IRE Preview: New speakers, sessions added to schedule

We're offering more than 100 sessions focused on honing specific skills, covering key beats, digging into data and documents and much more. Here are a few highlights we recently added to the schedule:

• This year's Showcase Panel will focus on government surveillance – how to cover it as a story and how those prying eyes impact your work. Panelists include former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, members of the Guardian and Washington Post teams whose award-winning work exposed many of the issues, and more. Separately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will hold a couple of hands-on sessions to help you equip yourself to communicate more securely - bring your laptop.
• Lowell Bergman will deliver the keynote address during our annual Awards Luncheon. He's a pioneer in nonprofit investigative journalism, worked for 60 Minutes and ABC News, was a correspondent for The New York Times, and now teaches at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and does documentary work for FRONTLINE. And, for good measure, he was portrayed by Al Pacino in The Insider. 
• A number of sessions will focus on international issues, including a just-added session featuring reporters working in the midst of the uprise in Ukraine, examinations of collaborations that cross borders, and covering organized crime, from Mexico to Eastern Europe.
• Two new types of sessions are being offered. Deep Dive panels give speakers a chance to really dig in on a specific topic or approach. And we're turning over one segment of the conference on Saturday to attendees with IRE By Design, in which members propose sessions onsite and the ideas with the most votes will be held.

The IRE Conference schedule is available online. You can also view the speaker list.