Journalists can now carry many of the essential reporting tools -- camera, voice recorder, notepad, phone, police scanner -- with them in one hand-held device. But that same device can carry a police scanner, a document scanner, a photo editor, a video camera and a flight tracker. You can record audio and take time-stamped notes. You can do calculations and legal research on the fly with easy searches. If stuck in the field, you can type a story on your phone that automatically syncs to a folder on a newsroom computer.

There are countless mobile apps that can help the work of ...

In August, reporter Kate Martin of the Skagit Valley Herald analyzed salary data for mayors across Washington state and ended up with a story about mayors from small towns in her coverage area -- Mount Vernon and Anacortes -- who had salaries on par with mayors from cities several times larger. In reporting the story, Martin first had to gather the data and then reconcile it with the realities of small-town civic duties.

The idea for the story arose through her typical reporting practices: each year, she requests salary data for all of the agencies that the Skagit Valley Herald covers.

“I ...

By Christopher Dolan, University of Scranton

From the art of the interview to “Facebook creeping,” we learned many invaluable investigative tools at IRE’s Scranton Watchdog Workshop.

During the day-long event, various expert investigative journalists taught the tricks and techniques needed when hunting down a good story.

Tisha Thompson from WRC-Washington had many tips for crafting a strong interview during her one-hour presentation. Ms. Thompson drew from her experience in the field to outline how journalists should handle their various interviewees—detailing how a journalist should interact with victims, criminals and everyone in between. Ms. Thompson said when interviewing both ...

By Laura Krantz
Gatehouse Media

This summer I attended my first IRE conference, in Boston. I really wanted to learn Microsoft Excel skills and I did, thanks to patient IRE staff. But more importantly, I was inspired by all the ruthless journalists using creative ways to mine for data and writing compelling stories.

I left itching to try it myself. Since June, I have been poking for data in the towns I cover but hit several roadblocks. Thanks to IRE colleagues, I've overcome all of them.

First, I wanted to get payroll data, but the town treasurer said it ...

By Anthony DeBarros
USA TODAY

In April, after USA TODAY published its Ghost Factories investigation into forgotten lead smelters, we heard from several people who wanted to know more about how the project came together — particularly the online package that included details on more than 230 of the former factories.

The following is an expanded version of a post I originally sent to IRE’s NICAR-L mailing list:

Alison Young was the lead reporter who conceived the idea for the project. In late 2010, she came to me with a couple of PDFs showing a list of suspected lead smelter ...

Developers will demo a beta version of the newsroom appliance at the 2012 CAR Conference.

Tucked away on reporters' computers are dozens of details that could benefit news coverage, if only other journalists knew where to look.

Newsrooms are swimming in data. Journalistic organizations big and small continue to collect data from local, state and federal governments, and dozens of other places. As the collection grows, making sense of that information can become more difficult.

That's what the PANDA project, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, wants to solve — make data analysis easier for journalists and make sharing ...

Your average CAR geeks - especially the old timers - follow a predictable route in tools they use for data analysis and sharing.

You start with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and everything’s going fine. But then someone tells you about relational databases, and suddenly you notice all of the things you can’t easily do in Excel.

Step up to Microsoft Access database manager and pretty soon you’re joining tables right and left, slipping terms like "Group By" and "normalization" into conversations and generally feeling pretty good about yourself.

But at some point, someone in your newsroom looks over your shoulder ...

The web now offers numerous free tools that give non-programmers the ability to create data-driven applications. Among those with the most promise, especially for journalists, is Google Fusion Tables.

Fusion Tables essentially is a free database manager in the cloud, allowing anyone to upload large data sets, merge them with other tables and create visualizations. It’s much more, though. The service has a detailed application programming interface (API), and basically can serve as a free back end to serve data and mapping applications. The service also is customizable while simple, with extra capabilities for more experienced users.

Of course ...

A new specialty in newsrooms is emerging that’s giving data new reach. It’s separate from computer-assisted reporting but shares much of the same DNA. Like CAR, it involves working intensively with data, but the end product is a web-based software application, not a story. A formal name for this field hasn’t completely gelled, but at ProPublica and some other newsrooms we call them “news applications.”

What are news applications? How do they relate to CAR? How can CAR nerds work with news apps nerds?

Simply put, news applications are journalism done with software development, much like photojournalism ...