As newsrooms continue work on their 2011 budgets, it’s the perfect time to consider bringing IRE training to your staff. See a full list of IRE presentations and software hands-on training. Custom IRE training for your newsroom or university remains one of the best bargains in the industry, with immediate results: new tools, skills, websites and approaches that bolster everyday beat coverage as well as enterprise stories. You might not realize the extent of presentations and workshops that IRE can bring to your staff, in addition to hands-on training in using spreadsheets, databases, mapping software and SPSS. Some newsrooms ... Read more ...

Toxic air and school children. Deadly infections in hospitals. Dangerous care in nursing homes. Journalists tackled each of these issues last year with work that won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award.  The award recognizes stories that incorporate survey research, probabilities and other social science tools in creative ways that lead to journalism vital to the community. The postmark deadline is Monday, November 1. Three awards are given annually:

• $500 for 1st place
• $300 for 2nd place
• $200 for 3rd place

Established in 2005, the awards were created to honor Philip Meyer’s pioneering efforts to utilize social science research methods ... Read more ...

There are new training videos are available on the IRE website, including free CAR training videos for IRE members. If you missed Tisha Thompson's recent webinar that highlighted documents and data that will help you juice up your stories, it is available now. It's only $5 for members ($10 for nonmembers). And IRE members have a number of free training options as well. Several conference sessions focusing on computer-assisted reporting are available for streaming. Sessions include:

• Bulletproofing stories
• Covering Campus: From the Stadium to the Boardroom
• CAR for Broadcast
• Probing Banks and Mortgage Lenders
• Mining Text for Stories