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Following money trails in election coverage

By Tyler Wornell  Tracking the flow of money in an election can be a crucial reporting tool for knowing who’s influencing elections and how. Tracking some of that money could prove difficult, though. In Friday’s CAR Conference panel, “Wagging the Dog: Using campaign finance data to cover the midterm election,” Denise Roth Barber from the…

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Breaking the silence with reporting on sexual misconduct

By Dariya Tsyrenzhapova Only one-third of victims of sexual harassment ever report those incidents to the authorities, Bernice Yeung said. Yeung, a journalist with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and a member of award-winning teams that produced documentaries “Rape in the Fields” and “Rape on the Night Shift,” spoke as part of a…

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IRE Radio Podcast | Homeless on the Road

If you’re walking down the street in San Francisco, it’s impossible to ignore. On any given day there are nearly 7,500 homeless people on the city’s streets. It’s an issue many of America’s largest cities are struggling to keep up with. But some have found a cheap solution to reduce their homeless populations: one-way bus…

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Digging into data on drug and court injustice

By Meredith McGrath In order to hold officials accountable and shine light on injustices, journalists are digging deep into the intricate data surrounding the drug world and court systems. Ed Silverman from STAT, Teri Sforza from the Orange County Register and Michael Braga from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune shared their stories of investigations, shed light on…

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Getting the data you deserve from records requests

By Jing Ren Steven Rich from The Washington Post, Sarah Ryley from The Trace and Annie Waldman from ProPublica shared their insights on how reporters should request open records at the state and national level at their CAR Conference panel. Waldman focused her presentation on clarifying the roles and functions of the Health Insurance Portability…

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Using data to cover the racial inequality beat

By Alexis Allison “The only thing that white people have worse than black people is osteoporosis,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, said during the “Investigating racial inequality” panel. “That’s the amazing thing about America,” Hannah-Jones said. “Anything you want to measure, somebody’s tracking it based on race.” Susan Smith…

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Who’s investigating college sports?

By Virginia Ward A series of small compromises between players and coaches often lead to high-risk operations within sports organizations. Syracuse University professor Jodi Upton, USA Today database editor Christopher Schnaars and Raycom investigative producer Jill Riepenhoff shared their experience investigating college and youth sports.   From major infractions to Title IX investigations, journalists are uncovering…

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How to build a bulletproof data story

By Meredith McGrath Want to make sure your data is bulletproof and fact-checked so there aren’t any holes? Arm yourself with these tips from Tisha Thompson, investigative reporter for ESPN, and Sandhya Kambhampati, data reporter for ProPublica Illinois. Get organized When starting out, create a text file or a Word document and record basic information…

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Analyzing College Scorecard data for higher education stories

By Tyler Wornell The College Scorecard is a database with a treasure trove of data about higher education institutions, providing information about graduation rates, debt repayment rates and median income for career fields. There’s a wealth of story ideas sitting in the database, and knowing what data is there and how to use it can…

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Simple tips to demystify data science

By Virginia Ward In his CAR Conference session on demystifying data, Hadley Wickham said his job is to push R as far as it can possibly go. The chief scientist at RStudio develops free tools to explore R, an open-source statistical language. He is also an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland…

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