Jan. 28
Before class
Take the class survey of skills and interests
Sign up for a membership at Investigative Reporters and Editors. Choose the student membership with nothing filled in for the other publications. Once you're a member, be sure to send a note to jgreen@ire.org requesting your free license for CometDocs, and Tableau if you want it. (It should be available for the Mac soon.) We'll talk about these packages later in the year. You will need access to the members-only portions of the site on the first day of class.
Class outline
- You, us
- Exploration of your survey forms
- Overview of computer-assisted / empirical / precision journalism in investigations
- Workshop: Finding a story for your presentation
Resources
CAR Overview
- Slides from class, and a few other links to stories that reflect a specific type of story. Look at these again if you need reminding of what an investigation containing an empirical spine looks like. We've left out most of the best stories of the last decade so you can use them for your story review.
- Mike Berens' passionate piece on the heart of CAR, written when Bill Clinton was president.
- Elliot Jaspin's story of finding racial cleansing in census data.
- "Serious Fun with Numbers", CJR, November 9, 2010, on Dan Gilbert's drive to learn enough to get a story.
Finding stories
The best stories for your presentation will be in-depth investigations that relied on an underpinning of analysis, usually of public records or home-made databases. You may not see the numbers in the story, but should pick up on common hints: The use of databases of public records, an analysis that at some point documents the trend.
Your IRE membership will be the best place to start looking, by reviewing stories that interest you in Extra Extra, story library in the resource center, IRE Journal articles and Philip Meyer award winners. Once you find one story, look up that person's byline for more. All stories entered in the IRE contests include a form that describes, in depth, what records and techniques were used. Look in the resource center for those.