison “The only thing that white people have worse than black people is osteoporosis,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, said during the “Investigating racial inequality” panel. “That’s the amazing thing about America,” Hannah-Jones said. “Anything you want to measure, somebody’s tracking it based on race.” Susan Smith…

By Virginia Ward A series of small compromises between players and coaches often lead to high-risk operations within sports organizations. Syracuse University professor Jodi Upton, USA Today database editor Christopher Schnaars and Raycom investigative producer Jill Riepenhoff shared their experience investigating college and youth sports.   From major infractions to Title IX investigations, journalists are uncovering…

By Meredith McGrath Want to make sure your data is bulletproof and fact-checked so there aren’t any holes? Arm yourself with these tips from Tisha Thompson, investigative reporter for ESPN, and Sandhya Kambhampati, data reporter for ProPublica Illinois. Get organized When starting out, create a text file or a Word document and record basic information…

By Tyler Wornell The College Scorecard is a database with a treasure trove of data about higher education institutions, providing information about graduation rates, debt repayment rates and median income for career fields. There’s a wealth of story ideas sitting in the database, and knowing what data is there and how to use it can…

By Virginia Ward In his CAR Conference session on demystifying data, Hadley Wickham said his job is to push R as far as it can possibly go. The chief scientist at RStudio develops free tools to explore R, an open-source statistical language. He is also an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland…

By Yue Yu Kevin Collier from BuzzFeed News, Neena Kapur from the New York Times and Margot Williams from The Intercept shared experiences and tips at the CAR Conference on constructing a secure workstation while pursuing sensitive leads. Collier talked briefly about the history of hackers working with journalists to produce big stories and getting…

In response to high demand, we’re adding six hands-on classes today from 4:45-5:45 p.m. Originally, we had no labs scheduled during this time slot due to Lightning Talks. However, we want to be as responsive as possible to the number of attendees seeking hands-on training. Here are additional hands-on sessions offered today, beginning at 4:45…

By John Sadler Keeping a focus on your local coverage area can be difficult in the current information climate — idea generation, watchdogging and source cultivation all need to be juggled. In Thursday’s panel “Putting your town under a microscope — and keeping it there,” John Diedrich of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Matt Kiefer of…

By Kelsie Schrader For many, data journalism is a complex and daunting task. It requires time, skill and access to data and sources. Data stories on hard-to-access, marginalized communities, then, can often seem unapproachable. The perceived difficulties of reporting on marginalized communities have resulted in a lack of data stories about and for non-white, non-elite…

By Dariya Tsyrenzhapova Location is a common thread that can lead a story and reveal meaningful findings to better serve a community. According to Victor Hernandez of Banjo, geodata also serves as a catalyst enlightening “a technological and a reporting breakthrough” to tell hidden or overlooked stories in underserved communities. Joe Yerardi, a data reporter…