The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. Add to that more than 3,000 tipsheets from our national conferences on how to cover specific beats or do specific stories and you have a resource that no reporter or editor should be without. These stories and tipsheets are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Logged-in members can view the tipsheets free online:
Search results for "tools" ...
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Campaign finance the data science way
The Center for Investigative Reporting and IRE teamed up with the San Francisco data science company Kaggle to help bridge the gap in journalism between hacking, math and substantive expertise. They challenged data scientists to approach a database journalists have looked at a million times over: federal campaign contributions. We'll introduce you to the winner of the competition and discuss the tools the data scientists used and their results.
Tags: hacking; math; data; campaign contributions; campaign finance
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(Way) beyond charts: Making interactive fun
Don't forget fun when making your interactives! We'll showcase witty and offbeat interactive graphics and news games from a few outlets we love, with the inside scoop on how each graphic was created, how the ideas got greenlighted, and tools you'd need to make them yourself. http://sisiwei.com/nicar-making-interactive-fun/#/
Tags: graphics; infographics
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Making timelines
Displaying a series of events can be as simple as drawing a straight line. But if you want to get fancier, there are a bunch of other options to display chronologies and storylines. In this talk, we'll take a tour of current timelines in the wild and walk you through three open-source tools to help you make your own: ProPublica's TimelineSetter, Zach Wise's TimelineJS, and WNYC's Vertical Timeline. http://lenagroeger.s3.amazonaws.com/timelines/timelines.html
Tags: data
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Data-Driven Beats
How can the tools and techniques used in data journalism be applied to the day-to-day demands of beat reporting? What challenges do newsrooms face reorganizing and adding structure to beats? We'll share our experiences building sites like Homicide Watch DC and PolitiFact, and look at examples of other projects that add structure and data to daily beat reporting. http://eyeseast.github.io/data-beats/
Tags: None
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Dig deeper with social tools
Learn how to find people, companies, experts and other sources and how to use geo-location features to cover breaking news. Use the tipsheet to discover new ways to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and mobile apps to improve your stories.
Tags: Social media; Twitter; Facebook; LinkedIn; mobile apps; sourcing; breaking news coverage
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Web tools for investigators
Learn what free online tools that will help you to enhance on your reporting and investigation. Get tips on social media searches, documents, Web scraping and visualizations.
Tags: Free tools; online tools; story visualization; reporting
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My friend FRED: Using Fed data tools to add context to stories
Federal Reserve Economic Data, or FRED, is the signature database at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Learn from Taylor how to find and use the economic database to add context to economic reporting.
Tags: Database; economic database; FRED
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Using DocumentCloud
IRE training director, Dowdell, lays out step by step tips on how to get started with DocumentCloud. From uploading your first documents, using the collaboration and notes tools, to publishing your documents. If you're new to DocumentCloud and need a simple, step-by-step guide, you'll want to keep this tipsheet handy.
Tags: documents; documentcloud
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Analysis Tools at FollowTheMoney.org
Roth Barber highlights the many great tools at FollowTheMoney.org in this tipsheet. There's everything from an independent spending database to "A unique view of the top 10,000 donors to political campaigns at both the state and federal level—information that exists nowhere else."
Tags: campaign spending; donors; tracking the money; L-CAT; contributors
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Taming monster datasets: The data specialist’s perspective
Doig gives tips on how to get huge data sets onto your computer and what tools to use on them.
Tags: SQL, SAS; .FTP; Ruby; large data sets