Deadline today to pre-register for IRE Conference

The deadline is today at 7 p.m. CT to get the early registration rate for the 2013 IRE Conference. Join us from June 20-23 in San Antonio, and you’ll find panels full of this year’s Pulitzer and IRE award winners, new tools for investigative journalism, tips for investigating on your beat and much more. Early registration ends on June 5. You can also register on site, but the rate goes up.

Dozens of this year’s major award winners will speak at the conference, including several Pulitzer Prize winners, duPont winners and IRE Medal winners:

• Reporters from the South Florida Sun Sentinel, who won the Pulitzer Prize for public service after reporting on speeding off-duty police officers and the damage they cause.
• David Barstow, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, who revealed rampant use of bribery by Wal-Mart in Mexico.
• Brad Schrade and Glenn Howatt of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose report on infant deaths at poorly regulated day-care homes won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
• Lisa Song, part of an InsideClimate News team that won the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for their series on flawed regulation of the nation’s oil pipelines.
• Lee Zurik, who was part of a team at WVUE-New Orleans that won duPont awards for their original stories,Dirty Deeds and Hiding Behind the Badge.
• Arwa Damon of CNN, who was part of a team that won an IRE Medal for breaking the story on the U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi. Damon’s eporting revealed that there was not a demonstration and that it appeared to have been a planned attack that unfolded simultaneously from three sides. She discovered that U.S. diplomats had been warned by Libyan officials three days before the attack that the security situation in the city was out of their control.
• Bo-Göran Bodin and Daniel Öhman of Swedish Radio, whose “Project Simoom” report won an IRE medal foruncovering one of the most secretive projects in Sweden: the illegal financing and construction of an advanced weapons factory in the Saudi Arabian desert in violation of the country’s strict human rights criteria.

You’ll be introduced to many tools for investigative reporting, whether you’re working on long-range enterprise or investigating breaking news:

• Panels on the best apps for mobile reporting, using the geolocation power of social media for news, tips from Google and Twitter staff on how best to use their sites for reporting, and an introduction to Banjo, a tool for discovering real-time, location-based information.
• Hands-on training using spreadsheets, database managers and free software such as Tableau Public
• Updates on ongoing projects including the Tor Project, a tool for protecting your research sources online.; Tabula, a tool for pulling data out of pdfs, the Investigative Dashboard; the CensusReporter project, the FOIA machine andThe Background Machine.

You’ll also find panels on a variety of topics, including:

• Collaboration
• Getting reluctant sources to talk
• Cybersecurity and government transparency
• Investigating border and immigration issues

Check out the full list of panels here.