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How to use boating accident data in an investigation
FCIR created this map of boating accidents. Click the map for the interactive version. Last January, Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and NBC 6 in Miami announced a partnership to produce more local in-depth investigations. Even before our partnership was announced, we had already decided during a brainstorm session that boating fatalities would be one…
Read MoreBoating accident data for 2012 now available
Labor Day is just around the corner, and we all know that boating enthusiasts (and wannabes) are getting as much boating in as possible before it gets too cold. Hence, the NICAR database library is releasing the latest year (2012) of the Coast Guard’s U.S. Recreational Boat Accident Database. WHAT’S IN IT?This database includes accident reports from 1969 through 2012.…
Read MoreFOIA Machine sees early success on Kickstarter
On July 16, a team of journalists and developers launched a Kickstarter campaign for a project called FOIA Machine. They asked for $17,500 to build a tool to help journalists and citizens request public information — a “TurboTax for government records,” the team called it. Two days later, they passed that goal. A week later,…
Read MoreChild deaths in India push global issues of pesticides, food safety into news
Food safety is a global issue. I was reminded of that with the news that more than 20 children in India died after consuming school lunches provided by a government-run program. Some children remain ill and authorities are trying to pinpoint the source – possibly a chemical found in pesticides that somehow made it into the…
Read MoreIn a big freelance project, a little organization up front goes a long way
By the time I sat down to write the 6,000 word article I’d been reporting for the past several months, I was ready to quit. I had over 50 interviews, thousands of pages of documents and reports, contact information and source names all stored across my phone, random word documents, email drafts, and actual paper…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Solving the mystery of the porn copyright troll
By Dalton Barker Researching the connection between copyright lawsuits and a porn company can be tricky — especially while at work. Claire Suddath, a Bloomberg reporter based in New York City, navigated the murky waters before she published her recent investigative piece: Prenda Law, the Porn Copyright Trolls. Suddath discovered that Chicago-based Prenda Law had…
Read MoreProPublica releases open source version of Free the Files
The ProPublica News Apps team on Tuesday released Transcribable, an open source version of its Free the Files project, a web application that enabled the team to crowdsource a massive cache of campaign advertising spending documents. The open source version allows anyone with a DocumentCloud account to create their own application and start crowdsourcing their…
Read MoreHow this year’s CAR Conference turned Australian journalist Edmund Tadros on to programming
Edmund Tadros, a journalist at The Australian Financial Review, said he used to dismiss the idea that journalists needed to know how to program. He considered it a waste of time. Even after he took some basic courses in web programming, and learned how to create interactive tables for his news organization’s site, he remained unconvinced.…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Tracking food waste at a local institution
Forty percent of food grown in the United States goes uneaten, according to the National Institutes of Health. That’s everything from misshapen potatoes left in the field to the half jar of salsa going bad in your refrigerator. Most of us believe wasting food is bad, but many large institutions write off that waste as…
Read MoreIRE and Esri fellowships awarded
IRE and Esri, the leading commercial publisher of geographic information system (GIS) software, have awarded 14 fellowships to attend Esri’s annual International User Conference and IRE’s mapping bootcamp. Fellowships to the User Conference this week in San Diego were awarded to: Dana Amihere, The Baltimore Sun Gus Begley, Houston Chronicle Wendy Fry, NBC 7-San Diego…
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