IRE22 Expected Sessions

Expected Sessions for in-person attendees

Here's a look at some of the sessions we're planning for #IRE22 in Denver. Please note that these in-person sessions are preliminary and subject to change. 

We'll be highlighting the sessions that will be available to virtual attendees in the coming days. 

PUBLIC RECORDS

• 7 things you didn’t know about getting documents and records
• Key records to get for your campus investigation
• Documents and data you can investigate inequity in K-12 education
• Advanced techniques to get records before you retire
• 50 records to request right now
• No one uses email anymore
• Court records are filled with untold stories: A PACER deep dive
• Biggest hurdles to accessing state and local public records

ELECTIONS

• Tracking dark money in the midterm elections
• Watchdogging congressional slush funds
• Investigating threats against poll workers and election officials
• Investigating congressional financial disclosures and stock trading
• Tracking online political ads

EXPOSING SYSTEMIC INEQUITIES, EQUITABLE NEWS GATHERING AND REPORTING

• Investigating the racist past of your news organization
• Investigating the racist past of your school or university
• Reporting on the homicides of Black women and girls
• Words matter: Beware harmful language in your writing
• Investigating inequality on any beat
• Using the Real Housewives franchise as a device to explore interviewing and bias
• Equitably covering people with disabilities
• Building and maintaining a source diversity tracker
• Exposing inequities in housing
• Hidden costs and racial inequality in economic development
• Public records for justice

MANAGEMENT

• Project management that works for reporters AND editors
• Teaching your team to manage blowback
• Creating successful newsroom collaborations
• How to be edited
• How To build (or rebuild) an investigative/data team
• Newsroom lessons from The Great Resignation
• Pre-publication red flags for editors

BUSINESS

• Investigating safety problems at private companies
• Piercing the veil: Reporting on businesses that want nothing to do with you
• Hidden costs and racial inequality in economic development

INTERNATIONAL

• Cross-border collaborations in the Middle East and North Africa
• Investigating the new organized crime
• Investigating the rise of globally connected white supremacy
• Dirty money, European banks and Russian organized crime
• Investigating international corporate secrecy

ON THE BEAT

• Cracking open statehouses
• Covering public lands issues
• Breaking through the Green Wall: Investigating Customs and Border Protection
• Decoding the police narrative
• Hot topics to investigate on the energy beat
• Data and investigations on the wildfire beat
• Tracking defense industry influence, revolving door lobbyists and foreign lobbying
• Investigating Title IX issues
• Investigating judicial corruption 
• Investigating police misconduct
• Exposing inequities in housing
• Accountability journalism on the environment beat
• Getting your weed investigation green-lit
• It's not just Tuskegee: Investigating stories on race and health
• Accountability in gun reporting
• Uncovering inequities in education and obstacles to student achievement
• Redefining remediation: New approaches for students who start college behind
• Sports investigations
• Exposing health threats at home, at work and all around us
• Reporting on airstrikes and secret sources

REPORTING AND WRITING STRATEGIES

• How to transition from daily reporting to writing a book
• Breaking into investigative reporting
• The first hours of breaking news
• Covering trauma
• Combating misinformation
• Using narrative writing in your investigative journalism
• Building trust in how investigative journalism works
• Accountability through solutions journalism
• Interviewing vulnerable sources
• A year in local investigations: Watchdog stories ideas
• Career roundtable
• Making your story ironclad
• Storyboarding your investigation
• Under pressure: Real-life breaking news in real-time
• So you want to use 2020 Census data?
• Student collaborations with media organizations
• Visual fact-checking strategies
• How to find the best investigative story ideas and pitch them successfully
• The art of long-form audio narrative
• Finding, cultivating and protecting sources
• Using forensic genealogy techniques in your investigation
• Rocky Mountain (research) High
• Building and maintaining a source diversity tracker

WORK BETTER

• My favorite digital journalism tools
• How to get your reporting project funded
• Finding legal cover as an investigative freelancer
• Show-and-tell session for how legal support helped make a story possible
• Q&A sessions: “Know Your Rights”
• How to pull off a cross-platform data partnership with (relative) ease
• Freelancer secrets: How to be get paid for doing good investigative work

TAKING CARE

• How to manage the stress and trauma of being a journalist
• Do you qualify as an ally?
• Having courageous conversations 

BROADCAST

• Going long (form)
• How to get people to talk 
• Investigating breaking news
• Anatomy of an Investigation
• Dynamic Duo: What did we do right? What did we do wrong?
• The visual perspective
• Building the investigative powerhouse
• Covering our communities
• 10 most important lessons
• Juggling investigations and GA
• Getting inside
• Art of accountability
• 60 ideas in 60 minutes
• Sources - how to get ’em, how to keep ’em
• Lightning talks
• Investigative scripts that sing
• Consumer investigations

MASTER CLASSES (pre-registration required)

Registration coming soon!

• Outlining and structure: The writer's missing manual
• Preparing for the tough interview by roleplaying in the newsroom
• Interviewing (broadcast)
• Writing the narrative

HANDS-ON DATA WORKSHOPS (pre-registration required)

Registration coming soon!

• Digging into data for stories: A crash course in Excel 
• Interviewing your data with SQL
• Interviewing your data with R
• Interviewing your data with Python

HANDS-ON CLASSES

• Making the most of your search on data.census.gov
• Free online tools to extract data from PDFs
• A pragmatic reporter's approach to data analysis
• Excel 1: Getting started with spreadsheets
• Excel 2: Formulas & sorting
• Excel 3: Filtering & pivot tables
• Excel: Importing & data prep
• Excel magic
• R 101: The fundamentals
• R: Data analysis and (a tiny bit of) stats
• Python 101: The fundamentals
• Python: Let's scrape a website
• Google Sheets: Scraping without coding
• Finding the story: Campaign finance
• Finding the story: Disaster data
• Finding the story: Climate data
• Finding the story: Cannabis sales
• Finding the story: Immigration
• Simple mapping with Google MyMaps
• From Excel to DataWrapper
• Data visualization and storytelling with Flourish
• Excel for investigating business and finance
• DIY Database: The joys and hazards of building it from scratch
• Cleaning data with OpenRefine

NETWORKING AND MEET-UPS FOR:

• Educators
• Students
• LGBTQ+ journalists
• Journalists of color
• Freelancers
• International journalists
• Early career
• Mid-career
• Veteran career