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The results are in! Here's the lineup for Lightning Talks at the #NICAR23 conference in Nashville next week, in speaking order:
Lightning Talks, a series of 5-minute talks at NICAR selected by the community, has become one of the most popular sessions at the conference. This year, you can attend the big event on Friday, March 3, from 5-6:15 p.m. in Broadway Ballroom 1&2 (Meeting Space Level 1). Thank you to the Knight Foundation for sponsoring Lightning Talks.
After Lightning Talks, please stick around to help us congratulate the 2022 Philip Meyer Journalism Award winners and recognize the first two Ring of Honor recipients.
by David Plazas
The 2023 NICAR Conference is fast approaching! It’s going to be a great time in Nashville, March 2-5. As a local regional committee member for NICAR23, I'm happy to share few of my favorite things to do with visitors:
Downtown is very walkable, so you can go to Ascend Amphitheater by the Cumberland River or have coffee at Bongo Java Roasting Co. in the Omni Hotel. Some of the best eateries are not necessarily downtown, but Pinewood Social is – in a converted warehouse. Here are others worth checking out throughout the city:
And here are some famous Nashville meals and restaurants of note: hot chicken (Prince's), meat and three (Swett's) and barbecue (Martin's).
For journalist friends wanting to enjoy the local LGBTQ nightlife, here are some great spots to keep on your radar:
For more local guide tips aggregated by the regional committee and IRE team, check out this NICAR23 guide to Nashville. See you in Nashville!
David Plazas is the Opinion and Engagement Director for the USA TODAY Network newsrooms in Tennessee and The Tennessean where he serves as an editorial writer, opinion columnist, op-ed editor and an editorial board member. He has written award-winning columns on affordable housing, government accountability and civic engagement. He leads the acclaimed Civility Tennessee campaign.
IRE is pleased to announce that Britta Lokting, Jonathan Moens and Gregor Stuart Hunter are the recipients of our 2022 Freelance Fellowships. With IRE’s support, these independent journalists will pursue projects investigating disability issues, technology, and China’s offshore wealth.
Britta Lokting, first place, is a freelance journalist based in New York City. She's written for The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Her project will investigate discrimination against parents with cognitive disabilities.
Jonathan Moens, second place, is a freelance science and investigative journalist based in Paris. He writes about brain sciences, conservation, the climate crisis and more, and has been published in various outlets, including National Geographic, The New York Times, and Undark. His project will investigate the rise of technology used to help police investigate crimes.
Gregor Stuart Hunter, third place, is a freelance reporter based in Taipei City, Taiwan. He has extensive experience covering business, politics and tech for The Guardian, Nikkei Asia and Fortune. He spent seven years in Hong Kong as a staff reporter at Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal, and three years in Abu Dhabi with The National newspaper. He is a CFA Charterholder, a Python programmer and a speaker of Chinese and Spanish. His project will investigate China’s offshore wealth.
The generosity of an anonymous donor has allowed IRE to award fellowships to support freelance journalism for the last 15 years. The fellowships give independent journalists a financial boost to pursue investigative work. New this year is a free two-hour consultancy provided by the Freelance Investigative Reporters and Editors to help each fellow with their projects.
If you’d like to donate to the Freelance Fellowship fund, make a donation online. Please designate "Freelance Fellowship” in the form.
About the award:
IRE Freelance Fellowships are awarded annually to journalists who make their living primarily as freelance/independent journalists. Applications are reviewed by experienced freelance journalists. Proposals are judged in part on the breadth, significance and potential impact of the investigative project. At the request of the donor, proposals dealing with whistleblowers, business ethics and/or privacy issues will receive priority; projects involving other topics will be given serious consideration by the committee as well. The freelance projects are to be published or aired primarily in U.S. outlets.
The votes are in and the 2023 NICAR T-shirt has been selected!
Jon Keegan of The Markup won our annual contest. You’ll be able to buy T-shirts with Keegan's winning design at the 2023 NICAR Conference in Nashville.
Jan Diehm of The Pudding was runner-up. Stickers with Diehm's second-place design will be available at Nashville, too.
Shirts and hoodies with Keegan's winning design are also available for purchase online from the NICAR23 Swag Shop, while #NICAR23 stickers with both designs are available for sale in the IRE Store online.
Thanks to everyone who entered designs and voted.
Halima Gikandi of The World, Leslie Rangel of KTBC-TV, Austin and Kaylee Tornay of InvestigateWest will serve as IRE’s 2023 Journalists of Color Investigative Reporting Fellows.
Halima Gikandi is the Africa Correspondent for The World radio program, the largest international news program on American public radio. Based in Nairobi, Gikandi reports on current affairs in Africa, with a focus on politics, security, and human rights. In 2019 and 2021, she served on the board of the International Press Association of East Africa (IPAEA), which advocates for hundreds of journalists working in the region.
Gikandi’s project will investigate allegations that certain U.S. citizens are taking advantage of Uganda’s weak social and legal protections to exploit minors.
Leslie Rangel is an award-winning morning anchor at KTBC’s Good Day Austin. Before landing in Austin, Rangel's work took her across the south, covering oil refinery explosions in Beaumont, Texas, chasing tornadoes and earthquakes in Oklahoma City, covering the Austin Police department and helping to launch the first local Fox affiliate in Waco.
Rangel’s project will focus on the reported lack of accessibility of mental health services for communities of color in Texas. She will be looking at the intersection of mental health access, community impact and systemic racism in Texas communities.
Before her role as an investigative reporter with InvestigateWest, Kaylee Tornay was an award-winning education reporter at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and the Medford Mail Tribune. She is a graduate of the University of Oregon.
Tornay’s project will take a deep dive into Oregon’s child care and early education system to determine whether it is perpetuating inequities for students and their families in regard to supply, quality and affordability of child care and early education options.
IRE’s yearlong fellowship is designed to increase the range of backgrounds, experiences and interests within the field of investigative journalism, where diverse perspectives are critically important. The 2023 fellowship program was open to journalists of color with at least three years of post-college work experience.
Gikandi, Rangel and Tornay were selected based on the projects they pitched in their applications. They will continue in their current professional roles while receiving a suite of IRE resources and support. These include training at an IRE data journalism bootcamp and both annual conferences, and they will receive IRE data services. Most importantly, they will each receive a mentor network of IRE members who will guide them through their year-long project.
The IRE Journalist of Color Investigative Reporting Fellowship was initially made possible thanks to generous donations from IRE members Mike Gruss, Meghan Hoyer, Megan Luther and Mike Tahani. Additional funding was provided by the IRE community and company sponsors ABC News, CNN, ESPN, Gray Television and Hearst Foundations. More than $115,000 has been raised to support the program.
Applications for the 2024 IRE Journalist of Color Investigative Reporting Fellowship will be available in October 2023.
If you’d like to donate to the fellowship, visit the IRE donation page and indicate your contribution is for the JOC fellowship.
If you want to participate in IRE training events and need financial assistance to attend, check out our fellowships and scholarships.
Investigative Reporters and Editors is pleased to announce that Robert L. Santos, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, will speak at the NICAR Conference in Nashville, March 2-5.
Paul Overberg of The Wall Street Journal will join Santos in a moderated conversation followed by audience Q&A.
The panel is scheduled for Friday, March 3, from 2:15 to 3:15 p.m. at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel.
“We’re thrilled the director of the U.S. Census Bureau is joining us in Nashville,” said Diana R. Fuentes, executive director of IRE. “The NICAR community is an exceptional mix of reporters, editors, programmers, web developers, and many others who often use census data in their roles. We’re looking forward to this opportunity to learn more about Director Santos and the vision for the future of the census and the Census Bureau.”
Santos’ career spans more than 40 years of survey research, statistical design and analysis, and executive-level management. He previously served for 15 years as vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute, where he directed its statistical methods group. He was executive vice president and partner of NuStats, a social science research firm in Austin, Texas.
Santos, a third-generation Mexican American statistician from San Antonio, Texas, is the first person of color to head the nation's largest statistical agency on a permanent basis.
Paul Overberg is a Washington-based reporter on The Wall Street Journal’s investigations team. Overberg specializes in analyzing data and public records to find stories and collaborates with reporters who cover many subjects. He has taught at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and served as a senior fellow for the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California. Before joining the Journal, he worked as a data journalist at USA Today. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Rutgers University.
January 25, 2023
A partnership between The Associated Press and PBS FRONTLINE that dug deeply into evidence of war crimes in Ukraine earned the first place prize in the 2022 Philip Meyer Journalism Award.
Other top honors go to The Los Angeles Times for its project “Extreme Heat's Deadly Toll,” and a collaboration between The Marshall Project, WOVU 95.9 FM Our Voices United and Cleveland Documenters that gives a comprehensive assessment of multiple systems that have bolstered inequities in a marginalized community.
The judges have also given a special citation to independent journalist Emily Corwin for exposing how tax credits meant to help marginalized workers get permanent jobs are instead used to subsidize temp work.
"This year's entries proved yet again that social science methods raise the ante on what it takes to be a journalist,” said Sarah Cohen, a contest judge and the Knight Chair in Data Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. “The judges paid special attention to the projects and partnerships that highlighted the groundbreaking work Meyer pioneered 50 years ago.”
The Meyer Award recognizes the best uses of empirical methods in journalism. The winners will be honored during the 2023 NICAR Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 2-5. The award is administered by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a joint program of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Missouri School of Journalism.
The 2022 winners are:
First place: “War Crimes Watch Ukraine,” The Associated Press and PBS FRONTLINE
The Associated Press: Erika Kinetz, Lori Hinnant, Cara Anna, Mstyslav Chernov, Evgenyi Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko, Oleksandr Stashevskyi, Michael Biesecker, Beatrice DuPuy, Serginho Roosblad, Marshall Ritzel, Sharon Lynch, Larry Fenn, Sarah El-Deeb, Richard Lardner, Juliet Linderman, Jason Dearen
FRONTLINE: Tom Jennings, Annie Wong, Carla Borrás, Miles Alvord, Anthony DeLorenzo, Priyanka Boghani, Dan Nolan, Aasma Mojiz Chantelle Lee
Judges’ comments: AP and Frontline partnered with organizations to collect evidence of war crimes in Ukraine and store the information in an updated public database to tell stories about attacks on venues such as hospitals, schools and a theater. For the story "AP evidence points to 600 dead in Mariupol theatre strike", the AP used two sets of floor plans, photos and video taken before and after the Russian strike on the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater to create an animated model. Witnesses and survivors walked the journalists through the building virtually, pointing out where people were sheltering room by room and how densely crowded each space was. The analysis determined 600 died. The attack remains the greatest known single loss of human life in the war. This was a riveting piece of journalism detailing unspeakable atrocities that continue to this day. Outstanding work!
Second place: “Extreme Heat's Deadly Toll,” The Los Angeles Times
Anna M. Phillips, Tony Barboza, Ruben Vives, Sean Greene and Logan A. Arnold
Judges’ comments: The Los Angeles Times found that waves of extreme heat buffeting California over the past decade have likely caused far more than the 599 deaths cited in official records. The 10-month investigation, which overcame resistance from local health officials, used sophisticated analytical techniques to examine an important topic and achieve impact. The reporters scoured hundreds of pages of paper death records and federal and state death databases to build a statistical model to estimate the true total number of deaths from heat. They worked with experts to develop and vet their findings and ultimately made the project's code publicly available in a GitHub repository. Shortly after it was published, local and state officials cited the project when proposing new measures to help protect people from extreme heat.
Third place: “Testify,” The Marshall Project, WOVU 95.9 FM Our Voices United and Cleveland Documenters
Rachel Dissell, Ilica Mahajan, Anna Flagg, Wesley Lowery, Elan Kiderman Ullendorff, Celina Fang, Ashley Dye, Raghuram Vadarevu, John G., Kellie Morris, Michelle Pitcher, Nicole Lewis, Ryan Murphy, Ariel Goodman, Aaron Colby Williams, Katie Park
Judges’ comments: The Marshall Project’s Testify is a comprehensive assessment of not just one, but multiple systems that have bolstered inequities in a marginalized community — from criminal cases to judicial elections, to voting patterns. Reporters spent 18 months gathering court records using a complex — and painfully slow — scraping system, then ran a statistical analysis that allowed the team to identify patterns among people who have cycled through the court system and assess judges' records. They stepped back to vet such findings by reviewing documents, consulting experts, and researching academic approaches.
Special citation: “A Tax Credit Was Meant to Help Marginalized Workers Get Permanent Jobs. Instead, It’s Subsidizing Temp Work.” Emily Corwin
Judges’ comments: An honorable mention goes to Emily Corwin, for her ProPublica story, “A Tax Credit was Meant to Help Marginalized Workers get Permanent Jobs. Instead, it’s Subsidizing Temp Work”. It’s only fitting that the social science methods used to develop this story — ethnography and content analysis — were informed by a Neiman fellowship when more than 50 years ago, a Nieman fellowship also inspired Philip Meyer to attempt survey research and to write the groundbreaking Precision Journalism. Corwin spent time watching temp workers in parking lots to help determine the questions she would ask, and developed semi-structured interviews to hone her research. She went further and produced a richly reported story that used traditional reporting methods once her research had pointed her in the right direction.
The Meyer Award honors Philip Meyer, professor emeritus and former Knight Chair of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Meyer is the author of “Precision Journalism,” the seminal 1973 book that encouraged journalists to incorporate social science methods in the pursuit of better journalism. As a reporter, he also pioneered the use of survey research for Knight-Ridder newspapers while exploring the causes of race riots in the 1960s.
The judges for the Philip Meyer Award for Precision Journalism were:
The Philip Meyer Journalism Award follows the rules of the IRE Awards in its efforts to avoid conflicts of interest. Work that included any significant role by a Meyer Award contest judge may not be entered in the contest. This often represents a significant sacrifice on the part of the individual — and sometimes an entire newsroom. The IRE membership appreciates this devotion to the values of the organization.
IRE works to foster excellence in investigative journalism, which is essential to a free society. Founded in 1975, IRE has more than 5,000 members worldwide. Headquartered at the Missouri School of Journalism, IRE provides training, resources and a community of support to investigative journalists; promotes high professional standards; and protects the rights of investigative journalists. The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting was founded by the Missouri School of Journalism in 1989 and became a collaboration between the school and IRE in 1994.
Contact:
Join Investigative Reporters and Editors for a special New York Workshop at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY January 20-21. Sessions on sourcing, backgrounding, business reporting and more will be led by some of the nation's most widely respected journalists, including Wesley Lowery and Walt Bogdanich. Check out the full slate of speakers and sessions, and register today to secure your seat!
As an add-on to the workshop, powerhouse researchers Barbara Gray and Margot Williams will teach a true master class on backgrounding and research: Mindsets, methods, and means of investigative news researchers. This special three-hour session would benefit all reporters and requires an additional fee along with workshop registration.
Coinciding with the first day of the New York Workshop, IRE will also host a special daylong Digging Into Data mini-bootcamp covering the basics of data analysis in the newsroom. IRE trainers Patti DiVincenzo and Adam Rhodes will teach how to find and request data, identify and clean dirty data, find story ideas, bulletproof your work and more. Attending this mini-bootcamp does NOT require registration to the main event.
For questions about registration or general event questions, please contact logistics@ire.org.
Earn bragging rights and help raise money for future training events by participating in our annual NICAR Conference T-shirt contest.
All ideas celebrating data and data journalism are welcome, from a simple, classic design with #NICAR23 on it to bad SQL puns (SELECT * FROM tshirts WHERE tshirts.thisone = “Awesome”).
There are only a few guidelines:
We will accept entries up through Sunday, Jan. 22. Send official entries as JPG or PNG files to conference@ire.org. Only submissions sent to that email will be entered in the contest.
Designs will be posted to the contest page as they are received. Starting Monday, Jan. 23, you’ll be able to vote for your favorite designs.
The designer of the winning T-shirt gets a free shirt and bragging rights.
We look forward to your ideas and another great NICAR Conference, March 2-5 in Nashville!
Ten newsrooms have been chosen to receive custom, grant-funded watchdog training in the coming year through IRE’s Total Newsroom Training program.
TNT provides two days of intensive, in-house training for small and medium-sized newsrooms dedicated to watchdog journalism. This is the 10th year IRE has offered the program.
TNT newsroom training is customized and includes two days of sessions ranging from public records battles to hands-on data analysis to topic-focused trainings like covering education, law enforcement, and underrepresented communities. The newsrooms were chosen from a record number of applicants.
"IRE is known for its passion in supporting and encouraging investigative journalism, and the TNT program allows us to share that passion with a wide diversity of journalists," Executive Director Diana R. Fuentes said. "From Camarillo, California, to Washington, D.C., nearly a dozen newsrooms across the country, including our first Spanish-language newsroom in Puerto Rico, will be receiving top-notch training in data analysis and investigative techniques this year, thanks to the TNT program. We are proud to help our fellow journalists find ways to better serve their communities."
Congratulations to the winning newsrooms:
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