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The 2024 NICAR Conference is just around the corner. This year, members are heading to Charm City. IRE’s annual data journalism conference will host amazing sessions March 7-10. But what is there to do outside of conference sessions and networking in Baltimore?
Thanks to NICAR24 Regional Committee members Tisha Thompson, Mallory Sofastaii and Kimi Yoshino, we’ve got you covered! Thompson is an investigative reporter with ESPN. Sofastaii is a consumer investigative reporter at WMAR-2 in Baltimore. Yoshino is editor-in-chief of The Baltimore Banner
Willing to grab a bite a little farther away? Thompson recommends The PaperMoon Diner to visit if you want to get a “John Waters” vibe. This eclectic restaurant serves a plethora of menu options, including a vegan selection.
Yoshino suggests folks keen to eat outside of the immediate conference vicinity to visit Clavel: A James Beard-nominated Mexican restaurant with a great selection of mezcal; however, they don't take reservations. But there are two amazing bars that you can drink at while waiting — Fadensonnen (natural wine bar) and W.C. Harlan (speakeasy type and right across the street from Clavel).
For those coming or going by train, the James Beard-nominated Alma Cocina Latina serves Venezuelan food near the train station with excellent plating and flavors.
Or do you want to get away from the conference venue after sessions wrap? For folks willing to travel farther, Sofastaii suggests an excursion to TopGolf, Horseshoe Casino or the neighborhood of Federal Hill to do the trick.
Consider also these additional local tips for running and sightseeing, on-screen pop culture and — last but not least — the iconic Mr. Trash Wheel. Read on for more details:
And there’s plenty for television and cinema aficionados. Fans of Baltimore native John Waters can seek out odd spots to enjoy around town. Fans of “The Wire” (set and produced in Baltimore) will also have plenty to discover while touring the area. Likewise, Yoshino says fans of “Homicide: Life on the Street” have added reason to drop by Kooper’s Tavern (noted in the regional committee’s local food suggestions) — it’s across the street from the Pendry Hotel (the site of the Baltimore Police Department in the show) and the bar has the old Homicide white board, used to keep track of solved and unsolved homicides. “Of course, when I went in for a drink and to see the board, nobody that worked there had ever seen the show or knew what I was talking about!”
Finally, worth noting to NICAR attendees, the conference venue is located next to one of Baltimore’s most iconic landmarks – Mr. Trash Wheel. According to the website for the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, “Mr. Trash Wheel is a social media celebrity, Baltimore landmark, and part of the semi-autonomous trash interceptor family in the Baltimore Harbor and surrounding waters.” And because we love data at NICAR, you can enjoy a decade’s worth of Mr. Trash Wheel data here.
IRE is proud to partner with Sunshine Week this year.
National Sunshine Week, celebrated annually in mid-March, is a public awareness campaign to shine a light on the importance of public records and open government. It’s a reminder to journalists and citizens alike — we have a right to know what’s going on in government!
“It’s a cause everyone can support,” David Cuillier, director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project, wrote in The IRE Journal this month.
“As Stanford’s James Hamilton calculated in his ‘Democracy’s Detectives’ book, for every dollar spent on records-based investigative reporting, society reaps $287 in benefits. That is a phenomenal return on investment.”
David Cuillier, "Bright tips for public support, Sunshine Week" (The IRE Journal, Q1 2024)
This year Sunshine Week runs March 10-16, with awareness and training events hosted by organizations in journalism, education, government and other sectors.
Cuillier shared ideas to celebrate Sunshine Week in his FOI Files column in the latest IRE Journal:
You can also attend IRE’s Sunshine Week webinar “25 records to request now” on Thursday, March 14. IRE executive director Diana Fuentes will walk you through a slew of interesting and informative public records in this hour-long session!
And if you’re looking for guidance on public records on a specific beat, read our other FOI Files columns in previous editions of The IRE Journal (IRE members have access to The IRE Journal for free, but nonmembers can also purchase digital versions of these editions):
For more ideas, resources and events, visit sunshineweek.org.
The results are in! Here's the lineup for Lightning Talks at the NICAR24 conference in Baltimore next week, in speaking order:
1. Your own worst enemy: How to organize your work so your future self won't hate you | Justin Myers, Chicago Sun-Times
You might have been here before: trying to pick apart some old analysis or script, wondering in anger what kind of jerk designed it this way — only to realize that jerk was you. I've been in that situation, too, and over the years I've found some ways to be kinder to the ever-present coworker known as My Future Self. I'd like to share some of them.
2. Visuals are data, too! | Brenna Smith, The Baltimore Banner
Too often, visuals are afterthoughts in stories. However, the emergence of visual forensics as a storytelling technique has changed that narrative, putting visuals front and center as key investigative findings. In this Lighting Talks session, Baltimore Banner reporter and former New York Times Visual Investigations fellow Brenna Smith will walk you through how to take an analytical approach to visuals, proving that newsrooms across the country can produce "visual investigations" without a New York Times budget.
3. Datasette Enrichments: Run bulk operations to enrich your data | Simon Willison, Datasette
Datasette Enrichments is a new tool that lets you take a table full of data and "enrich" it in various ways — run geocoders to populate latitudes and longitudes, clean up data with regular expressions and, most excitingly, pipe that data through GPT-4 (or GPT-4 Vision) with a prompt to extract or transform data. I'll demonstrate the feature in action and show how you can use it to process thousands of rows of data in all sorts of interesting ways.
4. Wait…who funds you? Finding out (on deadline) | Kyle Spencer, Reporting Right
Bad faith organizations with anti-democratic aims abound. But sometimes — and that’s by design —they can be hard to identify, which means you may be validating and/or legitimizing a group with radical goals (accidentally). How do you tell your readers who is behind the groups you quote, mention or allude to? This Lightning Talks session will give reporters and editors an easy 5-step process for figuring out what a group/nonprofit/think tank etc. really stands for — and who funds it. On deadline!
5. When charts lie | Todd Wallack, WBUR Boston
Graphics are an essential tool for data journalists. But it's also easy to mislead readers — either by mistake or on purpose. I'll highlight some common ways charts can trick the eye.
6. Expand your sourcing horizon | Jui Sarwate, CBS News and Stations
Learn about the different ways you can reach a variety of sources using X (Twitter) lists, connecting to sources through non-profits and by just cold emailing/calling by the bucket-loads.
7. How to take PDFs from strangers | David Huerta, Freedom of the Press Foundation
I'll be demonstrating the use of Dangerzone, a new tool actively developed by Freedom of the Press Foundation. Dangerzone allows journalists to create a malware-free copy of PDFs that may otherwise contain malicious code.
8. Follow the commodity then follow money: uncovering stories through commodity and supply chain data | Christopher Lambin, Global Witness
There is an array of data that can help investigators map the flow of physical commodities around the globe, including freight tracking, customs records, and satellite imagery. This presentation will explore how we can combine these sources to examine supply chains while investigating environmental harms, human rights abuses and sanctions evasion.
9. How to solve a murder while watching the World Cup | Catherine Rentz, independent journalist
I started building this database during the Women's World Cup (soccer!). It looked at what bad guys did as the evidence implicating them in violent crimes lay untested for decades. The results were frustrating: wrongful incarcerations and preventable violent crimes. Many jurisdictions have collections of cold case evidence like this that have remained "off the books" and untested for decades. Before long, I came across something shocking that led to a break in a 1983 unsolved murder of a college student in Baltimore County.
10. Do you know who runs your elections? | Michael Beckel, Issue One
There are more than 10,000 chief local election officials across the country. Monitoring them all would be a Herculean effort. Monitoring those is a key state or region is feasible — and necessary in understanding election administration challenges in 2024. Issue One's blockbuster analysis of Western states found that 40% of counties in the West have new chief local election officials since 2020 — and that the officials who left these positions took with them more than 1,800 years of combined experience. There is no better time than now to start getting to know your local election officials in your area!
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 8, from 5 - 6:15 p.m. in the Harbor Ballroom.
After Lightning Talks, please stick around to remember Philip Meyer's legacy and help us congratulate the 2023 Philip Meyer Journalism Award winners.
Like many reporters across the U.S., Votebeat Texas reporter Natalia Contreras has been preparing for the 2024 elections since last year.
It’s a momentous election year, to say the least. In Texas specifically, lawmakers filed hundreds of election-related laws during the legislative session. Some states enacted major changes in 2023: New York gave all voters the option to vote by mail; Michigan expanded the list of acceptable photo IDs; Mississippi made it a crime, in many instances, to help another voter return a mail ballot.
In fact, the entire nation saw “an unprecedented volume of state legislation changing the rules governing voting,” according to The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
It’s a topic that’s been trending up since the 2020 presidential election.
“We've been thinking about this year for about a year already,” Contreras said. “Because new laws, especially in Texas, just really are impacting the election and whether election officials are going to have the resources to pull off the election — and how that's going to impact voters ultimately.”
There are a lot of moving parts to keep track of, presenting challenges for newer and veteran reporters alike. IRE recognizes the importance of accurate and responsible coverage, and we want to be a resource for journalists during this challenging time.
“I really just want to make sure that the entire membership, or as many members as possible, are equipped with the skills they need to do quality elections coverage,” Adam Rhodes, IRE training director said. “It's probably one of the most important elections that a lot of us have seen, and I can't think of a more important time for there to be a robust and well-equipped press to cover elections.”
We asked three experts for their insight on covering the 2024 elections. Here’s some advice from Natalia Contreras of Votebeat Texas, Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets and Derek Willis of the University of Maryland:
“Making sure that you're relying on information that is vetted is a really important aspect of it, just having that kind of media literacy. I always check two sources when I'm doing something if it's not a primary source, and even sometimes when it is, because there's just so much misinformation and disinformation swirling around on the internet. ... That's part of journalism is asking questions, questioning the legitimacy of things – but make sure you're doing that even when something appears to be very basic.” — Anna Massoglia, OpenSecrets
“Resist the temptation to frame this campaign as a repeat of earlier campaigns. It is easier for us as journalists to understand things if they've happened before. We have some context for it … and campaigns are alike in many ways. But when you do that with campaign finance data, in particular, what happens is that you tend to look for the same kinds of stories that you did two years ago or four years ago.
And what I would encourage folks to do is to not be restricted to that, not be bound by that context, but to actually look for new ways, new stories, new behaviors in the data that would tell readers something interesting and novel about what's going on.” — Derek Willis, Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland
“It just comes down to building relationships with people that run the elections in the town or the state. … Also for the primary election, it’s super important to build relationships with the political parties (since) those people are also going to be running their own elections. ... (Their contact information) should already be on your phone, in your email, today, like right now.” — Natalia Contreras, Votebeat Texas
“No matter what your beat is, understanding at least the basics of money in politics and where to find resources is important. It's something a lot of people don't think about all the time, but it relates to so many different aspects of the world generally, whether you're reporting on things like environment or energy or specific companies, or pretty much anything. There's always a ‘money in politics’ aspect that can come up at some point.
It's something that's really important, in particular, going into an election year. Companies make political contributions, specific individuals (make political contributions), there’s lobbying, there's so many different elements that can come into play and can also add value to your story, whether or not it's focused entirely on money in politics.” — Anna Massoglia, OpenSecrets
“I'm always asking for access to see some part of the process (such as a public meeting, workshop or poll worker training) — whatever the law allows me to be there for. It's so helpful. … It really opens your eyes, just like anything else, and you're able then to provide more context to readers about why something went wrong or what happened.
Because there's so much nuance to elections. Something that can sound really bad, most of the time, isn't. It could be an administrative error, or a human error, most of the time. A voting machine that went down doesn't necessarily mean there's voter fraud, right? There’s, you know, a chain of custody that goes into place. There's always a good explanation, but being able to see it with your own eyes, you're able to explain it better.” — Natalia Contreras, Votebeat Texas
“There's so much out there, I know it can get really overwhelming. … There's so many great experts who are always really happy to walk journalists through things." — Anna Massoglia, OpenSecrets
“The hard thing is if you're a student or if you're trying to break into this (beat) … you're literally physically removed from a lot of the action. You're not with the candidates. You're not out talking to voters all the time. ... But there's a whole set of structures and processes involved in putting on a campaign and putting on an election that I would really encourage students to get involved in.
So for example, understanding how elections are run at a local level is super useful information. And so if students are not covering the campaign, volunteer to actually work an election. (That) will give you a really good education and a really good grounding in how elections actually operate.” — Derek Willis, Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
IRE is also hosting a series of webinars, workshops and panels throughout the year to train members and help them feel confident with election coverage. We’ve already hosted a few webinars on general election coverage and campaign finance. You can view the video recordings of these sessions, along with panels from past conferences, here.
Here’s what else we have coming up:
More details on these webinars will be announced as soon as they are confirmed.
And of course, we’ll have an entire track of election-related panels and classes at NICAR24 in Baltimore, with sessions on public records, campaign finance data, misinformation, foreign influence and more.
You can also get guidance from the Federal Election Commission, the Committee to Project Journalists, OpenSecrets, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Politifact — just to name a few resources.
Have an idea for an election-related webinar or workshop? Reach out to IRE training director Adam Rhodes. To receive updates on these events, subscribe to Quick Hits, IRE’s biweekly newsletter.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration, election security and voting access for Votebeat Texas, in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She has covered a range of topics as a community journalist including local government, public safety, immigration and social issues.
Anna Massoglia is OpenSecrets’ Editorial and Investigations Manager. Her research also includes "dark money," political ads and foreign influence. She holds degrees in political science and psychology from North Carolina State University and a J.D. from the University of the District of Columbia School of Law.
Derek Willis is a lecturer in data and computational journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where he teaches classes on data analysis and related topics. He previously covered campaign finance for ProPublica, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Congressional Quarterly.
Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) shares in the disappointment and sadness across our industry in the wake of recent layoffs at well-known traditional news outlets and in many smaller markets, which have received less attention but are just as devastating.
The cutbacks hurt journalism’s mission to inform the public. Yet, while fewer resources are disheartening, we cannot give up. There is a reason why the founders of the United States saw fit to include journalists in the First Amendment, and we at IRE are marshaling our resources and offering our strongest support to our colleagues, whose work is the very foundation of democracy.
From its beginnings in 1975, IRE has maintained a network of like-minded, fearless journalists who help each other in times of need, be it debugging a bit of code or finding a new job. And IRE members continue to do that today.
Here are some specific ways that IRE members can help today:
Investigative Reporters and Editors is a grassroots, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative journalism. IRE was started in 1975 with the goal of providing a forum for journalists throughout the world to share story ideas, news sources and newsgathering and data analyzing techniques. Its first conference was in 1976. It continues to educate, empower and connect journalists today, now with three conferences annually: NICAR in the spring, IRE in the summer and AccessFest, an all-virtual conference in the fall designed to increase accessibility and affordability of IRE’s top-of-the-line training. Members also have access to workshops and webinars throughout the year, as well as thousands of tipsheets and other resources online. The IRE network is thriving, with members reaching out to each other regularly online to resolve individual technical and content issues. If you’re not yet a member, join IRE here.
The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) and Investigative Reporters and Editors are collaborating on a webinar series that combines the organizations’ expertise in health reporting and data and investigative journalism.
"Follow the Money: The Business of Health Care" is an in-depth, hands-on webinar series that will equip journalists with the tools they need to tell the story of the big business of health care. The series is free for all journalists, thanks to the generous support of the NIHCM Foundation.
"For the first time in the history of our two organizations, IRE and AHJC are working together to help journalists across the country better cover this critical issue," said IRE Executive Director Diana Fuentes. "Collaboration is essential in today’s journalism world. Together, IRE and AHCJ will provide journalists with tools they need to reach their local communities."
In March, the first of four webinars will explore where to find financial data for hospitals and other health care businesses. The following webinars will explore how to investigate health care pricing and medical debt, and the nuances of private health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.
"We're thrilled to partner with IRE on this comprehensive webinar series that will benefit journalists looking to dig into the money side of health care," said AHCJ Executive Director Kelsey Ryan. "By bringing together our joint expertise, we’re certain journalists will take away valuable tips and story ideas they can use right away."
Mark your calendars for the first webinar of the series, "Using HospitalFinances.org and other tools to tell money stories," 1-2 p.m. ET on Wednesday, March 27. The session will be led by longtime AHCJ member Karl Stark, Director of Content/Editor in Residence at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Register here!
Looking ahead, the free webinar series continues throughout the coming months, with more details and registration coming soon:
Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. is a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting. IRE was formed to create a forum in which journalists throughout the world could help each other by sharing story ideas, newsgathering techniques and news sources. IRE provides members access to thousands of reporting tipsheets and other materials through its Resource Center and hosts conferences and specialized training across the country.
The Association of Health Care Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. With about 1,500 members across the U.S. and around the globe, its mission is to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of health care reporting, writing and editing. The association and its sister organization, the Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism provide training, resources and support for journalists, including health journalism fellowships, webinars, networking and conferences.
IRE is pleased to announce that Sarah Sax, Eli Cahan and Leonora LaPeter Anton are the recipients of our 2023 Freelance Fellowships. With IRE’s support, these independent journalists will pursue projects investigating third-party regulators, families punished over cannabis, and reform school students’ path to death row.
Sarah Sax is an award-winning freelance journalist, covering the climate crisis and the way environmental change is reworking the systems we live in. She covers labor, transnational trade and commodities, gender, Indigenous rights and the criminal legal system — often with a strong justice and accountability lens. Her work has been honored with a Front Page Award, an American Association for Journalists and Authors Award and has been recognized by the National Association of Science Writers, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of Environmental Journalists. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her project will be investigating how third-party certifiers systematically overlook human rights, labor, building and environmental violations in their work, leading to negative outcomes for humans, consumers and the environment.
Eli Cahan, M.D., M.S., is an award-winning investigative journalist covering the intersection of child welfare and social justice. His written work has been featured in The Washington Post, LA Times, Rolling Stone, and USA Today, among other publications. His multimedia work has appeared on TV via ABC and radio via NPR. Cahan’s reporting has won awards from the National Press Club, the News Leaders Association and elsewhere. He has received reporting fellowships from the McGraw Center, the National Press Foundation, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, among others; he has also been a grantee of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Pulitzer Center and elsewhere. Cahan is also a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His project will investigate how child protective services is punishing parents for cannabis use and harming vulnerable families in the U.S.
Leonora LaPeter Anton is a freelance writer focused on investigative and narrative stories. She wrote for 36 years at five southeastern U.S. newspapers, including more than two decades at the Tampa Bay Times. She was part of a team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series about violent conditions inside Florida's psychiatric hospitals. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her project will investigate documenting the number of boys sent to the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, who later went on to become sexual predators and murderers. At least 33 of them have been sent to death row for murder.
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 (FIRE) to help each fellow with their projects.
If you’d like to donate to the Freelance Fellowship fund, please make a donation online and designate "Freelance Fellowship" in the form.
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.
January 17, 2024
“Still Loading,” The Markup investigation, which exposed vast disparities in internet service quality from four major providers, earned the first place prize in the 2023 Philip Meyer Journalism Award.
The Meyer Award recognizes the best uses of social science research methods in journalism. It is named for Philip Meyer, the author of “Precision Journalism,” who pioneered the use of empirical methods to empower better journalism. Read more about Meyer and his legacy here.
Bloomberg News earned the second place award for “Power Plays,” a project that exposed how large U.K. power companies manipulated the country’s feckless energy system to reap profits. Third place goes to a collaboration between Lighthouse Reports, WIRED, Vers Beton and Open Rotterdam for “Inside the Suspicion Machine,” a series that traced the deployment of predictive AI in European welfare systems.
The judges have also given two special citations in the 2023 Philip Meyer Journalism Award:
The winners will be honored at the 2024 NICAR Conference, March 7-10 in Baltimore. 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.
First place: “Still Loading,” The Markup
Leon Yin, Aaron Sankin, Joel Eastwood, Gabriel Hongsdusit, Paroma Soni, Jeremy Singer-Vine, Evelyn Larrubia, Sisi Wei
Judges’ comments: For The Markup’s “Still Loading,” reporters gathered and analyzed 800,000 internet service offers from telecom giants in dozens of cities, finding they routinely offered the worst deals to households in lower-income, less white and historically redlined neighborhoods. The reporters adapted methods from an academic study to identify internet offers by address and then used Census data and historical maps to tell a powerful story about a critical social injustice. The judges applaud the team for their resourcefulness, robust validation process and, along with their partner Big Local News, commitment to sharing their bespoke mapping tool with the public.
Second place: “Power Plays,” Bloomberg News
Gavin Finch, Todd Gillespie, Jason Grotto, Sam Dodge, Alex Campbell
Judges’ comments: For “Power Plays,” Bloomberg News analyzed millions of records obtained through a national data portal and additional records on renewable energy subsidies. The team’s reporting exposed methods that large U.K. power companies used to manipulate the country’s energy system for profit, saddling customers with extra costs. This took place during an energy crisis that caused havoc, including forcing elderly people and low-income families into warming shelters. The judges commend the stories for shining an important spotlight on companies that usually avoid scrutiny despite their impact on people’s everyday lives.
Third place: “Inside the Suspicion Machine,” Lighthouse Reports, WIRED, Vers Beton, Open Rotterdam
Gabriel Geiger, Eva Constantaras, Justin-Casimir Braun, Evaline Schot, Dhruv Mehrotra, Saskia Klaassen, Romy van Dijk, Matthew Burgess, Morgan Meaker, Kyle Thomas, Daniel Howden, Andrew Couts, James Temperton, Eeva Liukku, David Davidson, Danielle Carrick, Htet Aung, Alyssa Walker, Raagul Nagendran, Hari Moorthy, Ishita Tiwari, Lily Boyce, Sascha Meijer, and Roelof van der Meer
Judges’ comments: In “Inside the Suspicion Machine,” Lighthouse Reports, WIRED, Vers Beton and Open Rotterdam gained rare access to the algorithms used to choose subjects for welfare fraud investigations. After nearly one and a half years of negotiation, the reporters obtained the underlying computer code used to flag Rotterdam’s residents, which could cut them off from services and even target them for raids. By studying and testing the risk scoring algorithm, they learned that it did only marginally better than random chance, and targeted people based on their native language, gender and even how they dressed. From there, the reporters followed two archetypes, as typified by more than 300 characteristics, to show audiences the arbitrary, and at times prejudiced, logic of the system. The judges remarked on how rarely news organizations gain access to these often proprietary lines of code, and how important they are to holding governments accountable for their actions.
Special citation: “Putin and Orbán's Media Masquerade: Projecting Unity and Tension in the EU,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Current Time Digital and Szabad Európa
Judges’ comments: "Putin and Orbán's Media Masquerade" is a timely investigation that used textual analysis, such as topic clusterization, to show how Russian and Hungarian propaganda have been interwoven since the war in Ukraine began, and how Hungary supported Russia's invasion. The visualizations were particularly helpful in displaying the analysis of data from 15,000 headlines from the propaganda machines of both countries. The project should inspire other journalists to investigate shared propaganda and disinformation between political parties and countries.
Special citation: “Unhoused and Undercounted,” The Center for Public Integrity in partnership with The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist
Judges’ comments: “Unhoused and Undercounted” told the story of the roughly 300,000 children and youth in the United States who are entitled to rights reserved for homeless students, but are going unidentified by school districts that have the legal obligation to help them. This collective oversight results in the students, disproportionately Black and Latino, lacking the critical support they need to stay in school, graduate and obtain referrals for health care and housing: In short, basic civil rights. Due to its nationwide approach, this analysis broke new ground by measuring the gap between identified and actual homelessness within school districts across the United States. The judges noted the data was also made available to local newsrooms, which was key to the project’s success in telling a story that holds educators to account for failing to serve their most vulnerable students.
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 influential 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 2023 Philip Meyer Journalism Award were:
The Philip Meyer Journalism Award follows the rules of the IRE Awards 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 4,500 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:
Applications are now open for IRE’s Total Newsroom Training, a grant-funded program that brings customized investigative training to small- and medium-sized newsrooms. This year, the program will reach a milestone of 100 newsrooms trained over 11 years.
IRE’s experienced trainers will visit selected U.S.-based newsrooms either virtually or in person for two days of intense, in-house investigative training – at no cost.
Spots in the program are limited and awarded on a competitive basis. Preference will be given to newsrooms in rural areas and smaller cities, smaller newsrooms in large markets, and newsrooms founded and run by those coming from and serving historically marginalized communities.
Total Newsroom Training is designed to increase the ability of news organizations to provide watchdog and enterprise coverage for their communities and to produce work that can lead to change and improvements. IRE customizes training based on the needs of the organization, which may include web tools, background techniques and hands-on data analysis training.
The newsroom must be committed to allowing a significant portion of its staff to attend the full two days of training and to tracking their progress after the training. Training must be completed by December 2024. The winning newsrooms will attend a webinar later in the year to showcase their work.
The deadline to apply is February 17, 2024. Learn more about the program and how to apply. For questions, email IRE trainer Adam Rhodes, adam@ire.org.
Signups are now open for the mentorship networking program at NICAR24 in Baltimore.
If you’ll be joining us for the conference, you can sign up by filling out this form. If you can’t make it to Baltimore this year but still want to find a mentor, please check out the IRE page at JournalismMentors.com, where you can set up a time to meet virtually with an IRE member mentor.
IRE will match mentors with mentees and arrange for them to meet at a breakfast during the conference. The NICAR24 mentorship breakfast will be held from 7:30 - 8:45 a.m. on Friday, March 8, at the conference hotel.
Space is limited in this popular program, and the deadline to apply is midnight CT on Monday, Feb. 5. If the slots are filled before then, your application will be added to a waitlist.
Please also note that you must register for the conference by Feb. 5 to participate.
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