Thursday night around 8 p.m., a bridge collapsed over the Skagit River on Interstate 5 in Washington state.

The Seattle Times’ Cheryl Phillips headed into work. On her way, she phoned IRE and double-checked. Yes, the database of bridge inspections was available for download. Within 30 minutes, the database was in the house and The Seattle Times was using details from it in its breaking news report as well as working on a map feature of bridges statewide.

Being able to essentially get the most up-to-date data on demand through NICAR was invaluable in The Times' understanding of the ...

Now that it's just warm enough to get in a boat, the NICAR database library has updated the Coast Guard's U.S. Recreational Boat Accident Database.

WHAT'S IN IT?
The updated data has accident reports from 1995 through 2011. Accidents involving vessel damage of more than $2,000 or disappearance of a person under circumstances that indicate death or injury are reported. The data include information on the nature of the accident, the vessels involved, plus any injuries and/or deaths. See the record layouts on each of the four tables for more detailed information.

The data ...

Short and sweet, Lightning Talks have become a highlight of the CAR conference. In Louisville this year they played to an overflow crowd at the biggest NICAR yet. And this year, attendee Fernando Diaz of Hoy Chicago captured them on video. Hear Ben rant. Be Nate Silver. Make games for news. Learn a new language.

Relive the 2013 Lightning Talks, one by one.

Fresh out of CAR 2013 and itching for data to work with? The NICAR database libarary is offering discounts on popular federal databases to help you get started. The data library updates databases on a variety of topics. You can explore our data by searching for a specific database, or looking for data by topic or by agency.

Here are the databases we're offering at a discount:

$50 for SBA disaster loan data
Recently updated to include Hurricane Sandy! Track money provided to businesses and homeowners for disaster losses. A large database with more than a million records and ...

Using tabletop.js, one editor and two researcher, presenter Tasneem Raja of Mother Jones got the remarkable 47% graphic online for Mother Jones in under five hours. If that’s not reason enough for you to try tabletop.js, consider this: Raja says Tabletop has been an absolute “game changer” for the Mother Jones newsroom. 

Think of tabletop.js as a javascript library that gives legs to spreadsheets. For now, Raja has settled on a simple protocol to deploy it: Reporters populate a Google spreadsheet with data that can include text, links, images or videos. Once it’s fact-checked, the ...

Google Fusion tables has a new look.

You can learn how to use it with Google Fusion Tables tutorials, and get a grip on how to import map data, and style, filter and share your creation with the world.

Learn step-by-step how to formulate “lots of points” maps, heat maps and intensity maps.

Some other cool tools: Fusion Tables Layer wizard to add custom layers, and shpescape to dump shapefile (like what you use in ArcGIS) into a Fusion table.

Cheryl Phillips of The Seattle Times and Anthony DeBarros of Gannett Digital presented on how to fit your data to the appropriate presentation style. Just like when you’re shopping for clothes, you should ask a lot of questions before you buy (or in this case, before you spend resources designing anything).

What is the story in the data? What kind of data is it? Aggregated or individual records, for example. How much data do you have?  How much time do you have? Resources? How granular do you want to get? Is there a geographic component?

Don’t stress over ...

Geolocation tools help you search for social media activity buzzing in your beat, on your block and even in your building. The following tools help you search by geolocation information embedded in tweets, Facebook updates, youtube videos and more.

“Geolocation is one of the most exciting things for journalists out in the field,” presenter Doug Haddix said.

Some sweet tools:

• Ban.jo lets you see the exact location of updates and tweets – great for scaring your friends at cocktail parties.
• Mappeo is a YouTube geo-search, which allows you to see videos posted in a certain area. Search “Sandy near New ...

I walked into the Tableau Public session with absolutely no experience -- and within about 10 minutes the instructor had us open up some data, sort through a few of the elements, and create a visualization.  Its immediate ease of use is clear. To produce quick, coherent interactive charts seemed pretty easy.  The further we went along though; it became apparent that there was some serious horsepower under the hood.  And with great power comes responsibility.  More on this later.

Our instructor, Mike Klaczynski, started with the proper way to format data for Tableau, and in the ...

IRE executive director Mark Horvit and training directors Jaimi Dowdell and Megan Luther offered advice this morning for how to make the best use of the conference. For first-time attendees, here are a few basic things to keep in mind:

There are three types of sessions: panels, demos and hands-on rooms.

Panels follow a fairly traditional conference format. A speaker or a group of speakers discusses a topic and perhaps field some questions. This morning's panels include "Information design and crossing the digital divide," "Getting Started: Digging deep with data journalism", and "Exploratory Data Analysis". There are three panel ...