25 things we learned at NICAR25

(March 18, 2025) — NICAR25 brought together more than 900 journalists, educators and students in Minneapolis!

With three-and-a-half days of programming on investigative and data journalism techniques, mapping, programming, AI and so much more, the conference is always packed to the max with practical knowledge and inspiring words of wisdom. Not to mention everything you learn outside of formal classes, by meeting and mingling with fellow colleagues and mentors.

Here are 25 things we learned at NICAR25. 

1. “Your data story is not about data. It’s about people.” — Carrie Cochran, Jodie Fleischer (Cox Media Group), and Tom Scheck (APM Reports).

2. Data journalism on college campuses is looking strong! We had students from CUNY, Indiana University, Mizzou, UC Berkeley, University of Minnesota, Syracuse University, University of Texas at Austin — just to name a few. Some students, like Yasmin Garcia and Johan Villatoro, even taught alongside their professors.

3. So many tools are free! RECAP has free documents from PACER archive, and you can set up alerts on court cases you’re watching. Notebook LM will summarize your documents after uploading. Google Pinpoint can help with bulk document search, summarization, and extraction. Check out more time-saving tools here, thanks to Pooja Dantewadia (Realtor.com), Tyler Dukes (McClatchy Media) and Cynthia Tu (Sahan Journal).

4. “I learned how to scrape data into Google Sheets!!” — Claire Rafford, Mirror Indy

5. ”I know how to make a pivot table now” — ‪Dené K. Dryden‬, The Rochester Post Bulletin

6. “I learned about tugboatinformation.com - a truly wonderful meticulous listing of every tugboat. There's a tugboat in the news in Half Moon Bay, where I live — and I found a page about it on the site! The internet is still a wonderful place.” — Simon Willison, simonwillison.net

7. Singer Bonnie Raitt loves investigative journalism! ESPN reporter Tisha Thompson gave a surprise Lightning Talk about a reporting journey that ended up with her on stage at a Bonnie Rait concert. She spoke about the power of watchdog reporting and the challenges investigative journalists face today. Raitt made a $23K donation to Investigative Reporters and Editors afterwards. 

8. The last time IRE went to Minneapolis was more than 30 years ago. The IRE Conference of 1988 was held in the Twin Cities.

9. “Approach AI with cautious curiosity” — Mike Reilley. Check out his free newsletter Journalist’s Toolbox™ for AI tools, resources and training videos for journalists.

10. The 1996 film Fargo is based in Minneapolis. Irene Casado Sanchez, of Big Local News, was the designer of this year’s NICAR T-shirt! Check out her t-shirt, inspired by the film poster!

11. There are so many government datasets that can be downloaded for free as Excel or CSV files and localized to any city, county or state in the United States. Here are 50, shared by David Cuillier and Sydney Sims of the Brechner FOI Project. These datasets can help with research, story ideas, finding trends and much more.

12. NICAR stands for the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting, but it’s gone through a few different name changes. At one point, it was just “CAR,” later becoming “MICAR” for its home-base at Mizzou. It officially became NICAR in 1994.

13. “I learned that there are numerous valid uses for artificial intelligence and machine learning in the newsroom. However, auditing and validating these models and their outputs is essential before publishing or further reporting. Additionally, NICAR25’s various sessions helped me realize the importance of understanding development environments before installing project-specific libraries (hopefully you can avoid cluttering your global environment like I did).” — Diego Torrealba, University of Texas at Austin 

14. The difference between a hot dish and a casserole, thanks to Taylor Miller Thomas.

15. The NICAR crowd loves games! We had two nights of NIghtCAR, where attendees played board games and put together puzzles after sessions. We also hosted karaoke and a data-themed scavenger hunt!

16. “Minnesota nice” is a thing. Our local IRE friends brought coats and other warm weather gear for people from out of town.

17. There are pros and cons to different languages. Carla Astudillo (Texas Tribune), Tazbia Fatima (Hearst), Nael Shiab (CBC News) and Kai Teoh (The Dallas Morning News) shared their preferences on what to use for breaking news, scraping data, building a database, and training an AI model. 

18. Satellite images can help you with your investigation, and they’re not just for weather events! Sentinel 2 images from every 5 days are free and easy to download from Copernicus Browser. 

19. “Learning about ⁦BillTrack50⁩ at #NICAR25. It has both free & paid versions, & its features include allowing you to search by keyword & by state, & for similar bills. I’ve already signed up for an account. It also includes federal legislation in search results” — Becky Yerak, WSJ 

20. Great investigative projects take time. “Be willing to do tedious work that others aren’t doing — like data entry to analyze 17,000+ trips taken by lawmakers paid for by private entities” — tip from Maggie Mulvihill, shared by Michael Beckel

21. Need data viz on deadline? The open source RAWGraphs web app can help with making charts and graphs, and you don’t need to sign up! Check out more time-saving tools flagged by Rowan Philp at the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN).

22. IRE member Sharon Machlis has compiled tipsheets and slides from NICAR conferences since 2020!

23. You’re always welcome here! “I hadn't been to a NICAR since 2018, somehow, but felt like I've never left. Best event for both practical skill-building and mission inspiration, even/especially in our current industry headwinds. And it was great to make some new friends (in the conference hallways and at the combination drag/soccer bar) and reconnect with many old ones.” — Tyler Machado, independent journalist

24. “A really lovely common thread I’m hearing at multiple #NICAR25 panels: Speakers talking about the time before they were good at what they did. We all started somewhere.” — Emily Hopkins, Mirror Indy

25. If you’re crowdsourcing for information, make sure the link to your survey is public (as we at IRE learned while putting together this blog post…). For actual tips on crowdsourcing data, see this tipsheet from Asia Fields (ProPublica), Jeremy Merrill (The Washington Post) and Leon Yin (Bloomberg News).

The NICAR Conference is IRE’s annual data journalism conference. IRE members can access tipsheets and select session recordings from the conference online. Join us next year - March 5-8, 2026 - in Indianapolis!