Melody Petersen of The Orange County Register has two pieces of advice to offer reporters: stay patient and follow the money trail. Petersen investigated school bonds in Orange County after realizing schools were opting for expensive agreements that would push costs onto taxpayers decades after the initial bond was distributed. She found that school districts were accepting deals that would cost taxpayers more than 10 times the original amount in a special bond known as a capital appreciation bond.

Other reports from the Orange County Register state that the bond deals will cost Orange County districts $2 billion over the ...

In the wake of the budget reforms proposed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in 2011, known as Wisconsin Act 10, Eric Litke of the Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team felt the public debate over salary was all rhetoric with little factual backing.  In February, Litke tried to change the public dialog by publishing the salary data for Wisconsin public sector employees making more than $25,000 a year.  The five-week report entitled

“What We Pay:  Your Tax Dollars and the Salaries They Support” took six months of research and cost almost $9000 in reimbursements for data.  By the end of ...

The Arlington Gazette Packet reports that public records in Arlington come at a high price compared to neighboring areas in northern Virginia. Throughout Virginia, access to open records remains spotty. The State Integrity project, which ranks states based on their level of transparency, placed Virginia 47 and gave it a failing grade. Now, Michael Lee Pope reports, open government advocates are claiming Arlington's costly request system serve as an added barrier to public access.

"Want a booking photo in a high profile case? Get ready to hand over $24," Pope writes. "Want to see a copy of a report ...

My palms become sweaty just thinking about math. Taking on a dataset of 25,000 records? Turn on the armpits.

I’m a fellow with an investigative news organization in Pittsburgh called PublicSource. At 30, I’m a pup reporter on nearly every level. My first crack at a data story was terrifying. And incredibly empowering.

After a three-day IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting Bootcamp, I was hooked.

Back in the newsroom, we used records from Pittsburgh’s 311 non-emergency call center to analyze how the city was handling pothole complaints. We found that between 2006 and 2012, the amount ...

In November, a KMGH Denver investigation revealed that Colorado police departments had failed to test hundreds of rape kits -- 44 percent of the 1,064 kits that Denver Police have received since 2008. Those untested kits prevent police from entering DNA into a national database that could help identify serial rapists. Keli Rabon, lead reporter on the story, shared with IRE how she found the story, what steps she took, how she handled a sensitive ...

For help in the scramble to provide instant results and analysis -- all while sorting through close decisions on the local and federal level --  check out these resources for adding depth to your election night coverage, the day after stories and long range post-election stories. Also, check out our look at data-driven stories leading up to election day.

What's being done

• The Los Angeles Times site had a presidential map as well as a map of California showing how counties voted on candidate races and ballot measures.
• The Huffington Post also had an election center, complete with map and table ...

During the weeklong IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting Boot Camp you wake up thinking about spreadsheet pivot tables and practice so many database queries that you never want to ask another question that requires a “WHERE” statement. But the most important lesson that gets drilled into your head is a simple one: practice, practice, practice.

After I left the January 2011 boot camp, I tested out my skills on some smaller stories.  I took a look at the public and private colleges that received Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits, which was primarily an exercise in cleaning up a Microsoft Excel ...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported an illegal immigrant who was a witness in a homicide case, an attorney told me. "Prosecutors are going to drop the charges."

Sure enough, the case crumbled and the U.S. citizen who had been charged with murder was set free. ICE agents had deported the witness after he was arrested on unrelated charges and booked into the county jail, court documents showed.

Local and federal authorities responded by pointing fingers at each other and insisting this was an isolated incident. The problem, a breakdown in communication, had been addressed, they promised ...

Located just south of Chicago, Indiana's Lake County has long been a hot-bed of political corruption, bloated government and patronage jobs. County government spending became so rampant that the largest corporate taxpayers in 2005 commissioned a study that recommended cutting government spending or consolidating services to save taxpayers millions. Few of the recommendations were adopted, and about two years later, the Indiana General Assembly forced a frozen tax levy specifically targeting the county's wasteful ways.

Times of Northwest Indiana reporter Bill Dolan and I spent four years collecting a decade's worth of electronic spending records for all ...

It's always nice to get a tip, but we found our local overtime pay leaders by goofing around in some online records. I came across an online database of public employee salaries offered by SeeThroughNY, a non-profit transparency portal.

And like any curious journalist, I pulled out our county government and sorted it top to bottom in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

This was not the typical payroll information we routinely get from government payroll offices. This database of 4,727 records originated from the state pension system, run by the state comptroller’s office. It wasn’t just a ...