The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Posts Tagged ‘spreadsheets’
Tips for building smart, clean spreadsheets
By Amanda Nero Sandhya Kambhampati, most recently a Knight-Mozilla fellow working in Berlin, Germany, helped CAR Conference attendees turn mediocre spreadsheets into ready-to-use data for analysis. Kambhampati took attendees through the dos and dont’s of formatting data in Excel. The session focused on the top errors she and her colleagues have run across in newsrooms…
Read MoreIn a big freelance project, a little organization up front goes a long way
By the time I sat down to write the 6,000 word article I’d been reporting for the past several months, I was ready to quit. I had over 50 interviews, thousands of pages of documents and reports, contact information and source names all stored across my phone, random word documents, email drafts, and actual paper…
Read MoreDiscovering data at the IRE Conference
Jewel Loree, of Tableau Software, uses her hands to illustrate how the software reformats data into columns during the Tabluea Public for beginners session. Photo by Travis Hartman. By Kathryn Sharkey It’s a word mentioned over and over at the IRE Conference, whether you’re at a specific panel on the subject or not: data. This…
Read MoreIRE trains South African journalists as part of Power Reporting conference
By Megan Luther African journalists face different reporting barriers than their colleagues in the U.S., yet they share the desire to learn investigative techniques. IRE traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa at the end of October to train reporters at the annual Power Reporting: The African Investigative Journalism Conference. More than 200 journalists attended the three-day conference, which included typical sessions…
Read MoreAdding depth to coverage of election results
For help in the scramble to provide instant results and analysis — all while sorting through close decisions on the local and federal level — check out these resources for adding depth to your election night coverage, the day after stories and long range post-election stories. Also, check out our look at data-driven stories leading…
Read MoreBehind The Story: Investigating credit report errors
Courtesy of The Columbus Dispatch When Jill Riepenhoff and Mike Wagner began researching credit report errors in 2010, virtually everyone they spoke with knew someone who had been affected. Although the industry lacks an official outlet for consumers to dispute credit claims, the reporters’ nationwide FOIA requests returned nearly 28,000 files from the Federal Trade…
Read MoreWith one week left before Philip Meyer deadline, a look at past winners
There is only one more week until the Nov. 2 postmark deadline for the Philip Meyer contest, and we want to see your work. The Philip Meyer Journalism Award recognizes stories that incorporate survey research, probabilities and other social science tools in creative ways that lead to journalism vital to the community. Established in 2005,…
Read MoreBehind the Story: Investigating a building collapse, creating an interactive timeline
A normal day on the local government beat became two months of investigating for Lansing State Journal reporter Lindsay VanHulle. After a portion of the residential St. Anne Lofts building collapsed in East Lansing, Mich., VanHulle discovered problems in the city’s building code and development programs. Prior to the building’s collapse, these problems allowed unpermitted…
Read MoreHelp us design a NICAR T-shirt
The journalists who attend the Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference do many things for their newsrooms: They analyze data, build websites, write stories, scrape and acquire records. To honor this work, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting will sell a T-shirt celebrating the data geek in us all. Proceeds from the shirt will help raise funds for…
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