IRE News
Behind 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…
Read MoreCoverage guide for aviation safety
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…
Read MoreNieman Lab hosts Q&A with new INN/IRE Director of Data Services
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…
Read MoreWisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism to remain at University of Wisconsin-Madison location
Andy Hall, of the Wisconsin CEnter for Investigative Journalism, addresses IRE members at the 2013 Awards Luncheon on June 22 in San Antonio. Photo by Travis Hartman The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Wisconsin State Journal report that Gov. Scott Walker has decided to veto a budget measure that would have forced the nonprofit Wisconsin…
Read MoreIRE remembers Kelly Guckian
For many of us in this organization we have two families – our personal one and our IRE family. Today I was heartbroken to hear that we’d lost Kelly Guckian from our IRE family. For those of you who didn’t get the pleasure to meet Kelly, she was kind and sincere. She also loved data,…
Read MoreU.S. Border Patrol wins Inaugural Golden Padlock Award
The Golden Padlock Award. Photo: Travis Hartman. Investigative Reporters and Editors has named the U.S. Border Patrol as the winner of its first annual Golden Padlock Award recognizing a U.S. government agency or individual for unrelenting commitment to undermining the public’s right to know. The country’s largest law-enforcement agency was chosen among dozens of nominations…
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