Don't let love get in the way of investigating. The old saying in journalism goes something like "if your mother says she loves you, check it out,” and if that's true for your mother then it's certainly true for your Valentine's Day date. So let's begin our walk through of how to make use of publicly available information to background your date.

First, checking property records, criminal records and civil filings is going to be much faster if you have access to Nexis. But if you don’t, you can still navigate your way to ...

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In December, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch released Death on the Rails, a special report on the surprising number of pedestrian deaths that have occurred on railways.  Reporter Todd Frankel explains how he cross-referenced databases and resources to build his own map of the accidents, which he used to further investigate ”hot spots” of pedestrian death and injury.

You began investigating for the series after a pedestrian fatality in June.  What inspired you to look into these rail-related accidents?  Did you expect to discover so many when ...

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As the White House and Congressional Republicans inch toward an agreement before the fiscal cliff deadline, the opportunity remains for digging deeper into the federal budget and the impact of a deal -- or lack of deal -- on both the country's broad economic health and local communities. Find help in these links and resources.

Econocheck
A collaboration between IRE and the Sunlight Foundation, Econocheck is free to both members and non-members. It offers a wealth of data for covering the economy, including the following topics:

• Jobs and Employment
• Taxes, Government Finances and Debt
• Health Care and Insurance 
• Prices and Inflation ...

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In the wake of a disaster, individuals and business owners are often left with severely damaged property. Many turn for help to the Small Business Administration, which approves low-interest loans to help rebuild. For declared disasters in 2011 alone, the Small Business Administration approved over $1 billion in loans.

NICAR has updated the SBA database of these loans, which is now current through Sept. 2012. 

WHAT'S IN IT?
Disaster loans through the SBA are one of the primary forms of federal assistance for individuals and non-farm, private-sector businesses who have suffered losses. The data have information on the borrower ...

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Students head to lunch at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Council Bluffs. The school district reported 58 alleged incidents to the state in five years, arguably a low rate for an urban district of 9,000 students. David Purdy/The Register

In reporting, timing is everything.  For Des Moines Register reporter Kyle Munson, the topic of bullying in Iowa schools was reaching a climax as his work was being finalized.  During the release of his series “Bullying in Iowa,” Iowa had faced two deaths related to bullying incidents, the most recent involving a northwest Iowa teen who committed suicide after ...

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Working on a project about health care systems? About to start one? Here are some resources to help:

The Association of Health Care Journalists is offering Reporting Fellowships on Health Care Performance, a yearlong program that funds reporting on health care systems in the United States. The program is designed for mid-career journalists, who continue their regular jobs and pursue the project with the support of their newsroom, which would publish the final product.

The fellowship offers up to $4,000 for field visits, data and research. Fellows also get guidance through AHCJ seminars, conferences and email consultations, as well ...

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Economic issues have taken center stage during this year's elections. Candidates for office are trying to tap into voters' discontent about unemployment, government spending and housing.

It's easy for journalists and the public to get lost when politicians toss out economic statistics to score points. So IRE and the Sunlight Foundation have teamed up to bring you EconoCheck, which provides details about these key economic stats and links to the source data.

Bill Allison, Sunlight's editorial director, offers examples of recent candidate claims that EconoCheck can help you evaluate in your reporting.

EconoCheck is funded by a ...

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As part of an effort by three journalism organizations to maintain public access to an important database of physician discipline records, that data is now being made available free of charge through the IRE website.

Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Association of Health Care Journalists and theSociety of Professional Journalists have protested the government’s decision to cut off access to The National Practitioner Data Bank, which has been used by reporters for many years to investigate issues involving lax oversight of physicians. The version of the data that has traditionally been publicly available does not identify doctors, but ...

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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 ...

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One of my personal annoyances came to a quiet end last week, when the U.S. Senate decided to begin publishing vote information in XML rather than the HTML that had been its format for years. The House, usually the institutionally more nimble of the chambers, began publishing vote information in XML back in 2003 (view the source on this page to see an example). Here's a Senate vote - it has information on the date and time of the vote, plus all of the individual positions. This makes it easier to parse the information into a spreadsheet or database ... Read more ...