NICAR 2025 schedule
176 sessions confirmed • Updated January 23 • All times are CT
176 sessions confirmed • Updated January 23 • All times are CT
NICAR 2025 will run from Thursday, March 6, to Sunday, March 9 in Minneapolis, at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center (30 South 7th Street Minneapolis, MN 55402).
Click here to register. More details will be added to this schedule as they are confirmed.
Start typing to filter the results below. You can search by session title or speaker name.
Showing 176 of 176 sessions
Welcome first-timers & networking
Time: Thursday, March 6, 8 – 8:45 a.m. (45m)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Laura Jael Kurtzberg is a data visualization specialist, cartographer and news applications developer with a particular interest in environmental stories. Laura has worked at the intersection of data journalism and design with organizations like InfoAmazonia, Ambiental Media, WLRN Public Media and Mongabay.
Cody Winchester was a newspaper reporter, data specialist and web developer before joining IRE as a training director in 2017. He became tech lead in 2022.
Connect: GitHub
Beginner track: New to data journalism? Start here
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
MaryJo Webster is the data editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune. Previously she worked at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, USA Today, Center for Public Integrity, Investigative Reporters & Editors and small newspapers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Big Local News tools, wares and resources
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Coaching ChatGPT to help with coding and data tasks
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Critical datasets to know when covering K-12
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Everything everywhere all at once: Data from around the world to report on global issues
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
In an interconnected world, data is more accessible than ever—but finding and using global data comes with unique challenges. In this panel, reporters will explore strategies for locating reliable international datasets and navigating the obstacles that come with using them. From language barriers to currency conversions, inconsistent formats, and varying levels of data transparency, journalists must adapt to diverse contexts to uncover the story within the data. Panelists will share practical solutions for addressing these challenges, including best practices for working with multilingual datasets, standardizing metrics across borders, and verifying sources in regions with limited transparency. Additionally, the session will tackle the complex issue of obtaining documents and records in countries where public records laws are weak, inefficient, or nonexistent. Panelists will highlight creative approaches to accessing critical information, from building local partnerships to leveraging non-traditional sources.
Key questions for discussion during the panel:
- What are the most effective methods for identifying and accessing reliable global data sources?
- What unique challenges do international datasets present—such as language barriers, currency discrepancies, or incompatible formats—and what strategies can help overcome them?
- How can journalists access critical documents in countries where public records laws are weak, inefficient, or nonexistent?
Speaker
Finding the story: Digging into IRS data on nonprofits
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Google Sheets 1: Getting started with spreadsheets
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Python for data analysis
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
In this session, you'll learn how to analyze data using the popular Python data analysis library pandas. You'll learn about the benefits of scripting your data projects and enough syntax to load, sort, filter and group a data set.
This class is good for: People who are comfortable working with data in spreadsheets or SQL and want to make the leap to programming -- no coding experience required. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Reporting in underserved communities with hard-to-get data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Pam Dempsey is the program director of the Data-Driven Reporting Project and the past executive director of Investigate Midwest. Since 2003, she has worked as an online, print and radio journalist, and developed community engagement programs, investigative reporting workshops and helped coordinate the start-up of two online newsrooms that heavily emphasize data journalism.
Connect: LinkedIn
Ayuka Kawakami is an investigative data journalist based in New York City. Ayuka is one of the eleven award recipients for the Data-Driven Reporting Project 2024. She is currently working on a data-driven investigative story of how the thriving shipping industry impacts the remote Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic. She is also a polar adventurer who frequently spends time in the Arctic regions and has a passion for addressing climate change in the polar regions.
Connect: LinkedIn
Mauricio is an award-winning journalist. He began his career as a crime and breaking news reporter at DNAinfo Chicago. He was a founding member and Southwest Side reporter for Block Club Chicago. Mauricio also worked as an investigative reporter covering immigration at the Desert Sun for the USA Today Network, an education reporter at Chalkbeat Chicago, and an associate digital editor at Chicago magazine.
Connect: Bluesky
Beginner track: How to find data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Greta Kaul covers the built environment, including development and livability issues, at the Star Tribune. Prior to joining the Star Tribune, she was the data reporter at the Star Tribune.
Georeferencing static maps
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
This session is for reporters who often have to wait to hear back from others about the availability of GIS files, when it's sometimes much faster to georeference them on our own. Using QGIS, we can georeference maps and create our own layers.
Instructor
Harsha Devulapalli is a graphics reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, with a diverse background as a researcher, geographer, urban designer, developer and product manager. He is passionate about cities, maps, transit, languages, typography and history.
Google Sheets 2: Formulas & sorting
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
How to be your own archivist
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Navigating Census data: Exploring regions and trends over time
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Networking for LGBTQ+ journalists
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Networking: Students
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Practical, ethical use of AI in the newsroom: Translation, audio processing and chatbots
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Technical tech regulators: The data we use to regulate the most powerful companies in the world
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Get familiar with open data we use to regulate powerful companies, and discuss structures for accountability.
Speaker
Using Python to scrape websites
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Watching the weather with Github Actions
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
When severe weather is on its way, you'll want to know about it. Find out how to set up Slack alerts based on live U.S. National Weather Service data using Github Actions.
Instructor
Bill Tracker: How to collect and analyze legislative data for any beat
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Dr. David Cuillier is director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. He has taught data journalism and access to information for more than 20 years, and before that was a newspaper reporter and editor in the Pacific Northwest. He is a member of the FOIA Advisory Committee and is co-author of “The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records."
Bringing data journalism to the sports section
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Datawrapper hacks
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructors
Taylor Johnston is an award-winning visual data journalist working with the CBS News data team. Previously, Taylor was a graphics reporter for Hearst Connecticut Media Group. She has also worked for The New York Times, The Center for Public Integrity, The Dallas Morning News and Newsday. Taylor is from Cleveland, Ohio. A first-generation college student, she graduated from Ohio University with bachelor's degrees in journalism and interactive information design.
Grace Manthey is a visual data journalist at CBS News & Stations. Previously, she was the founding member of the data journalist team at the ABC Owned Television Stations. She holds a master's in journalism from the University of Southern California and a bachelor's in journalism from Quinnipiac University. She currently lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her husband and puppy/data sidekick, Dunkin.
Connect: LinkedIn
Extracting data from PDFs using off-the-shelf tools
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Join this class to learn how to “liberate” trapped data locked inside of PDF’s. This class will cover basic approaches for getting text out of PDF documents using powerful and freely available tools. Participants will be introduced to basic concepts and walked through tackling common challenges encountered with tricky PDF documents.
This session is good for: People who are unfamiliar with PDF-to-text tools or would like to learn how these tools can be used for extracting difficult text from images embedded in a PDF document.
Instructor
Finding the story: Reproductive health data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Get AI to read all that stuff with semantic search
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Semantic search is a novel way to search large sets of short-ish text, like datasets of complaints, incident reports or social media posts. Instead of keyword search – which misses misspellings, paraphrase and use of terms that the user hasn't thought of – semantic search finds results whose meaning is similar to that of the query.
It's a guaranteed-safe way to use AI in a newsroom context, because the only downside of a "false positive" match is wasting the reporter's time in reading the irrelevant search results.
Let's talk about the use-cases where we've used it, the fiddly choices we have to make when using semantic search, and the bright new future that awaits us.
Speakers
Dylan Freedman is a machine-learning engineer and journalist on the A.I. Initiatives team at The New York Times. He started his career on a machine-learning team at Google before pivoting to study journalism at Stanford. He served as lead developer at journalism nonprofit DocumentCloud and most recently worked on elections at The Washington Post. He is passionate about building open-source tools to empower investigative reporting and analyze documents, media and data.
Jeremy B. Merrill is a data reporter at The Washington Post. He likes natural language processing and bad jokes. He lives in Atlanta.
Google Sheets 3: Filtering & pivot tables
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
How to start investigating your college or university with data and records
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Are you a student journalist who wishes they had a clearer road map to how to get started doing accountability journalism on your college campus? Let's talk about how to get started. A session for total beginners. Let's talk about open records laws, federally required disclosure like IRS Form 990 and the Clery Act, and what's available to you even if you're at a private institution.
Speaker
Jennifer Peebles is a newsroom data specialist at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, helping reporters find and tell stories with government data (and sometimes documents, too). She also helps colleagues obtain records (on paper and electronically) through the state's open government laws. She is the former government editor of The (Nashville) Tennessean newspaper. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and was once editor of its student newspaper.
Turning police disciplinary files into data and stories
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Updating data practices for inclusion
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
With data collection, algorithms and artificial intelligence affecting larger and larger parts of our lives, journalists should become more and more comfortable with using data for reporting. But how can they do this while keeping diversity and inclusion in mind, and not leaving some groups behind, or emphasizing a status quo that disadvantages minorities? Let's talk - What have your experiences been? What resources do you know of? How can we improve our own practices and encourage sources to update theirs?
Speaker
Samantha Sunne is a freelance journalist based in New Orleans. She is the recipient of several national grants and awards for investigative reporting, most recently the ProPublica Local Reporting Network fellowship. Her first book, coauthored with trainer Mike Reilley, “Data + Journalism: A Story-Driven Approach to Learning Data Reporting,” was an Amazon bestseller in 2023.
Connect: Bluesky
Using CAPTCHA-solving services to automate difficult web-scraping projects
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Using Python to analyze map data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Python has a lot of useful tools for scripting your GIS analysis. In this introductory workshop, we'll use a couple of popular mapping libraries to work through some common newsroom mapping tasks. (We'll focus on analysis more than visualization.)
This session is good for: People with a little bit of Python experience (we won't cover basic syntax). Knowledge of GIS concepts is helpful but not required.
Instructor
Cody Winchester was a newspaper reporter, data specialist and web developer before joining IRE as a training director in 2017. He became tech lead in 2022.
Connect: GitHub
Advanced Python mapping techniques
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Arijit (Ari) D. Sen is an investigative data journalist at CBS News. Prior to joining CBS, he worked at The Dallas Morning News, NBC News and the Asheville Citizen-Times. He was a finalist for the Livingston Award and winner of the IRE Award in 2024 for his work on "Bleeding Out."
Getting the most out of Datawrapper *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 5:45 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Datawrapper is a powerful data visualization tool with capability that goes far beyond bar and line charts. Whether you’re freelancing, covering a beat for your local newspaper or working for a national news organization, Datawrapper’s free and paid versions make the tool accessible for any budget. In this workshop, we’ll cover:
- Making mobile-friendly (and mobile-first!) graphics
- Basic visualizations like bar and line charts as well as more advanced visualizations like maps, tables and timelines
- How to use Datawrapper Academy to independently learn new tools and tricks
- Improving accessibility for Datawrapper graphics
- How to incorporate Datawrapper into your newsroom’s regular workflow
- Implementing a workflow for editing and fact-checking Datawrapper graphics
This class is good for people who have basic familiarity with Datawrapper or other point-and-click data viz tools. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructors
Madi Alexander is the senior graphics editor on POLITICO’s data and graphics team, where she covers health care, education and other public policy issues. She previously worked as a data journalist for Bloomberg Government and The Dallas Morning News. Madi has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. Outside of work, she enjoys birding and volunteers for Guide Dogs for the Blind.
Go big with GitHub Actions: Scale up your newsroom’s data pipelines *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 5:45 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Take this three-hour class to learn how journalists deploy massive data pipelines at zero cost using GitHub’s powerful Actions framework.
You will get hands-on experience creating an automated system that can collect, process and publish a gigantic dataset with ease.
Ben Welsh, Iris Lee and Dana Chiueh will teach you how to:
Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Students do not need to be programming experts, but they should have at least some experience editing code and working with GitHub. Don’t talk yourself out of attending. If you’re interested and have a good attitude, you are qualified to join.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructors
Google Sheets: Advanced pivot tables
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
How to run visual investigations
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Learning a new beat in data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Passive scraping for social media
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Spatial analysis in R: 101
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Spreading data wisdom through mentoring
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
We’ve all have mentors, maybe just for that one breakfast, maybe for that one job transition, maybe for a lifetime. We’ll talk about how to find a mentor, how to set goals, how often to reach out, how to be a good mentor and how to be a good mentee. And why it’s sometimes important to look for help outside your workplace. Bring your questions, we'll leave plenty of time for Q&A.
Speaker
What to do when the data doesn't exist
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Data stories that don't look or sound like data stories
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Elevate your graphics with Illustrator
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Vector graphics programs like Illustrator are great tools for creating beautiful, unique data visualizations and graphics – but it doesn’t need to all be done from scratch. In this session, we will go over ways to begin making your chart using tools that most newsrooms already use (like Datawrapper, RawGraphs, Flourish and ggplot) and elevate its design with the magic of SVGs and vector graphics programs.
This session is good for journalists with some data and data visualization knowledge.
Instructor
Adam Marton is a data journalist specializing in visual storytelling, code and design. He is on the faculty at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at The University of Maryland, where he oversees the data and graphics bureau of Capital News Service and teaches data journalism and visual design courses. He previously worked at The Baltimore Sun, where he led the data and graphics desk in the newsroom.
Follow the money: How to use campaign finance data in your reporting
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Kelly Waldron is a data reporter at Mission Local, an independent, nonprofit newsroom based in San Francisco. Lately, her work has focused on using data to uncover the vast amount of money pouring into local elections. Previously, she graduated from Columbia Journalism School’s data program and worked in remote sensing for a satellite company.
Google Sheets: Importing & data prep
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Don't give up if your data isn't presented in a neat spreadsheet. This session will teach you how to get data into a spreadsheet and prepare it for analysis. We will look at how to import text files, deal with data in a PDF, and get a table on a web page into a spreadsheet.
This session is good for: Anyone comfortable working in Google Sheets. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Google account to participate.
Instructor
Media lawyer Q&A
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Instructor
PDF next steps: Extracting data using command-line and other tools
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
This class seeks to help you free data stored in PDFs. Attendees will extract text from a computer-generated PDF using command-line tools, process image files with optical character recognition and set themselves up for working with PDFs in Python. The session will also cover how to assess a PDF to select the right tools to use to free its data.
This session is good for: People with experience using a command-line interface and who deal with frustrating PDFs. Knowledge of Python or R is a plus but not required. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Spatial analysis in R: 202
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Using microdata from the Minnesota Population Center
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
David Van Riper is director of spatial analysis at IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series). He is co-principal investigator of IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS), which provides historical and contemporary small-area census data, and work on the geographic identifiers available in IPUMS microdata products (IPUMS USA and CPS).
Connect: LinkedIn
MaryJo Webster is the data editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune. Previously she worked at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, USA Today, Center for Public Integrity, Investigative Reporters & Editors and small newspapers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Using open-source intelligence (OSINT) in investigations
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Which coding language to use and why
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Nael Shiab is the senior data producer at CBC News, where he uses programming languages to explore and answer public interest questions through data. He specializes in crafting engaging digital experiences, including immersive 3D data visualizations. Nael also maintains the open-source JavaScript library simple-data-analysis (github.com/nshiab/simple-data-analysis).
Beginner track: How to request data and documents: FOI
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
CAR (data journalism) through the decades
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Developing an ethical AI policy for your newsroom
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Join news leaders to discuss the why, when, and how to develop an AI policy for your newsroom.
Speakers
Silvia DalBen Furtado is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she investigates the use of artificial intelligence in journalism. Her current research is focused on computational journalism, AI ethics, global media, streaming television, platform studies and computational methods. She has a MA in communication (2018) from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil.
Extracting data from complex PDFs using pdfplumber
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Wonderful tools such as Tabula have made it easier to extract tabular data from PDFs. But what if your pile of PDFs is more complex than that? Maybe there are a few bits of info that you need to grab outside the tables, or maybe the information isn't tabular at all?
In this session, we'll use pdfplumber, an open-source Python library, to demonstrate some techniques. We'll also demystify some aspects of the PDF file format, which will come in handy no matter what tools you use.
This session would be good for: People with some prior experience using Python.
Instructor
Jeremy Singer-Vine is a data editor, reporter, and computer programmer based in New York City. He currently serves as data editor for The New York Times. Previously, he founded the Data Liberation Project, served as the data editor for BuzzFeed News and worked at The Wall Street Journal. Since 2015, he has also published Data Is Plural, a newsletter highlighting useful and curious datasets.
Google Sheets: Using string functions to manipulate data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Making publishable graphics in R Studio
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Navigating your mental health in journalism
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Spatial analysis in R: 303
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Beginner track: Feed the beast: Integrating data nuggets on deadline
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Extracting data and artifacts from documents with AI
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
How economic development incentives impact public budgets
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Companies receive upwards of $95 billion in economic development subsidies per year. While those deals are often reported upon, what's less analyzed are the impacts of those tax breaks and other subsidies on budgets, and what, if anything, communities get in return. Using Subsidy Tracker and Tax Break Tracker help answer those questions. Learn how to use the databases and how reporters have used them in their reporting to show the impact of corporate giveaways. Subsidy Tracker lets users explore what companies are receiving incentives and where, and Tax Break Tracker shows users how much revenue governments give up in the name of economic development. This session would be especially useful for local and state government reporters, as well as those covering education (the public service that loses the most funding when incentives are given due to its dependence on property taxes).
Instructors
Arlene Martínez is with Good Jobs First, which promotes corporate and government accountability in economic development, especially around taxpayer incentives. Her work focuses on who benefits from tax and economic policies and regulatory changes. Before joining the nonprofit GJF, (which maintains the Subsidy, Violation, and Tax Break Tracker databases), she was a reporter with the USA TODAY Network, The Morning Call, the LA Times and Hispanic Link News Service.
How to use CensusDis, the friendliest Python API for U.S. Census data
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Scott Pham is an investigative reporter and a managing editor of the CBS News data team.
QGIS 1: Spatial analysis for beginners
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Learn to how to make your own maps using free, open-source software called QGIS. This class will teach you how to get started importing and displaying geographic data. Not all datasets need to be mapped, but some do! We'll go over how to find publicly available data, prepare it for mapping, and join together different datasets.
This session is good for: Beginners looking to learn the basics of visualizing geographic data. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Daniel Wainwright is a senior data journalist with BBC News. He's covered UK elections both general and local and worked on the results of the 2024 U.S. election. He's previously been political editor of a regional newspaper in England and produced content from the 2021 Census for the UK's Office for National Statistics.
R 1: Intro to R and RStudio
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Reporting on America's prison and jail death crisis
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Ethan Corey is The Appeal’s research and projects editor. Ethan’s investigative research and reporting has been featured in many outlets beyond The Appeal, including In These Times, The Nation, New York Focus, Retro Report and BuzzFeed News. Before joining The Appeal in July 2018, Ethan worked as the head of fact-checking at Retro Report.
Scraping without programming
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Yes, you can scrape data without using code -- in fact, all you need is Google Sheets! We'll be using Excel-type formulas (don't worry if you don't know what those are, either) to make simple scrapers that automatically pull data into Google Sheets. It’s the best way to get around clunky websites and unhelpful PIOs!
This session is good for: Beginners who want to start using data for their stories. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and must have a Google account.
Instructor
Samantha Sunne is a freelance journalist based in New Orleans. She is the recipient of several national grants and awards for investigative reporting, most recently the ProPublica Local Reporting Network fellowship. Her first book, coauthored with trainer Mike Reilley, “Data + Journalism: A Story-Driven Approach to Learning Data Reporting,” was an Amazon bestseller in 2023.
Connect: Bluesky
Tidycensus will convince you to learn R
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Tired of dealing with tabs, weird variable names, and disappearing leading zeros with Census data? Learn how to use Tidycensus, a well-designed R package that pulls data from the Census API and structures it in a logical, tidy way, which makes it easier for you to join with other data and analyze.
Instructor
Using AI tools in the newsroom *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructor
What's involved in data editing?
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
MaryJo Webster is the data editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune. Previously she worked at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, USA Today, Center for Public Integrity, Investigative Reporters & Editors and small newspapers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Covering college sports when the players are pros
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Custom dataviz with JavaScript 101
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Interested in building data visualizations for the web? This session will introduce you to charts made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, helping you understand how various components combine to create a complete visualization displayed in your browser by coding.
Instructor
Digging deep: Scraping government websites
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Join us as we scrape a government website live and dig pages deep to extract specific data. Whether your data is a search bar and five clicks into the database, or located in a document, we’ll show you how to use a tool that will save your team hours of work and make what seems impossible, possible.
Speakers
Extracting data from the worst PDFs on the planet
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Finding the story: Inflation Reduction Act data
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Google Sheets black belt: Apps script for data journalists
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Transform your reporting workflow by harnessing the power of Google Apps Script to automate your communications directly from Google Sheets. This session will show you how to effortlessly send personalized emails to hundreds of contacts at a time, schedule follow-ups and set up automatic alerts when your data changes—all from your spreadsheet. We'll also touch on other practical applications like collecting data from APIs and monitoring websites for real-time updates. Use ChatGPT to write your scripts, and learn some JavaScript along the way. Elevate your journalism by automating routine tasks, so you can focus on crafting compelling stories.
This session is good for people who have a firm grasp of spreadsheets and are ready to take those skills to the next level. Some experience programming in any language will be helpful, but is not required. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) and a Google account for the training.
Instructors
Alex works on the Election Analytics team at The New York Times, which produces the statistical models behind the Needle, conducts The New York Times/Siena College Poll and tells analytical, visual stories about how people vote. His job blends computer-assisted reporting with traditional techniques to help readers understand electoral trends and outcomes.
How to crowdsource data for your next big story
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Jeremy B. Merrill is a data reporter at The Washington Post. He likes natural language processing and bad jokes. He lives in Atlanta.
Layer Cake: How to build reusable, customizable graphics with D3 and Svelte
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Working on deadline, news graphics need to be made quickly. They also often require customization to meet the needs of the day's story accurately and cleanly. These two requirements are often at odds with one another. Graphics libraries that let you make charts quickly are often not customizable. The most customizable graphics framework, D3, often requires a great deal of prep and code to even make a simple bar chart.
In this presentation, we'll look at Layer Cake, which is a graphics framework in Svelte built for these twin demands of a newsroom. Its approach is different from most frameworks or libraries you may have worked with and we'll look at how you can create reusable code to produce engaging graphics in a fast-paced environment.
This session is good for people who have knowledge of JavaScript and D3 already and want to learn how to translate that to Svelte. Experience with Svelte is not required but will be helpful. We'll discuss the philosophy behind project code as much as possible. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training.
Instructor
Networking: Women in data
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Public records for social justice: Uncovering inequity in your community through FOI
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Dr. David Cuillier is director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. He has taught data journalism and access to information for more than 20 years, and before that was a newspaper reporter and editor in the Pacific Northwest. He is a member of the FOIA Advisory Committee and is co-author of “The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records."
Sydney Sims is the outreach coordinator for the Joseph L. Brechner FOI Project at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. She promotes the right to know through training and communications. Previously, Sims worked as a journalist at Capital B News, WABE 90.1 FM and the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. An Auburn University journalism graduate, she is an award-winning journalist and Atlanta native, now residing in Gainesville, Florida.
QGIS 2: Analyzing geographic data
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Build on your existing knowledge of QGIS and learn how to explore, manipulate and analyze geographic datasets to gain new insights.
This session is good for: Those who attended the QGIS I workshop or already know the basics of visualizing geographic data in QGIS. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Daniel Wainwright is a senior data journalist with BBC News. He's covered UK elections both general and local and worked on the results of the 2024 U.S. election. He's previously been political editor of a regional newspaper in England and produced content from the 2021 Census for the UK's Office for National Statistics.
R 2: Data analysis and plotting
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Sarah Ryley is an investigative and data journalist currently at Columbia University as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism. Previously, she was an an investigative reporter at The Boston Globe and The Trace, and she was the data projects editor at the New York Daily News. Her work has triggered numerous reforms and has been recognized with dozens of awards and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2017.
Connect: LinkedIn
AI starter pack: Python
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Building the bridge to advanced data journalism
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Your students are comfortable with the fundamentals: they’re (mostly) fluent in numeracy, proficient with Google Sheets, can make publishable data visualizations and understand how to integrate data into their storytelling. Now it’s time to design an advanced class so that they can take the next logical step. But where should you concentrate your efforts to deepen their expertise? And how can you introduce challenging concepts—like coding, scraping and stats—without overwhelming them? Join some of the field’s top journalist-educators as they share practical strategies to make more advanced data skills accessible and meaningful over the course of a semester.
Speakers
Liz Lucas is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, where she teaches classes in problem-solving with data and AI. Previously she was the senior training director at IRE.
Connect: GitHub
Alex Richards is a journalism professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. Before joining the academy, he was a reporter and editor at news organizations including the Chicago Tribune, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Las Vegas Sun, as well as the consumer finance company NerdWallet. He's also a former IRE training director.
Derek Willis teaches and does data journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He's been coming to NICAR since the late 1990s.
Custom dataviz with JavaScript 102
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Data reporting for smaller newsrooms
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Kate Martin is a data correspondent at APM Reports. Over two decades, her investigative reporting has driven policy reforms, forced resignations, led to criminal indictments and spurred changes to at least five state laws or legal precedents. Most recently, she uncovered widespread violations of Illinois laws by hospitals failing to follow laws meant to protect sexual assault survivors.
Finding the story: Localizing gun violence reporting with The Gun Violence Data Hub
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
George LeVines is the editor of the Gun Violence Data Hub at The Trace. He previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, NPR and CQ Roll Call.
Connect: LinkedIn
Introduction to network analysis and visualization
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Walking participants through the entire process of getting data, structuring it into a network of nodes and edges, creating a graph layout, and creating an interactive visualization.
Participants need to have Gephi (https://gephi.org/) downloaded to their machine prior to taking this class.
Instructor
Investigating who's behind that website
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Reporting online today, journalists must battle with astroturf campaigns, fake news sites and sketchy shell companies to find out who is behind the story. Usually it leads to a frustratingly common question: Who is behind this website?
Using a range of tools (free and otherwise), we walk you through how to investigate the provenance and ownership of websites: how can you identify the scope and scale of the network it belongs to — if any? Who’s behind the site, now and in the past? Who are the main actors promoting this website? Where else does this site crop up?
While it is not always possible to fully unmask the owner of a site, using a thorough checklist of tools and techniques that we have used in real-world investigations, we can help you make sure to reveal as much as possible about a website, and potentially uncover important clues.
Speaker
Networking for journalists of color
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Parameterized reporting in R
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
R 3: Gathering and cleaning data
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Regular expressions are fun (I promise!)
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
15 health datasets in 60 minutes
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Illness, disease and death, oh my! Health data can be a scary subject full of unreliable methods and incomplete data. We'll show you 15 reliable health-related databases and demonstrate how they can be used to localize national trends.
Speaker
Madi Alexander is the senior graphics editor on POLITICO’s data and graphics team, where she covers health care, education and other public policy issues. She previously worked as a data journalist for Bloomberg Government and The Dallas Morning News. Madi has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. Outside of work, she enjoys birding and volunteers for Guide Dogs for the Blind.
AI starter pack: JavaScript
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Analyzing images and videos with AI
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Beginner track: Making your data story ironclad
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Liz Lucas is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, where she teaches classes in problem-solving with data and AI. Previously she was the senior training director at IRE.
Connect: GitHub
Finding narratives in a pile of documents
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Rob Wells is an associate professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where he teaches reporting and data journalism. Wells was the former bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires and then deputy bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C.; he has also reported for Bloomberg News and The Associated Press. He is the host of the Jazz Scoop, a weekly jazz show on KUAF, 91.3, NPR for Northwest Arkansas.
Finding the story: Trade data
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructors
Finding the story: Wildfire data
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructors
Taylor Johnston is an award-winning visual data journalist working with the CBS News data team. Previously, Taylor was a graphics reporter for Hearst Connecticut Media Group. She has also worked for The New York Times, The Center for Public Integrity, The Dallas Morning News and Newsday. Taylor is from Cleveland, Ohio. A first-generation college student, she graduated from Ohio University with bachelor's degrees in journalism and interactive information design.
Grace Manthey is a visual data journalist at CBS News & Stations. Previously, she was the founding member of the data journalist team at the ABC Owned Television Stations. She holds a master's in journalism from the University of Southern California and a bachelor's in journalism from Quinnipiac University. She currently lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her husband and puppy/data sidekick, Dunkin.
Connect: LinkedIn
First Athena Query: How to analyze hundreds of million records in seconds with Amazon Web Services and SQL
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Using data and docs to fact-check immigration rhetoric
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Web scraping with Python *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 4:30 p.m. (2h 15m)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
If you need data that's trapped on a website, writing some code to scrape the page could be your solution. This entry-level class will show you how to use the Python programming language to harvest data from a website into a data file. We'll introduce you to the command line and code notebookes and show you how to fetch and parse content from the web using Python.
Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided.
Workshop prerequisites: This class is programming for beginners. Some basic familiarity with Python and HTML is helpful but not required.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $25 to participate.
Instructor
Cody Winchester was a newspaper reporter, data specialist and web developer before joining IRE as a training director in 2017. He became tech lead in 2022.
Connect: GitHub
AI starter pack: R
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Beginner track: Creating meatier stories: Sourcing, documents and other tools for start investigative reporting
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Do you really need a map? How to make the most of your data viz
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Finding needles in haystacks with fuzzy matching
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Findings and using undocumented APIs
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
This tutorial will introduce reporters to an exciting and often overlooked data source found on every website. You will learn how to find and use hidden APIs as a reporting resource, and hear about how this data source has been used in past reporting. We'll be working off this scripted documented: https://inspectelement.org/apis
This session is for reporters who want to diversify their data sources. You don't need to write code: we'll teach participants to find hidden APIs in your web browser, but knowing some coding will let you to unlock detailed and rich datasets hidden in plain sight. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
How to approach an investigative data question
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Adiel Kaplan is an investigative reporter and editor at NBC News, where she works on investigative projects with a data focus. Her work primarily appears in print on NBCNews.com, with cross-platform stories airing on Nightly News and NBC News NOW. She has covered topics from climate change to criminal justice, healthcare and labor, and teaches investigative reporting for the Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and the Data Program at Columbia Journalism School.
Emily Zentner is the data journalist for the statewide public and nonprofit media collaborative The California Newsroom, where she works with partner newsrooms on investigative stories and trains reporters to use data skills in their reporting. Her work primarily focuses on criminal justice and climate stories. She was previously data reporter at CapRadio in Sacramento, where she reported on wildfire, climate change and police mishandling of sexual assault cases.
The 411 on 311: How to use calls-for-service data in your daily reporting
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Janelle O'Dea is an investigative reporter who enjoys marrying data and shoe-leather reporting. After five years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she went to nonprofit news, first at the Center for Public Integrity and now at the Illinois Answers Project (Better Government Association). Along with two other reporters, she is on the state investigative team. She's based in St. Louis, and her beat takes her all over the Metro East and Southern Illinois.
Unlocking interactive maps for newsrooms
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Brandon is the creator and lead developer of the Protomaps project, which unlocks affordable, custom interactive maps for newsrooms. He's been working on web cartography for over a decade in areas like environmental science, humanitarian aid and government. He's currently based in Taipei, Taiwan.
Using OCCRP's Aleph tool
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Beginner track: Tools to save you time
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Command-line data analysis with VisiData
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
VisiData is a fast, powerful, keyboard-driven tool for quickly exploring datasets. It's often the first piece of software I use to examine new data. In this hands-on session, you'll learn VisiData's essentials commands — including how to sort, filter, summarize and aggregate.
This session is good for: People who have a basic familiarity with your computer's command line interface. No programming knowledge necessary, but some knowledge of Python is a plus.
Instructor
Jeremy Singer-Vine is a data editor, reporter, and computer programmer based in New York City. He currently serves as data editor for The New York Times. Previously, he founded the Data Liberation Project, served as the data editor for BuzzFeed News and worked at The Wall Street Journal. Since 2015, he has also published Data Is Plural, a newsletter highlighting useful and curious datasets.
De-mystifying cryptocurrency data: How to find stories on ransoms, scams and betting markets
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Trump is back, and he's bringing crypto with him. With crypto’s rally comes a new boom of scams and ransoms. Two experienced data journalists share stories, tips and techniques from years of reporting on crypto's underbelly: ransoms, sanctions violations, romance scams and betting markets using blockchain and other cryptocurrency data.
Instructors
Jeremy B. Merrill is a data reporter at The Washington Post. He likes natural language processing and bad jokes. He lives in Atlanta.
Caitlin Ostroff is a data reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York, where she covers crypto, finance and politics. She's broken scoops and chronicled turmoil at crypto exchanges FTX and Binance. She was previously based in London for The Journal.
Debunking sports myths with data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Norm Lewis is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Florida, where he has been since getting his doctorate from the University of Maryland in 2007. Before then he was a journalist for 25 years, ranging from editor of smaller dailies to The Washington Post financial desk. In addition to creating five data courses at UF, he conducts statistics-based social science research into news culture for peer-reviewed journals.
Connect: Bluesky
Evolving threats to journalists' safety – digital, physical and legal
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Stephanie Sugars is the senior reporter for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, covering press freedom aggressions across the country. She has previously worked at the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Post-Conflict Research Center, and her freelance reporting has appeared in Al Jazeera, openDemocracy and Balkan Diskurs. A graduate of NYU's Global and Joint Program Studies program, her professional work focuses on human rights, politics and identity-targeted violence.
Fun with shapes: Scripted mapping in R or Python *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Let's face it, QGIS is the Excel of geospatial analysis. Sure, doing simple mapping in it and ArcGIS is a blast, but executing complex, reproducible joins and measurements can be a real drag. Taking a more scripted approach is way less of a buzzkill, especially when you need to revisit your earlier work or share with others.
Whether you choose R or Python, follow along from mapping basics to more complex techniques that will make your next geospatial analysis a walk in the park. Cut loose, write some replicable code and have fun with shapes!
Preregistration is required and seating is limited. To get the most out of this session, you should have a working knowledge of both GIS/mapping techniques and some experience with either Python or R.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructors
How to investigate special-interest influence on your Congressional delegation
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Learn visualization packages in RStudio to make a variety of charts
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
R is a powerful tool; it can analyze data and visualize the data to present. This R class will introduce useful R packages for journalists using R to make different charts for their stories. In this session, you will learn how to adjust and beautify charts by coding them in R. This session is great for those with some experience using R and an interest in designing charts.
Instructor
Networking for international journalists
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker
PyCAR *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 a.m. – 5:45 p.m. (7h)
Location: Birch Lake/Maple Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
This hands-on workshop will teach journalists basic programming concepts using the Python language. The class will introduce language basics and useful libraries in the course of a typical reporting project: scraping data from the web, analyzing a spreadsheet and visualizing the results.
Preregistration is required and seating is limited. You must bring your own laptop (no tablets) to this training.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $75 to participate.
Instructors
Scott Pham is an investigative reporter and a managing editor of the CBS News data team.
Quantifying history
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Airtable: Building better and easier-to-use databases
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Airtable is a spreadsheet and database software with useful features to view, sort, group, and link records between tables. You'll see a few examples of how Airtable has been useful for the instructor's reporting (and why she almost never use Excel anymore!) and walk through a hands-on example.
This session is good for: Anyone who has been frustrated at making multiple versions of the same spreadsheet, creating extra columns (or filters) and then repeatedly hiding and unhiding them, or jumping between multiple spreadsheets to bring together different information about the same record.
Instructor
Amy Fan is an investigative data reporter and lapsed quantitative social scientist. Most recently, she worked at Scripps News, where she was the lead data reporter on "Poisoned Water," a series on the aftermath of the Flint water crisis that won a 2024 National Emmy. She holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Duke University and previously worked in the finance department at MIT Sloan.
Behind the story: 2024 Philip Meyer winners
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Climate change has changed natural disasters; we must change how we prepare
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Customizing ggplot for yourself or your organization
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructors
Kaitlyn Radde is an associate information graphics designer at Pew Research Center, where she designs data visualizations, interactives and social media products. She previously interned with the graphics teams at NPR and Chalkbeat.
Data scouting: A heuristic to plan data scraping and collection
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Everything you need to know about political dark money
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Dark money played a major role in the 2024 elections, and in the months ahead, it will continue to shape the legislative landscape in Washington and all across the country. This panel will provide an overview of what you need to know to uncover dark money activity and try to find out who is behind it. Learn how to follow the money trails with tools and techniques to track secretive groups, piece together opaque spending networks, and uncover donors through political ad records, corporate records, and campaign finance data as well as filings with the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Labor, Congress, and more.
Speakers
Michael Beckel is the research director at Issue One, a D.C.-based bipartisan political reform advocacy group. He is a nationally recognized expert on dark money, campaign finance and election administration issues. He previously worked as a reporter for more than a decade, including at OpenSecrets, the Center for Public Integrity and Mother Jones. Born and raised in Minnesota, he is happy to give recommendations to those visiting his home state.
Fraud investigations: How to get and use data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Upping your Excel game *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (2h 15m)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
If you've found yourself struggling in a spreadsheet, thinking that whatever you were trying to achieve seemed harder than it should've been, then this is the class for you. We’ll learn about various tools and functions in Excel that come in handy when you need to re-structure or otherwise get your data ready for analysis. We'll cover string functions, logical functions, date functions, reshaping data, merging data using lookup functions and perhaps a few other nifty tricks if time allows. We’ll do some “drills” introducing you to these concepts, then put your new skills to work in a sort of “scrimmage,” fixing up some real-life data. You’ll also walk out with practice data and a 30-page tipsheet that covers, in detail, everything from the class, plus more that we won’t have time for.
Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided for the training.
Workshop prerequisites: You should have prior experience using Excel or Google Sheets, and be comfortable with introductory-level spreadsheet skills, such as sorting, filtering, SUM and AVERAGE functions, calculations such as percentage change or percent of total, and how to use pivot tables.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $25 to participate.
Instructor
MaryJo Webster is the data editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune. Previously she worked at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, USA Today, Center for Public Integrity, Investigative Reporters & Editors and small newspapers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Visualizing data with large language models
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Workshop your public records request
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (2h 15m)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speaker
50 free government data sets in 50 minutes
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Why take time to argue with government records custodians when you can grab story-ripe data online for free? This session will run through 50 free datasets in 50 minutes – a twist on the 50 FOIA requests in 50 minutes. The classics, like dams, train wrecks, and bridge inspections, but also new ideas that the savvy data journalist may have missed. It will show where the datasets are located, what stories can be generated, and any caveats, with a handout providing all the relevant links to the data and IRE Resource Center tip sheets.
Speakers
Dr. David Cuillier is director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. He has taught data journalism and access to information for more than 20 years, and before that was a newspaper reporter and editor in the Pacific Northwest. He is a member of the FOIA Advisory Committee and is co-author of “The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records."
Sydney Sims is the outreach coordinator for the Joseph L. Brechner FOI Project at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. She promotes the right to know through training and communications. Previously, Sims worked as a journalist at Capital B News, WABE 90.1 FM and the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. An Auburn University journalism graduate, she is an award-winning journalist and Atlanta native, now residing in Gainesville, Florida.
Beginner track: Writing with numbers
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Cutting-edge web scraping techniques
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Finding the story: Labor data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
From code to Charts: Create DataWrapper graphics straight from R
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Supercharge your visualization workflow by using the DataWrapper API to create powerful graphics directly from R. Clean, analyze and visualize data without exporting or switching between applications. Build charts and maps, create templates, automate production tasks and produce dozens (or hundreds) of charts with just a few lines of code.
This session is good for journalists with some knowledge of DataWrapper and R.
Instructor
Adam Marton is a data journalist specializing in visual storytelling, code and design. He is on the faculty at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at The University of Maryland, where he oversees the data and graphics bureau of Capital News Service and teaches data journalism and visual design courses. He previously worked at The Baltimore Sun, where he led the data and graphics desk in the newsroom.
Lessons learned from inclusive collaborations to inform Global Majority-led cross-border investigations
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Many cross-border investigations are led by a Global Minority media partner who are incentivized to prioritize Global Minority editorial objectives and audiences. How could we apply DEI practices that have been pioneered in collaborative community reporting projects to design more equitable international collaborations?
Speaker
Spatial analysis using geographical Census data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Yes, you still need to calculate an accuracy rate for your AI workflow
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude really can be helpful. I swear. They have helped us by reading large quantities of documents and classifying them, or by extracting a snippet, to answer questions like: Do these Truth Social posts contain an insult? Who is the guest in described in this podcast episode description? Is "Bethel Christian School" a religious or secular school?
But they don't always help on the first try -- and you can't evaluate AI with just vibes.
I mean, you can. But you'll end up being wrong.
Come learn best practice methodologies for how to use these sorts of AI classification and extraction methodologies from Washington Post journalists who have done about a dozen such experiments in the past year. We'll cover how to generate gold data, pick the right accuracy stat, calculate that accuracy stat and how to use those stats to improve your prompts.
Speaker
Jeremy B. Merrill is a data reporter at The Washington Post. He likes natural language processing and bad jokes. He lives in Atlanta.
AI tools for your newsroom
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 4:30 p.m. (2h 15m)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
We'll cover new AI tools and technology for reporters and editors, with a focus on investigative work. Mike Reilley, founder of JournalistsToolbox.org and co-author of "Data + Journalism" will guide you through the latest and greatest data and digital tools (most of them free!) that you can incorporate into your workflow right now! Come armed with a laptop and smartphone. Participants get a handout with links to tools, examples, tips, tricks and more.
Instructor
Mike Reilley is a senior lecturer in data and digital journalism at the University of Illinois Chicago. He owns and operates JournalistsToolbox.ai and is the lead trainer for the RTDNA/GNI fact-checking program and for the ONA/Microsoft AI in Journalism program. He is the author of two books: "The Journalist's Toolbox: A Guide to Digital Reporting and AI" and "Data + Journalism" with Samantha Sunne.
Connect: X, X (Journalist's Toolbox), BlueSky
Beginner track: Easy visualizations for your first data stories
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Beyond the press release: Uncovering corporate behavior
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
What companies say and how companies behave is often vastly different. Violation Tracker is a database that tracks the behavior of companies across 450 regulatory agencies - including OSHA, EPA, Department of Labor, and state and local attorneys general offices. In all, it has 655,000 records totaling over $1 trillion in fines, fees and settlements. In this session, participants can learn how to get the most out of the database, including making industry comparisons, connecting parent companies through subsidiaries and other tips for digging into companies. Because many companies also receive significant government assistance via economic development subsidies, we'll also tour Subsidy Tracker, a database which allows users the ability to search which companies have received taxpayer subsidies. We'll also demonstrate our newest database, Violation Tracker Global, which tracks the behavior of the biggest companies across 45 countries. Plus, learn about SEC filings, corporate structures, and the key relationships that keep a company going. Cover how companies actually behave - not how they say they do.
Instructors
Arlene Martínez is with Good Jobs First, which promotes corporate and government accountability in economic development, especially around taxpayer incentives. Her work focuses on who benefits from tax and economic policies and regulatory changes. Before joining the nonprofit GJF, (which maintains the Subsidy, Violation, and Tax Break Tracker databases), she was a reporter with the USA TODAY Network, The Morning Call, the LA Times and Hispanic Link News Service.
Siobhan joined Good Jobs First in January 2023 with experience in corporate research and organized labor, and works to maintain the Violation Tracker database. She has a Masters in International Studies from the University of Denver, where she focused on global labor exploitation and corporate accountability.
Covering agriculture & our food supply with data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
During this session, panelists will share their experiences and tips for reporting on agricultural issues and data-driven food supply chains. Attendees will learn about relevant agricultural and environmental databases that will allow them to explore the intersections between food production, climate change, and economic factors.
Speakers
First LLM Classifier: Practical AI in the newsroom *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 5:45 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Learn how journalists use large-language models to organize and analyze massive datasets.
Take this three-hour class to get hands-on experience creating a machine-learning model that can classify the text recorded in campaign contributions, crime reports, legislative bills, consumer complaints and other newsworthy data.
You will learn how to:
* Replace a complex machine-learning system with a simple LLM system
* Write a prompt that classifies text into predefined categories
* Evaluate your results using a rigorous, scientific approach
* Improve your prompt by training it with rules and examples
By the end, you will understand how the new class of LLM classifiers can outperform traditional machine-learning methods with significantly less code, and you will be ready to write one yourself.
Anyone who has dabbled with code and AI is qualified for this class. A curious mind and good attitude are all that’s required.
Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructors
Introduction to R *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 5:45 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
We'll introduce you to R, a free, powerful open-source programming language that will take your data reporting to the next level. By the end of this three-hour session, you will be able to read data from common file types into R, clean and explore it, create visualizations, and make your entire data workflow reproducible. We'll also talk about how to find help when you're stuck.
Workshop prerequisites: This session will be most helpful if you’re comfortable working with data and you’re ready to take your skills to the next level.
Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided for the training.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructor
Liz Lucas is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, where she teaches classes in problem-solving with data and AI. Previously she was the senior training director at IRE.
Connect: GitHub
Managing investigators: Leading those born to challenge authority
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 4:30 p.m. (2h 15m)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Being a news manager is already tough, but what if you supervise investigative journalists? They come with an extra layer of challenges because their very job (and likely their personality) makes them hyper-alert to authority figures. This course is designed to give you some tools and tactics to lead individuals and entire teams of investigators more effectively. Learn from three investigative managers from different media at different stages of their leadership careers. How did they launch into their roles, and what experience have they gained along the way? This course is for current investigative managers and anyone aspiring to step into such a position in the future.
NEW AT NICAR25: We’ll tailor portions of this course for people who lead data journalists. We’re also squeezing it into two hours of learning, then an hour-long management networking/meetup event. Oh… and it’s free to attend (typically, an additional fee is required)!
Topics will include: managing compassionately, hiring challenges, transitioning to management, forging partnerships, building relationships, handling resource cuts, organization/structure, tough decisions/conversations, in-house training/growth, delivering feedback, creating inclusive opportunities, and juggling responsibilities/projects/work.
Speakers
Emma Carew Grovum is the director of careers and culture at The Marshall Project and also the founder of Kimbap Media, a consultancy solving problems at the intersection of technology and audience. Emma coaches journalists on leadership, product thinking and digital transformation. She is a co-founder and regular contributor to the News Product Alliance, runs a leadership accelerator for journalists of color called Upward and co-hosts Sincerely, Leaders of Color.
Jamie Grey is managing editor of InvestigateTV, Gray Television’s national investigative team. The team’s stories air on the company’s stations in 113 markets across the country. Prior to joining InvestigateTV, Jamie was managing editor/chief investigator at the NBC affiliate in Columbia, Missouri, where she was also an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. She has past investigative reporting experience in Iowa and Idaho.
Josh Hinkle is KXAN’s director of investigations and innovation, leading the station’s duPont and IRE Award-winning investigative team on multiple platforms. He also leads KXAN’s political coverage as executive producer and host of “State of Texas,” a weekly statewide program focused on the Texas Legislature and elections. In 2021, he was elected to the IRE Board of Directors and currently serves as its vice president.
Policing the police with data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Tips for successful public records requests
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Auditing AI algorithms for bias
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Finding the story: Immigration data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Navigating federal campaign finance data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Pine Lake/Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
No comment? What to do when government agencies won't answer your questions about their data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Surveys 101: A journalist’s guide to writing with polling data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
A well-designed survey can lend important insight into the public’s views and experiences. For journalists, working with high-quality survey data can inspire story ideas and add deeper context to reporting, while mistakenly using a shoddy poll can distort the facts and create confusion. We’ll give attendees the tools to tell the difference.
This session is good for anyone who is fairly new to working with public opinion polls and would like to level up their understanding. It will cover what polls can tell us – and what they can't; and how to assess survey quality using metrics like questionnaire design, sample weighting and survey mode. We’ll also give tips on how to write about survey results in a fair and balanced way and pitfalls to avoid.
Speakers
Christopher Baronavski is lead engineer for editorial content at Pew Research Center.
Katherine Schaeffer is a writer and researcher on Pew Research Center's data journalism team. She is a former newspaper reporter.
Connect: LinkedIn
Tidyquant in R, and a few other business and economics tools
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Tidyquant is a one-stop shop R package specifically for retrieving and analyzing financial data, with simple functions to pull data from sources like Yahoo Finance and FRED, conduct financial and performance analytics, and create beautiful charts. We’ll also go over a few other useful R packages for doing financial and economic analysis as time permits. This session is best for people who are already comfortable with the basics in R.
Instructor
Sarah Ryley is an investigative and data journalist currently at Columbia University as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism. Previously, she was an an investigative reporter at The Boston Globe and The Trace, and she was the data projects editor at the New York Daily News. Her work has triggered numerous reforms and has been recognized with dozens of awards and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2017.
Connect: LinkedIn
Tools, tips and tough lessons for teaching data journalism
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
NICAR has a mix of people who have been teaching for a long time and a lot of adjuncts who make side money teaching a class. This panel is all about the latest in teaching data journalism. For example, I'm working on an interactive textbook that rewrites itself so a student in Minnesota gets Minnesota data and Minnesota local examples. There's many more out there.
Speakers
Rahul Bhargava is an educator, designer and artist working on creative data storytelling and computational journalism in support of social justice and community empowerment. He creates data murals and theatre, award-winning museum exhibits, AI-powered civic technologies with CSOs, and he has delivered keynote talks across the globe. Rahul’s first book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information," is now available from Oxford University Press.
Help train JedR Masters
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
How to turn your investigation or data findings into narrative audio
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Networking and meetup for managers, editors and leaders
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Emma Carew Grovum is the director of careers and culture at The Marshall Project and also the founder of Kimbap Media, a consultancy solving problems at the intersection of technology and audience. Emma coaches journalists on leadership, product thinking and digital transformation. She is a co-founder and regular contributor to the News Product Alliance, runs a leadership accelerator for journalists of color called Upward and co-hosts Sincerely, Leaders of Color.
Jamie Grey is managing editor of InvestigateTV, Gray Television’s national investigative team. The team’s stories air on the company’s stations in 113 markets across the country. Prior to joining InvestigateTV, Jamie was managing editor/chief investigator at the NBC affiliate in Columbia, Missouri, where she was also an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. She has past investigative reporting experience in Iowa and Idaho.
Josh Hinkle is KXAN’s director of investigations and innovation, leading the station’s duPont and IRE Award-winning investigative team on multiple platforms. He also leads KXAN’s political coverage as executive producer and host of “State of Texas,” a weekly statewide program focused on the Texas Legislature and elections. In 2021, he was elected to the IRE Board of Directors and currently serves as its vice president.
Practical, ethical use of AI in the newsroom: Research, reporting and fact-checking
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Dylan Freedman is a machine-learning engineer and journalist on the A.I. Initiatives team at The New York Times. He started his career on a machine-learning team at Google before pivoting to study journalism at Stanford. He served as lead developer at journalism nonprofit DocumentCloud and most recently worked on elections at The Washington Post. He is passionate about building open-source tools to empower investigative reporting and analyze documents, media and data.
Scraping without programming (repeat)
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Scraping is a catch-all word for grabbing information off a web page and into your spreadsheet - whether the website wants you to or not. This session will introduce easy, hands-on methods for scraping data from a live webpage without having to learn any code. We will use the ImportHTML and ImportXML formulas in Google Sheets. Scraping beginners welcome!
Instructor
Samantha Sunne is a freelance journalist based in New Orleans. She is the recipient of several national grants and awards for investigative reporting, most recently the ProPublica Local Reporting Network fellowship. Her first book, coauthored with trainer Mike Reilley, “Data + Journalism: A Story-Driven Approach to Learning Data Reporting,” was an Amazon bestseller in 2023.
Connect: Bluesky
Swapping LexisNexis for free tools
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Using data to report on the housing crisis in your community
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Using open-source tools to investigate public transit
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Greg Morton is a data reporter at the Baltimore Banner, where he works on data-driven accountability stories about Maryland and its institutions. At the Banner he co-authored an investigation into the arduous commutes that are a feature of Baltimore's popular school choice system. His work has appeared in ProPublica, The Washington Post and The Texas Tribune.
Beginner track: Taking it all home
Time: Sunday, March 9, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Greta Kaul covers the built environment, including development and livability issues, at the Star Tribune. Prior to joining the Star Tribune, she was the data reporter at the Star Tribune.
Liz Lucas is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, where she teaches classes in problem-solving with data and AI. Previously she was the senior training director at IRE.
Connect: GitHub
Coaching ChatGPT to help with coding and data tasks (repeat)
Time: Sunday, March 9, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor information coming soon.
Election data to use after the election
Time: Sunday, March 9, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
First visual story: Launch a data-driven website *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Sunday, March 9, 9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: Excelsior Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Learn how America’s top news organizations escape rigid content-management systems to publish custom graphics on deadline.
Take this class to get hands-on experience in every stage of the development process, writing JavaScript, HTML and CSS within a Node.js framework. You’ll start with data from a real-life Los Angeles Times analysis. You won’t stop until you’ve crafted a custom presentation and deployed a working application on the World Wide Web.
Workshop prerequisites: If you have a good attitude and know how to take a few code crashes in stride, you are qualified for this class. If you’re a little scared, that’s a good thing. You’re ready for this.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructors
Practical, ethical use of AI in the newsroom: Chatbots
Time: Sunday, March 9, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Using IF statements and VLOOKUP in Sheets
Time: Sunday, March 9, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Wayzata Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
MaryJo Webster is the data editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune. Previously she worked at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, USA Today, Center for Public Integrity, Investigative Reporters & Editors and small newspapers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Yes, you really CAN get high-res satellite images for free
Time: Sunday, March 9, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
This panel will show newcomers to this compelling form of evidence that medium res images are now free and easy to use via open source portals (you can just tap a slider on EO Browser app to eliminate pictures with clouds), and also how to Make and Frame your email request to marketing people at private companies for high res images.
Speakers
Laura Jael Kurtzberg is a data visualization specialist, cartographer and news applications developer with a particular interest in environmental stories. Laura has worked at the intersection of data journalism and design with organizations like InfoAmazonia, Ambiental Media, WLRN Public Media and Mongabay.
Early career journalists' roundtable
Time: Sunday, March 9, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.
Localizing national data sets
Time: Sunday, March 9, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speaker information coming soon.