Data Analysis
For more than 30 years, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) has helped enhance journalists’ investigative work through collecting, sorting and making sense of data. If you don’t have the resources, time, skills or tools to get it done, NICAR can help.
We’ll tackle almost anything, from data conversion to cleaning to full-blown analysis. We work with our own data and with data you provide. We charge an hourly rate based on the difficulty of the job and your market size. We’ll give you a good-faith estimate before we start the work.
We always keep your data and your story ideas to ourselves. We’ll never share anything with anybody, ever, unless you give us explicit permission.
Services start at $75 per hour for small news organizations. Rates increase in relation to the complexity of work and size of the newsroom. Long-term contracts and retainer services are available.
What we can help with
Here are some examples of the types of jobs we’ve done in the past:
Conversion
Dealing with a file format that you don’t recognize, such as .DAT or .XML? Or those pesky .PDFs? We can most likely help you convert those files into something more useful.
Importing
Have a bunch of text files or spreadsheets that you want to analyze, but don’t want to spend the time doing the imports? Let us do them for you.
Cleaning
Do you need text fields converted to dates, name fields split into first and last, or badly formatted data put neatly into rows and columns? We love to clean data.
Mapping
If you have geographic data, we can map your data and help you with spatial analysis.
Analysis
If you have data and questions but don’t know how to answer them, we can help you get the answers.
Ready to hire IRE?
The next step is to email datalib@ire.org outlining the project.