Data Analysis - Investigative Reporters & Editors

For more than 30 years, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) has helped enhance journalists’ investigative work through collecting, sorting and making sense of data. If you don’t have the resources, time, skills or tools to get it done, NICAR can help.

We’ll tackle almost anything, from data conversion to cleaning to full-blown analysis. We work with our own data and with data you provide. We charge an hourly rate based on the difficulty of the job and your market size. We’ll give you a good-faith estimate before we start the work.

We always keep your data and your story ideas to ourselves. We’ll never share anything with anybody, ever, unless you give us explicit permission.

Services start at $75 per hour for small news organizations. Rates increase in relation to the complexity of work and size of the newsroom. Long-term contracts and retainer services are available.

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Types of Jobs

Here are some examples of the types of jobs we’ve done in the past:

Conversion

Dealing with a file format that you don’t recognize, such as .DAT or .XML? Or those pesky .PDFs? We can most likely help you convert those files into something more useful.

Importing

Have a bunch of text files or spreadsheets that you want to analyze, but don’t want to spend the time doing the imports? Let us do them for you.

Cleaning

Do you need text fields converted to dates, name fields split into first and last, or badly formatted data put neatly into rows and columns? We love to clean data.

Mapping

If you have geographic data, we can map your data and help you with spatial analysis.

Analysis

If you have data and questions but don’t know how to answer them, we can help you get the answers.

Ready to hire IRE?

The next step is fill out our online request form. Our director of data services will get in touch with you to discuss your newsroom's needs and explain our fees in more detail.

SUBMIT A REQUEST ONLINE

For a long time in my career I wanted to do investigative journalism, but I didn’t know what to call it. I didn’t know what it looked like. Interacting with IRE and especially meeting other people of color who are investigative journalists have really given me a lot of inspiration to go after the stories that I thought were maybe too ambitious for me.

- Ana Ley, The Virginian-Pilot

Meet Your IRE Expert

David Herzog

David Herzog is a veteran investigative reporter, data journalist and educator with more than 25 years of experience. He’s a Journalism Professions professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and serves as the academic adviser to the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. He is also the director of data & research services at IRE. Before joining the school and IRE in 2002, Herzog spent nearly 15 years as a newspaper reporter and editor. He’s worked for the Providence Journal, The Baltimore Sun and The (Allentown, Pa.) Morning Call.

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