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Behind the Story: New Jersey reporter finds inconsistencies in 2008 death investigation
Chris Baxter Chris Baxter and NJ Advance Media wrestled out a compelling and untold story, let the digital presentation take the lead and came away with a “smashing” investigative success. Using a system he developed to keep tabs on lawsuits involving state police, Baxter came upon the stifled story of Kenwin Garcia, a Newark man…
Read MoreNew York newspaper asks judge to force release of license plate data
The Democrat & Chronicle is fighting a county’s denial to provide license plate information about seven newspaper employees and a couple government-owned vehicles, the paper reports. The Rochester, New York-based paper has reported that Monroe County is indiscriminately amassing license-plate information from high-speed cameras. During the summer, a reporter filed a Freedom of Information Law…
Read MoreFrom the IRE Archive: Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance”
Interested in learning more about the story behind the new movie, “Kill the Messenger“? Listen to this panel from the 1997 IRE National Conference in Phoenix, Ariz. titled “Can Investigative Reporting Go Too Far?”. In the early 90’s investigative reporter Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News dug into the CIA’s involvement of cocaine…
Read MoreSuggest a database and help expand the NICAR Data Library
NICAR is looking to add new data sets to its collection, and we’re interested in your suggestions. We’re looking for national, multi-state, or multi-country data sets that are potentially valuable to reporters and are not easily accessible. Our goal is to enable access to and use of important data, and we need help identifying targets…
Read MoreAUDIO: How to structure your story
You’ve done all of your reporting and now it’s time to write, but how do you structure your story? Jacqui Banaszynski, winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, explored this issue during the 2014 IRE Conference in San Francisco, demystifying the process and offering insight on how to think beyond the traditional inverted…
Read MoreIRE Radio Podcast | Policing the Players
You don’t have to be a full-time sports reporter to investigate athletes. This week we’re looking at sports investigations on several levels: college, military and professional. Join us for tips on getting around secretive athletics departments and digging deeper when players get in trouble. Here’s the lineup: Tom Roeder of the Colorado Springs Gazette discusses “Broken…
Read MoreNew video series highlights reporting tips, techniques
This week we launched Story Shorts, a new series of web videos designed to help journalists share tips and techniques they’ve used on a variety of investigative stories. We’ve paired the minute-long videos with related resources (tipsheets, stories, webinars and audio) curated by IRE staff. We’ve even made a few of our tipsheets free for a…
Read MoreAUDIO: Tips for getting key sources to talk
Investigative reporters spend months on story basics, building data and documents. But without the right sources, even the most telling facts can read a bit, well, boring. With that in mind, four battle-tested investigative reporters spoke at the 2014 IRE Conference on the topic of building trust with sources. Ellen Gabler, of the Milwaukee Journal…
Read MoreWashington Post, Marshall Project collaborate with DocumentCloud to make note embeds responsive
This post originally appeared on the DocumentCloud blog. On Aug. 3, The Marshall Project, a new nonprofit journalism organization focused on criminal justice issues, published an investigation in partnership with The Washington Post that revealed new evidence raising doubts about a high-profile Texas execution. Tom Meagher, data editor at The Marshall Project: Our reporter, Maurice…
Read MoreApply now for the 2015 IRE Knight Scholarship
2014 CAR Conference Knight Scholars and mentors pose for a group picture. Applications are now being accepted from college students at several historically black colleges and universities for the Knight Scholarship to attend IRE’s 2015 data journalism and annual investigative reporting conferences. Apply online by Sunday, Dec. 7. The 2015 conferences include our annual data journalism conference…
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