IRE is gaining a new summer fellow as part of the first ever Google Journalism Fellowship. Nicole Pasulka of New York University will spend 8 weeks with IRE, as well as a week with Google and a week with the Knight Foundation.

Pasulka is currently getting an M.A. in journalism at NYU in the Literary Reportage program. She has five years of experience in journalism working as a freelancer, an editor for The Morning News, and a fellow at Mother Jones. Last summer she received the 2012 I.F. Stone Award from the Nation Institute and a 2012 grant ...

By Dan Hill

The hands-on workshops at last year's conference blew me away, and I hope to leave Louisville with exposure to new tools I can put to use in the newsroom. Although technology is always changing and this year's tools may soon be obsolete, there are some skills workshops I don't want to miss.

My NICAR goal is to grasp Django well enough to pitch and lead a feasible newsroom project. The four Python sessions should help.

Northwestern friends and I are known to #RallyForR, so expect to see us with pom poms listening to Amanda ...

By Wendell Cochran

For me, the NICAR conference is one of the highlights of the year. I have attended nearly every one since the first in Raleigh in 1993. Over the years, my roles have changed, but NICAR remains helpful to me. These days I don’t go so much to learn new skills or even to polish my old ones, but mostly to stay abreast of the new directions CAR and its practitioners are headed.

At the past two conferences, among the most entertaining and informative sessions have been the lightning talks organized by Derek Willis and Aron Pilhofer ...

By Derek Willis

The first eight or 10 NICARs that I attended, I went heavy on the skills-based sessions, learning specific software from experienced users. As I've gravitated towards a (relatively) compact set of everyday tools, I find myself at more thematic sessions that dig deep into a specific problem or approach.

One of the things that I love to do when deciding one my NICAR conference schedule is to separate sessions into "new" and "new-to-me" categories. In the past several years NICAR has seen an explosion of sessions about topics that have barely been covered before, from natural ...

By Kate Martin

I am really looking forward to this year’s NICAR conference. I started my data training in 2011 with IRE at a week-long CAR boot camp. These days I regularly use Excel and Access in my reporting for the Skagit Valley Herald, a daily with five newsroom reporters.
 
After last year’s hands-on sessions on Tableau Public, I immediately put my education to use to map a state carcass removal database for a story about roadkill in Washington state. 

I intend to improve my mapping skills by attending classes on how to use ArcGIS. I see an ...

A year or two ago, thanks to Hacks/Hackers, IRE and the University of Missouri, I became really interested in how I can use data and technology to make me a better reporter. I’ve made some progress since then, but at the end of the day, I’m still a beginning reporter who is looking for tools I can use. Here are some sessions I’m planning to take advantage of at NICAR next month:

• Sessions that I will walk out of with a list of tools I can start using immediately, like “Dig deeper with social tools” and ...

Richard Ben Cramer, a journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 as a foreign correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer, died this week from complications of lung cancer. Cramer's writing career spanned politics and sports, and in addition to the Inquirer his work appeared in magazines such as Esquire and Rolling Stone. Cramer authored several books, including What It Takes: The Way to the White House, an in-depth look at the 1988 presidential election.

This week, IRE pulled a 1991 Esquire story by Richard Ben Cramer from its archives:

George Bush: How He Got Here
"A life of ease ...