IRE News Archives

Child deaths in India push global issues of pesticides, food safety into news

July 19, 2013

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…

In a big freelance project, a little organization up front goes a long way

July 18, 2013

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…

Behind the Story: Solving the mystery of the porn copyright troll

July 18, 2013

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…

ProPublica releases open source version of Free the Files

July 17, 2013

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…

How this year’s CAR Conference turned Australian journalist Edmund Tadros on to programming

July 11, 2013

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.…

Behind the Story: Tracking food waste at a local institution

July 9, 2013

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…

IRE and Esri fellowships awarded

July 8, 2013

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…

Coverage guide for aviation safety

July 6, 2013

A Boeing jetliner operated by the airline Asiana crashed and caught fire at San Francisco International Airport on its arrival from Seoul on Saturday, killing at least two people and injuring more than 100 others. The National Transportation Safety Board has announced it will investigate, but it could take years to determine the cause of…

Nieman Lab hosts Q&A with new INN/IRE Director of Data Services

July 1, 2013

Nieman Lab held its Monday Q&A with Denise Malan, the new Director of Data Services in a collaboration between IRE and the Investigative News Network. In that role, Malan will focus primarily on obtaining and analyzing data sets that can be used by INN members; the data will also ultimately be archived in IRE’s library. She talked…

Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism to remain at University of Wisconsin-Madison location