NICAR 2025 schedule
205 sessions confirmed • Updated February 27 • All times are CT
205 sessions confirmed • Updated February 27 • 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 205 of 205 sessions
Welcome first-timers & networking
Time: Thursday, March 6, 8 – 8:45 a.m. (45m)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Welcome to the conference! Hear from IRE staff about tips and tactics to navigate our conference like a pro. Also, you'll learn about key resources that IRE offers once you're back home.
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Over the next few days, you'll see there is a seemingly endless number of things you can learn in the data journalism world. It can be daunting! But everyone at this conference started at the same place as you. We'll help you get started! This session will cover the basics of data journalism, starting with what it is, tips for building up your skills and advice for how you can — realistically — integrate these skills into your daily reporting.
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
A lightning-round showcase of innovative newsroom tools that can help you manage mass FOIAs, automate web scraping, analyze large document dumps with artificial intelligence and track how special interests influence statehouse legislation.
Speakers
Coaching ChatGPT to help with coding and data tasks
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Charles Minshew is the data storytelling editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, helping journalists tell stories with data and digital tools. Charles is the former director of data services for IRE. In 2012, Charles was on the staff of The Denver Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of a shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Critical datasets to know when covering K-12
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Join this panel to learn the most important datasets, what to do if they disappear, how to approach K-12 data when you’re new to the beat, state-level data and story ideas.
Speakers
Becky Dernbach is the education reporter at Sahan Journal. She graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and worked as an editorial fellow at Mother Jones before coming to Sahan Journal in 2020. She received the 2024 award for Best Beat reporting from the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists.
Sharon Lurye is the data reporter for The Associated Press’ Education Reporting Network. She is based in New Orleans.
Connect: Bluesky
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: Grand Portage 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?
Speakers
Helena Bengtsson is data journalism editor at Gota Media, a regional publishing company in the south of Sweden with 14 local titles. She previously worked as editor for data journalism at Sveriges Television, Sweden’s national television broadcaster for 27 years, and she also served as editor, data projects, for the Guardian UK between 2014-2017. In 2006 and 2007, she was database editor at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C.
Irene Casado Sánchez is a data journalist at Big Local News, a Stanford University project providing data, training, and tools to help journalists better cover their communities. She collaborated with Reuters’ Global Enterprise team to investigate the misuse of climate finance and debt-burdening financial mechanisms. She worked with The New York Times’ Investigative Local Fellowship, providing data expertise and mentoring fellows.
Andy Lehren is editorial director for the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism and director of investigative reporting at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. Formerly an investigative reporter for The New York Times and NBC News. Has won 100+ journalism honors, including a Polk, Peabody, Emmys, multiple IRE awards and contributed to a Pulitzer. Andy has worked extensively in data journalism, including as the former head of NICAR data library. Andy is on the IRE Board of Directors.
Bianca Muniz is data analyst at Agência Pública, an independent Brazilian news outlet, and journalist specialized in data-driven reporting. She holds a MSc and a BSc in Biomedical Sciences from UNIFESP, and a BA in Journalism from USP. Since 2020, she has conducted data-driven investigations on human rights and socio-environmental issues. She currently leads the Projeto Escravizadores, tracing slave-owning ancestors in the genealogies of Brazilian political figures.
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)
The IRS collects information on millions of hospitals, schools, arts organizations and other nonprofits. The IRS has put much of that data online. We'll use Excel to explore some of that data. We'll also talk about how you might use other tools, like R, Python or SQL to access additional data. But no coding is required to attend this class.
This session is good for anyone who has some experience working with spreadsheets or databases. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Finding the story: Immigration data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Attendees with basic data skills will learn how to locate information of the H-1B skilled worker visa program, generate investigative story ideas, and analyze petition-level granular H-1B data newly obtained by Bloomberg News through a FOIA lawsuit.
This session is good for anyone interested in learning about the legal immigration system and employment of foreign workers and is good for those comfortable with the basics of working in Google Sheets. Computers will be provided.
Instructor
Finding the story: Using DNS search for investigative journalism
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Every online interaction begins with a lookup in the Domain Name System (DNS), the backbone of the Internet. As a result, there are digital footprints left behind in the DNS. With the demise of Whois, investigative reporters are looking for new tools to uncover these footprints. Learn how to use DNSDB Scout, a tool to query DNSDB, a historical passive DNS database, to discover previously unknown online connections and gain new information to advance your ongoing and breaking news investigations.
Basic knowledge of the Domain Name System (DNS) is helpful, but not required. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.
Instructors
First SvelteKit data app
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
This session will demonstrate to attendees how to use SvelteKit (Svelte's UI framework) to build a simple data-driven web application. We will cover the basics of what makes Svelte and SvelteKit what they are, followed by demonstrations of how to organize and set up a mini-site with multiple pages, different ways you can load in data, and how to handle components (both LayerCake charts and regular ones).
This intermediate session is good for journalists with JavaScript experience.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Tyler Machado is a freelance web developer and design technologist, located in Boston, MA. Specializing in data visualization, Tyler has created visual stories, dashboards and tools for publications like The Pudding, Science News, Harvard Business Review and Northeastern University. Tyler has also worked on design systems, UI/UX and frontend development for publisher websites across in-house and agency roles.
Google Sheets 1: Getting started with spreadsheets
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
In this introduction to spreadsheets, you'll begin analyzing data with Google Sheets, a simple but powerful tool. You'll learn how to enter data, navigate spreadsheets and conduct simple calculations like sum, average and median.
This session is good for: Data beginners. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Google account to participate.
Instructor
K. Sophie Will is an investigative data reporter at Bloomberg Law, Government and Tax. Previously, she was a congressional action reporter at CQ Roll Call and Utah Investigative Journalism Project's Alicia Patterson fellow. The award-winning Utah native graduated from Boston University with bylines found in the Deseret News, USA Today, AP, Thomson Reuters, HuffPost, WGBH and more.
Python for data analysis
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette 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
Sandra Fish is a kinda retired data journalist who specializes in political reporting, most recently at The Colorado Sun but also for New Mexico In Depth and other publications. She was a journalism instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder for eight years.
Reporting in underserved communities with hard-to-get data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
This panel discussion will show examples of how journalists are navigating complex and data-driven stories on underserved communities. Speakers will share stories and how they problem-solved connecting with the people behind the data.
Speakers
Chelsea Curtis is a reporter at Arizona Luminaria uncovering data and stories about Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) in Arizona. She recently created a first-of-its kind MMIP database in Arizona, an initiative that was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Data-Driven Reporting Project. Chelsea previously worked at The Arizona Republic, Today's News-Herald and the Arizona Daily Sun.
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
Analyze large datasets in Google Sheets via Google Cloud
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Connect large data sets to Google Sheets, which has UI patterns, querying tools and other affordances that more newsroom collaborators are comfortable with.
This session is good for: people comfortable with csv, cloud services, spreadsheets and some SQL familiarity. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.
Instructor
Tiff Fehr is a staff engineer within the Interactive News team, a group of technologists embedded in The New York Times newsroom. The team focuses on custom software development for newsroom projects in addition to large-scale data journalism work.
Connect: Mastodon
Beginner track: How to find data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
How to find and vet credible data sources that you can use right away.
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.
Stephanie Lamm is a data reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She works with data to uncover stories that would otherwise remain hidden. She previously worked for the Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle. She interned for the AJC in the summer of 2017. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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.
This session is good for: beginners with some knowledge of geospatial data.
Laptops will be provided.
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: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Much of Google Sheets' power comes in the form of formulas. In this class, you'll learn how to use them to analyze data with the eye of a journalist. Yes, math will be involved, but it's totally worth it! This class will show you how calculations like change, percent change, rates and ratios can beef up your reporting.
This session is good for: Anyone who has taken Google Sheets 1 or has been introduced to spreadsheets. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Google account to participate.
Instructor
Craig Lyons is the managing editor at the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism. Lyons has spent more than 15 years covering government agencies at the local, state and federal level in Michigan, Indiana, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Lyons’ work has earned recognition from the Chicago Headline Club, Michigan Press Association, Hoosier State Press Association and the Indiana Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Introduction to the command line (Macs)
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Too often in data journalism we forget about the basics. And it doesn't get as basic as the command line. Even knowing a little will make your job easier. We will run through some simple commands, dive into working with spreadsheets and show you some handy tools he frequently uses at work.
This session is good for: People who feel intimidated by the command line on their computer, but want to explore the power of command line tools. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Networking: Students
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.
This session is for journalism students.
Speaker
As managing editor of investigative content for Cox Media Group, Jodie manages national collaborations and investigations for 8 local TV stations. She previously spent 20+ years as an investigative reporter in Washington, Atlanta and Orlando. She's earned some of journalism’s top honors including from duPont, Goldsmith, Barlett & Steele, IRE, numerous Emmys/Murrows, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Public Service. She's served on IRE’s Board of Directors since 2019.
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
As AI continnues to proliferate and become more advanced, how can journalists use this technology ethically while advancing the work we do? Come to this session to talk about how AI can be a helpful tool in your reporting, and how to mitigate ethical risks as you explore.
Speakers
Originally hailing from Houston, but based in Tbilisi, Georgia, for 20 years, Eric Barrett joined OCCRP in 2019, managing the Data Desk for 6 years before co-managing the Research and Data Team to support OCCRP's network of journalists, leveraging data to shine a light on corruption. Previously, he directed Georgia’s first data non-profit, JumpStart Georgia, and later managed technology and security at Azerbaijan’s leading independent media outlet in exile, MeydanTV.
Connect: Mastadon
Tazbia Fatima is a is a newsroom AI engineer at Hearst Newspapers DevHub, where she works with machine learning and generative AI for data journalism and reporting tools. Fatima is a recipient of the 2024 Magic Grant by the Brown Institute for media innovation. She graduated with a Dual M.S. in journalism and computer science from Columbia University, with a Geffen Scholarship and the Brown/Tow Award for Excellence in Computational Journalism.
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: Grand Portage 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
The wonders of CDC WONDER: Analyzing birth and death data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
In this session, panelists will share key data that they’ve relied on while reporting on the aftermath of the Dobbs decision to ultimately tell a larger story about public health, including from the CDC and WHO on maternal mortality, the AMA on OB/GYN training and workforces, and more. Speakers will point reporters to those sources and encourage them to think about new ways to tell the post-Dobbs story, with angles that go beyond abortion.
This session is good for anyone. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Paul Overberg is a data reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He worked on USA TODAY’s data team for many years and led its demographic coverage. He also has taught at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and served as an instructor and senior fellow for the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Connect: X
Using Python to scrape websites
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
This session will show you how to use the Python programming language to scrape data from simple websites.
This session is good for: People with some experience working with data. Experience with Python and/or HTML is a plus but not necessary. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Allan James Vestal is a data journalist and editor who has served in roles at Politico and Bloomberg News, among other outlets. He has worked on teams to expose serious flaws in the nation’s newborn screening system, track residential natural gas accidents and show serious accountability gaps in state-run nursing homes for military veterans. Vestal has directed teams of journalists and developers in building interactive election-night experiences in 2020, 2022 and 2024.
Watching the weather with Github Actions
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's 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.
This session is good for journalists with some familiarity with git and GitHub. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
Instructor
What to do when the data doesn't exist
Time: Thursday, March 6, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
What do you do when you're reporting a story that could really use some data but its nowhere to be found or flat out doesn't exist? From building databases to thinking outside the box, this session will discuss ways to pause, pivot, and think creatively about how to overcome roadblocks when dealing with a dearth of data.
Speakers
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: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
This session explains how any reporter can search for pending legislation in any state – or across the country – collect the data and analyze it through a new tool developed with journalists in mind. This bill tracker, through BillTrack50, allows journalists to search for bills by topic and analyze the data going back 14 years. The tool integrates machine learning, which allows searches with greater precision, reducing misses resulting from simple keyword searches. Come to this session to learn how to use it. See the application of the tool by the University of Florida Brechner Freedom of Information Project to track secrecy legislation, and hear from the data experts at Stanford University’s Big Local News on possible applications of this data, along with other civic information search tools they provide for journalists.
This sessions is good for beginners.
Laptops will be provided.
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)
Sports is absolutely drowning in data and there is a large and hungry audience for sports content. Alongside that, there's a large and growing open-source sports analytics community that data journalists should be a part of. In this hands-on class, speakers will take you through examples of ways to use traditional data journalism tools like R and the Tidyverse to bring in up-to-the-moment sports data and do sophisticated analysis that you can immediately visualize to add context to seasons, leagues and sports.
This session is good for journalists with some R experience.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
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.
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.
Data scouting: A heuristic to plan data scraping and collection
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Few scraping projects are exactly the same, but you can scout out where to begin from a common set of questions. This talk will cover judgement calls to consider before collection; Web basics such as HTTP that help you scrape; and ways you can triage your target website to pick the right libraries and more. Participants for this beginner-to-intermediate session will get access to a repo of Jupyter notebooks with demos in Python.
Speaker
Datawrapper hacks
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
This session is for people who are comfortable with the basic settings on Datawrapper but looking for more ways to upscale their visualizations. Some basic HTML knowledge is preferred but not necessary.
Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Datwrapper account to participate.
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. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Maggie Mulvihill is a veteran reporter, data journalism trainer, news entrepreneur, First Amendment advocate and attorney. Mulvihill is an associate professor of the practice in computational journalism at Boston University and a member of IRE’s Academic Task Force.
Connect: X
Get AI to read all that stuff with semantic search
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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
Dana Chiueh is a news innovation engineer at the Minnesota Star Tribune. She has a background in data and investigative journalism, covering police misconduct and prisons.
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: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
A look at the awesome power of pivot — and how to use it to analyze your dataset in minutes rather than hours. We'll work up to using a pivot table by first sorting and filtering a dataset, learning how to find story ideas along the way.
This session is good for: Anyone familiar with formulas, sorting and filtering in a spreadsheet program. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Google account to participate.
Instructor
Google Trends for journalism
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Find out how to discover what people are searching for, what's trending near you, and see the tools latest features with hands-on training. We will cover how to use Google Trends to find story ideas, add color to data-driven storytelling, and how to dive deeper to discover geographic patterns and how to build time and topic comparisons.
Speaker 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: Grand Portage 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.
Speakers
Deborah Nelson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former IRE president on faculty at the University of Maryland, home of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. Most recently, she has co-authored a Reuters series on the environmental drivers of disease and on the global hunger-relief crisis.
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.
Networking for LGBTQ+ journalists
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.
This session is for anyone who identifies as part of the LGBTQIA+ community or as an ally.
Speaker
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.
Turning police disciplinary files into data and stories
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
So you got your hands on a trove (or at least a pile) of documents about police misconduct — what do you do? Our panelists will walk through the life of a document dump from a mess of PDFs to high-impact reporting. On this journey from documents to data, no detail will be spared. We’ll cover organizing and sharing the documents, testing OCR, hand-annotating, using LLMs and most importantly, finding stories in the haystacks of text. The tools and approaches we’ll cover in this panel will be useful even if your document trove isn’t about police misconduct. And if you’re looking to get your hands on police disciplinary files like the ones we’re working with, we’ll have some ideas for that too.
Speakers
Dillon Bergin is MuckRock's data reporter. He uses data and public records to power investigative reporting with partner newsrooms. He's also the director of the Data Liberation Project and hosts FOIAFriday, a monthly community podcast about all things public records.
Connect: Bluesky
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.
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)
This class will teach attendees how to use CAPTCHA-solving services to automate CAPTCHA solutions in web scraping. Attendees will learn how to efficiently identify and send required elements to the CAPTCHA-solving service and apply the unique codes received to navigate past CAPTCHAs encountered during web scraping. Special focus will be placed on tackling Google's reCAPTCHA v2, a commonly used CAPTCHA on the web, alongside strategies for overcoming challenges presented by more complex websites. The class will provide practical skills in CAPTCHA solving, equipping attendees with the knowledge to implement these solutions in their projects.
This session is good for journalists with some Python experience. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Ryan Little is the data editor at The Baltimore Banner, where he leads a team of data reporters and a visual investigator. His work analyzing large datasets and scraping the web has won multiple national awards and led to at least one Department of Justice investigation. Little is a dedicated mentor to aspiring data journalists and frequently speaks on the role of data in uncovering vital stories.
Using Python to analyze map data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette 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. Laptops will be provided.
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
50 free government data sets in 50 minutes
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, 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.
Advanced Python mapping techniques
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Roughly a quarter of Americans live more than 30 minutes away from a high-level trauma center. Peer-reviewed research suggests that this distance can literally make the difference between a patient living or dying of a traumatic injury. In this session I would explain how we used cutting-edge GIS tools in Python to map trauma care deserts in the United States for the IRE Award-winning series "Bleeding Out." The methods we use for this project can be generalized for lots of journalistic applications, from reproductive healthcare to food deserts.
This session is good for those with experience using Python and Pandas.
Laptops will be provided.
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."
Finding the story: Real estate data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
The housing market is packed with stories waiting to be found—if you know where to look. This session will show how to use real estate data that's freely available online, to identify trends, investigate market dynamics, and craft compelling, data-driven stories. We’ll cover essential housing metrics like home values, rental trends, inventory shifts, and affordability, while also discussing investigative techniques, time-series analysis, and visualization strategies. Whether you're tracking gentrification, housing shortages, or investor influence, this session will give you the tools and insights to turn complex real estate data into high-impact reporting.
This session is good for anyone! Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Getting the most out of Datawrapper *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 5:45 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: Gray's 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:
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.
Catherine Allen is a data/graphics reporter at Politic, where she covers energy and environmental policy. She grew up in San Diego and graduated from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is based in New York City.
Connect: LinkedIn
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: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
You've done a few pivot tables and are getting curious about what more you could do with them. What happens if you aggregate by more than one column? What are those "column" and "filter" boxes for? Come unlock the full potential of pivot tables in this intermediate spreadsheet class.
This session is good for: People familiar with spreadsheets and aggregating data with pivot tables, or anyone who has taken Sheets 1-3. Laptops will be provided.
You will need a free Google account to participate.
Instructor
Emily Corwin is a senior editor with APM Reports, an investigative team at American Public Media. She has previously been a Nieman fellow, a public radio reporter, and a cellist in an alt/rock band.
Connect: LinkedIn
How to run visual investigations
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
How to collaborate across the newsroom, alongside graphics, photo and video desks, to identify distinct investigative storylines that can only be told visually.
Speakers
Joyce Sohyun Lee is an award-winning reporter who helped launched The Washington Post’s Visual Forensics team. She joined The Post in September 2017 as a video editor on the international desk. Prior to her time at The Post, she worked as an associate video producer for Time magazine and holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Connect: X
Maureen Linke is the visual editor for The Wall Street Journal's Washington and investigations teams, specializing in data visualization and visual storytelling. Previously, she held roles at the Associated Press, USA Today and CNN. Her work has earned recognition from the Pulitzer Prize Board, Investigative Reporters & Editors, the New York Press Club and the Overseas Press Club.
John West is a writer and software engineer, currently reporting the news with code at the Wall Street Journal, where his work has won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. Previously, he worked as a researcher at the MIT Media Lab and as a writer and engineer at Quartz. His first book, "Lessons and Carols," was published in 2023 and his second book, a digital memento mori, is expected next year.
Learning a new beat in data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Lots of early-career data and graphics journalists may find themselves working on a niche beat new to them, with complicated data, hard-to-find data sources, and a need for in-depth knowledge to truly excel in their reporting. This session will provide a primer on how to build data-specific sources and contacts (including a tipsheet with some of this information for a range of beats), how to get your footing in a topic that's brand new, and how to emerge as an expert in your beat.
Speakers
Rosmery Izaguirre is a data and graphics reporter for POLITICO. She previously interned at the LA Times's data and graphics desk and worked on the Miami Herald's investigations desk. Rosmery can discuss reporting, data analysis, and graphics.
Paroma Soni is a data and graphics journalist covering trade, immigration and agriculture for Politico Pro. She worked previously as an associate visual journalist at FiveThirtyEight, where her graphics focused on electoral politics and abortion. She was also a fellow at Columbia Journalism Review and a video producer at BuzzFeed India. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she is currently based in New York.
Master the power of mapping with QGIS
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 5:45 p.m. (3h 30m)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Mapping is a powerful tool to find patterns in data that can only be explored on a map. This session will give you the basics for doing mapping with the open-source tool QGIS. You'll learn how to build thematic maps, how to bring outside data into QGIS and connect it to your map and how to combine data in a map to look at geographic relationships in your data.
This class is good for those with solid spreadsheet skills ready to move into mapping. Pre-registration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Jennifer LaFleur teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and works with newsrooms. She was the Center for Public Integrity editor on 40 Acres and a Lie, a 2.5-year investigation into a long misunderstood government program that gave land to formerly enslaved people. She has worked for CPI, Reveal, ProPublica and several newspapers, and is on the boards of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the National Center for Disability and Journalism.
Connect: Bluesky
Charles Minshew is the data storytelling editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, helping journalists tell stories with data and digital tools. Charles is the former director of data services for IRE. In 2012, Charles was on the staff of The Denver Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of a shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Passive scraping for social media
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Scraping complex, changing sites with anti-bot measures like TikTok and Twitter is an uphill battle, but there's often a secret solution: spy on the traffic between your browser and the server, capturing the relevant pieces! This session will take a step into the second tier of “undocumented APIs,” showing participants how to intercept their browser’s data transmissions to build spreadsheets – often with far more information than is displayed on the screen.
We’ll cover several automated, coding-friendly use cases, but participants won’t need any technical skills beyond using a web browser.
Speaker
Jonathan Soma is Knight Chair in Data Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, where he directs both the Data Journalism MS and the summer intensive Lede program. He regularly publishes tutorials on everything from basic Python and analysis to ai2html and machine learning. At the moment he unfortunately cannot stop talking about AI. When Soma isn't boring his students to tears he's probably rescuing cats.
Spatial analysis in R: 101
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Learn how to use spatial functions in R to level up your reporting. We’ll explore tools for mapping, spatial joins, buffering and calculating distance — all using a single package. We’ll center a story published by The Baltimore Banner on gun violence around schools to showcase an application of these functions and demonstrate best practices for basic geospatial analysis.
This session is good for beginner and intermediate journalists with some familiarity with R.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Ryan Little is the data editor at The Baltimore Banner, where he leads a team of data reporters and a visual investigator. His work analyzing large datasets and scraping the web has won multiple national awards and led to at least one Department of Justice investigation. Little is a dedicated mentor to aspiring data journalists and frequently speaks on the role of data in uncovering vital stories.
Shreya Vuttaluru is the investigative data reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. Her work has appeared in the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Banner and the Dallas Morning News. She likes accountability stories, and also maps.
Spreading data wisdom through mentoring
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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.
Speakers
Sandra Fish is a kinda retired data journalist who specializes in political reporting, most recently at The Colorado Sun but also for New Mexico In Depth and other publications. She was a journalism instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder for eight years.
Adrian D. Garcia has been the managing editor of data visualizations for Financial Times Specialist since January 2024. In addition to his editing responsibilities, he currently covers topics related to corporate boards and directors. In the fall, he teaches an intro to data journalism course at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He also serves on the SABEW Training Committee and NAHJ Business Journalism Task Force.
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.
Elevate your graphics with Illustrator
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch 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.
Extracting data from documents with AI
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Come to this session to learn how to use AI to "read" documents like PDFs and Excel files. It's more than just feeding the documents in and asking for data. This session will go over techniques as well as common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Speakers
Rosmery Izaguirre is a data and graphics reporter for POLITICO. She previously interned at the LA Times's data and graphics desk and worked on the Miami Herald's investigations desk. Rosmery can discuss reporting, data analysis, and graphics.
Sean McMinn is the data/graphics editor at Politico, where he manages a team of data and visual journalists who cover political news. He has worked in data, visual and investigative newsroom roles for over a decade, mostly covering federal politics and policy.
Connect: GitHub
Jonathan Soma is Knight Chair in Data Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, where he directs both the Data Journalism MS and the summer intensive Lede program. He regularly publishes tutorials on everything from basic Python and analysis to ai2html and machine learning. At the moment he unfortunately cannot stop talking about AI. When Soma isn't boring his students to tears he's probably rescuing cats.
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)
This workshop will approach covering campaign finance as if we are writing our first story on the beat, using a dataset on donations to mayoral candidates in the San Francisco general election. We’ll go over the data structure, filing requirements and then delve into the dataset to run some basic analyses and workshop story ideas. We'll also share examples of stories that were published using the exact same data. You should come away from this workshop with a good idea of what kind of campaign finance data is available and how you can incorporate it in your reporting — no matter where you are reporting from. This session is good for all levels of experience.
Laptops will be provided.
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.
Going deeper with Census microdata: IPUMS is your friend
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Census microdata allows you to look at demographic trends that are impossible to find in Census summary data. This session will introduce you to the various free IPUMS tools to work with microdata and give you examples of how journalists have used this data in stories.
Speakers
Paul Overberg is a data reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He worked on USA TODAY’s data team for many years and led its demographic coverage. He also has taught at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and served as an instructor and senior fellow for the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Connect: X
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.
Google Sheets: Importing & data prep
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: 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
Mike Stucka has been a self-described full-time data dork since 2016. He gained a focus on newsroom automation and localization for Gannett/USA TODAY Network. He started with data at his college paper, when he still had hair. He is a graduate of Northeastern University, Loyola University Chicago and a great IRE bootcamp many years ago.
Media lawyer Q&A
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Does your investigation contain complex legal questions? Unsure of how to proceed? Bring your questions for a personal discussion with some prominent media law experts.
Speakers
Maggie Mulvihill is a veteran reporter, data journalism trainer, news entrepreneur, First Amendment advocate and attorney. Mulvihill is an associate professor of the practice in computational journalism at Boston University and a member of IRE’s Academic Task Force.
Connect: X
PDF next steps: Extracting data using command-line and other tools
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette 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
Chad Day is the chief elections analyst for The Associated Press and a member of AP’s Decision Desk. He writes about politics and elections and also teaches data journalism at Georgetown University. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, where he was part of a team awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting.
Spatial analysis in R: 201
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Take your spatial skills up a notch by learning to use image-based data derived from satellite observations. In this session, you’ll discover how to navigate tricky filetypes like netCDF and TIF, all within the comfort of RStudio. Learn how to extract decades of real-time measurements from variables like ocean heat, temperature, land use, air pollution and more. By the end, you’ll have the tools to join satellite measurements with traditional shapefiles.
This session is good for journalists who are comfortable with the basics of R and Rstudio. Attending "Spatial analysis in R: 101" is recommended. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Ryan Little is the data editor at The Baltimore Banner, where he leads a team of data reporters and a visual investigator. His work analyzing large datasets and scraping the web has won multiple national awards and led to at least one Department of Justice investigation. Little is a dedicated mentor to aspiring data journalists and frequently speaks on the role of data in uncovering vital stories.
Shreya Vuttaluru is the investigative data reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. Her work has appeared in the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Banner and the Dallas Morning News. She likes accountability stories, and also maps.
Using open-source intelligence (OSINT) in investigations
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
This session will show how journalists can begin incorporating open-source research methodologies in their investigations, with examples from real articles.
Speaker
Which coding language to use and why
Time: Thursday, March 6, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Journalists may use a variety of coding languages for data investigations or for news application development. Each project and each newsroom has a unique tech stack. You might be wondering: which ones should I try? Our panelists will discuss projects they’ve pursued with code, which languages they used, and why.
Speakers
Carla Astudillo is a senior data visuals developer and journalist with a focus on elections and political data. Before joining the Tribune in 2019, she was a data and interactive visuals journalist at NJ.com and The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. She earned a master’s degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida.
Tazbia Fatima is a is a newsroom AI engineer at Hearst Newspapers DevHub, where she works with machine learning and generative AI for data journalism and reporting tools. Fatima is a recipient of the 2024 Magic Grant by the Brown Institute for media innovation. She graduated with a Dual M.S. in journalism and computer science from Columbia University, with a Geffen Scholarship and the Brown/Tow Award for Excellence in Computational Journalism.
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).
Kai Teoh leads a team of journalists responsible for The Dallas Morning News' data reporting, interactive projects, illustrations and graphics. He's passionate about advocating for immigrant journalists and enjoys mentoring data journalism students. With a career spanning different roles in the newsroom, he's committed to empowering his colleagues and elevating their work through collaboration.
Connect: LinkedIn
Beginner track: How to request data and documents: FOI
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Introduction to making successful requests for public data or documents.
Speakers
Tisha Thompson is an investigative reporter with ESPN and appears on all the platforms, including video, podcasting, radio, and dot com. She's a bit of a journalistic Swiss Army knife and can find a good investigative story pretty much wherever you send her. She started attending NICAR more than 20 years ago and credits it with much of her professional success.
Building a culture of accessibility and why it matters
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
When we're writing, filming or recording a story, are we thinking about how we can make sure everyone can understand our work? Accessibility goes beyond alt-text and screen readers. This session will discuss best practices for making sure your journalism is accessibile to people of all abilities and backgrounds, and why it should be a necessary and intentional part of all the work you do.
Speakers
Stacy Kess is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of Equal Access Public Media. She is reporter and editor with more than 25 years' experience who has contended with life-long health issues. She is also a survivor of a head-on car-crash in 2017. This led her to her mission of decreasing the barriers for many of the 28 percent of Americans who can’t read, hear, see or understand the news. Kess oversees editorial and media development at EAPM.
Joe Murphy is a technically skilled editor at NBC News who loves figuring things out, getting people on the phone, unusual spreadsheets and making order from chaos. Also a fan of accessibility, Python, CSS, vim and the command line.
Connect: Bluesky
Data stories that don't look or sound like data stories
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Don't be boring! Get and use data in your investigations but remember you're telling a story to an audience that's probably not as geeked out by the data as you are.
Speakers
As managing editor of investigative content for Cox Media Group, Jodie manages national collaborations and investigations for 8 local TV stations. She previously spent 20+ years as an investigative reporter in Washington, Atlanta and Orlando. She's earned some of journalism’s top honors including from duPont, Goldsmith, Barlett & Steele, IRE, numerous Emmys/Murrows, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Public Service. She's served on IRE’s Board of Directors since 2019.
Developing an ethical AI policy for your newsroom
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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
Darla Cameron is the chief product officer at The Texas Tribune. She guides product development, engineering, design and data journalism, working closely across the organization to deliver the Tribune’s work in fresh and innovative ways that build trust with more Texans.
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.
Andrew Ford serves as an AI journalist for USA Today / Gannett, where he is a staunch advocate for rigorous reporting processes. In this role, he leverages new technology to enhance traditional reporting methods, benefiting both his own work and that of his colleagues. Andrew has a distinguished career in investigative journalism, having worked at local newspapers nationwide to uncover systemic issues ranging from police accountability to healthcare.
Connect: X
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.
Extracting data from complex PDFs using pdfplumber
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette 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.
Laptops will be provided.
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.
Finding the story: Using DNS search for investigative journalism (repeat)
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Every online interaction begins with a lookup in the Domain Name System (DNS), the backbone of the Internet. As a result, there are digital footprints left behind in the DNS. With the demise of Whois, investigative reporters are looking for new tools to uncover these footprints. Learn how to use DNSDB Scout, a tool to query DNSDB, a historical passive DNS database, to discover previously unknown online connections and gain new information to advance your ongoing and breaking news investigations.
Basic knowledge of the Domain Name System (DNS) is helpful, but not required. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.
Instructors
Google Sheets: Using string functions to manipulate data
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Maybe you converted a PDF or imported a table into a spreadsheet -- or maybe an agency gave you a poorly formatted file. You can use string functions to reformat your data and get your spreadsheets working for you.
This session is good for: Anyone comfortable using formulas and functions 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
Grace Asiegbu is a freelance investigative reporter from Chicago who recently reported on housing and eviction issues for Injustice Watch, a nonprofit organization focused on Cook County's judicial system. Her interests include race and gender equity, government accountability, and criminal justice. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, respectively.
Making publishable graphics in R Studio
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Explore different graphics types and styling you can do in R Studio and then export into Adobe Illustrator for publication.
This session is good for: beginners with some R Studio experience.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Maureen Linke is the visual editor for The Wall Street Journal's Washington and investigations teams, specializing in data visualization and visual storytelling. Previously, she held roles at the Associated Press, USA Today and CNN. Her work has earned recognition from the Pulitzer Prize Board, Investigative Reporters & Editors, the New York Press Club and the Overseas Press Club.
Spatial analysis in R: 301
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Data that lacks a shared column for direct joins can often still be connected through maps. But common geographies like census tracts and precincts rarely align perfectly. Despite these challenges, it’s still possible to estimate how votes shifted across neighborhoods or calculate statistical relationships using Census data. This process is called interpolation — learn how to translate data from one map to another and bridge geographic gaps in their data analysis. This session is good for journalists who are comfortable with the basics of R and Rstudio. Attending "Spatial analysis in R: 201" is recommended. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Ryan Little is the data editor at The Baltimore Banner, where he leads a team of data reporters and a visual investigator. His work analyzing large datasets and scraping the web has won multiple national awards and led to at least one Department of Justice investigation. Little is a dedicated mentor to aspiring data journalists and frequently speaks on the role of data in uncovering vital stories.
Shreya Vuttaluru is the investigative data reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. Her work has appeared in the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Banner and the Dallas Morning News. She likes accountability stories, and also maps.
Updating data practices for inclusion
Time: Thursday, March 6, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
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
Mentor program breakfast (invitation-only event)
Time: Friday, March 7, 7:30 – 8:45 a.m. (1h 15m)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
If you signed up for the conference mentor program, come meet your match at this invitation-only breakfast.
Beginner track: Feed the beast: Integrating data nuggets on deadline
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
No need to do a long-form investigative, data-heavy story. Start small.
Speakers
Maggie Green is the award-winning data journalist for ABC7 Chicago. Working closely with teams across the ABC-owned stations and ABC News, she has contributed to breaking news stories on mass shootings, severe weather events, natural disasters, asylum seekers and more. Maggie is a proud alumna of Yale University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and an even prouder dog-mom to Simon, her 12-year-old chow/pitbull mix.
Connect: X
Daniela Ibarra is an award-winning investigative reporter at KSAT in her hometown, San Antonio, Texas. Before returning home, she worked at KTXS and then KTUL in Oklahoma, where her reporting was credited with changing state law. She served on the national boards of SPJ and NAHJ. Daniela graduated from the University of North Texas and is the proud daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants. Ibarra is one of IRE's 2025 Chauncey Bailey Investigative Reporting Fellows.
John Kelly is vice president of data journalism for CBS News, leading a team of data and investigative journalists reporting for the network's news programs such as CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes, as well as 14 owned local CBS Stations and cbsnews.com. He led similar teams previously for ABC News and USA Today.
Connect: LinkedIn
Stephen Stock is chief investigative reporter at WVUE Fox8 New Orleans and contributing correspondent for Gray’s InvestigateTV. Specializing in public corruption, safety and transportation, Stock was a founding member of CBS News and Stations Innovation Lab and helped build investigative teams in San Francisco, Miami and Orlando. He teaches at IRE, newsrooms and universities around the US. He’s won a Peabody, du-Pont, national SPJ, three Murrows, six AP awards and 18 Emmys.
How economic development incentives impact public budgets
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Birch 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).
Attendees will need to bring their own laptop.
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: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
CensusDis is a simple Python package for accessing the US Census API. Unlike competing packages, it gives access to almost everything the Census Bureau produces, including American Community Survey, the Current Population Survey, the Supplemental Poverty Measure and so on. It even has methods for downloading geographic resources like Tiger Shapefiles. It has methods for quickly exploring which datasets and tables are available, so that you know what exists before you configure a whole script to try and download it. The greatest feature, however, is that it can download your census data and output a choropleth of any geography in a single function call. Learn how to make your work with the Census faster, more reliable and more enjoyable.
This session is good for journalists with some Python experience.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Scott Pham is an investigative reporter and the Data Team Coordinator of the CBS News Data Team.
Navigating your mental health in journalism
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
As journalists, we face a number of pressures and issues that can make it difficult to maintain a healthy and sustainable professional life. This will be a facilitated discussion where everyone can share challenges they’re facing and discuss possible ways to address those and take better care of ourselves. This will be an off-the-record, roundtable-style discussion.
Speakers
Jasmine Ye Han is a news graphics developer at Informa TechTarget (Industry Dive), where she tells business news stories with data analysis and visualizations. Previously she was a data journalism reporter at Bloomberg Industry Group. Jasmine is an alumnus of the Missouri School of Journalism and NICAR data library. She moved to the U.S. from China in 2014.
Khushboo is the Roy W. Howard Fellow at Wisconsin Watch. She specializes in data and early childhood education reporting, with a particular focus on government infrastructure meant to support child care organizations. She also works with others in her newsroom to improve data literacy and create graphics. In her free time, she enjoys jigsaw puzzles, raising service dogs, reading and playing video games.
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)
Jump into data analysis with R, the powerful open-source programming language. In this class we’ll cover R fundamentals and learn our way around the RStudio interface for using R.
This session is good for: People with a basic understanding of data analysis who are ready to go beyond spreadsheets. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Reporting on America's prison and jail death crisis
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
It’s been a decade since Congress passed the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act, but the federal government still doesn’t know how many people die in jails or prisons or during arrests. Even worse, it has since told the inspector general that it has “no plans” of releasing the data it has already collected and is currently battling with USA Today and the Appeal in separate lawsuits, each seeking the data that the federal government has collected under DCRA.
But where do you start now? The lack of direction from the federal government means that each state handles this data differently. Different agencies collect different pieces of the data, and you’ll have to string it together yourself. In this panel, reporters who’ve done the hard work of piecing deaths in custody data together will walk you through how you can build your own database to hold jails, prisons and police agencies accountable.
Speakers
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.
A.J. Lagoe is an investigative reporter for KARE 11 in Minneapolis. His reporting routinely leads to criminal convictions and legislative hearings, and has resulted in numerous new federal and state laws. A.J. is a two-time IRE Award winner and also the recipient of many of journalism’s other highest honors including the George Polk, along with multiple Peabody and duPont Columbia awards.
Scraping without programming
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: 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.
This session is good for: beginners and journalists with some R experience. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Andrew Ba Tran is an investigative data reporter at The Washington Post. He has worked on stories that have won the Goldsmith and Pulitzer Prizes for Investigative Reporting. Some of the papers he’s worked at include The Boston Globe and The South Florida Sun Sentinel. He is an adjunct professor at American University and has crafted several online courses teaching the statistical language R to journalists.
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)
Move beyond the chatbots and learn to leverage more advanced AI techniques. We'll cover what possibilities exist for AI across text, audio, images and video, focusing on extracting structured data from messy documents, building proof-of-concept tools to share with coworkers, avoiding cloud-based services like OpenAI and Anthropic, and staying up-to-date with progress in the field.
You’ll get the most out of the session with a working knowledge of Python, but we’ll also cover non-coding options when they exist. Participants will leave confident about discussing, prototyping, and evaluating AI tools in their newsroom, and won’t giggle (so much) when they hear the phrase “Hugging Face.”
Laptops will be provided.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructor
Jonathan Soma is Knight Chair in Data Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, where he directs both the Data Journalism MS and the summer intensive Lede program. He regularly publishes tutorials on everything from basic Python and analysis to ai2html and machine learning. At the moment he unfortunately cannot stop talking about AI. When Soma isn't boring his students to tears he's probably rescuing cats.
What's involved in data editing?
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Though more and more newsrooms have embraced data journalism, not every newsroom has a data editor. So what goes into data editing, why do we need it, and how can we help the journalists in our newsrooms use the most accurate and responsible data? In a panel discussion, data editors will explore these questions.
Speakers
Yoohyun Jung is the data editor at the Boston Globe, leading a team of computational journalists. She was previously the deputy data editor and data reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. Jung began her career in Arizona as a cops reporter, then developed as a data journalist with the help of IRE and NICAR.
Connect: LinkedIn
Alexandra Kanik is the data editor for Hearst Texas, which includes the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. She leads a team of reporters that produces unique analysis, interactive charts, custom graphics and reader-focused storytelling. She joined Hearst in May '21 after a decade in nonprofit news at organizations including Louisville Public Media and PublicSource. She holds a bachelor's degree in graphic design from MICA.
Dan Kopf is the data editor for The Chronicle. Previously, Kopf was the data editor at Quartz, where he also covered economics and demographics.
Connect: X
Kai Teoh leads a team of journalists responsible for The Dallas Morning News' data reporting, interactive projects, illustrations and graphics. He's passionate about advocating for immigrant journalists and enjoys mentoring data journalism students. With a career spanning different roles in the newsroom, he's committed to empowering his colleagues and elevating their work through collaboration.
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.
What's new in the world of LLMs
Time: Friday, March 7, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Speaker
Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, an open-source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time building open source tools for data journalism built around Datasette and SQLite. Simon completed a JSK Journalism Fellowship at Stanford and has worked for the Guardian. He co-created the Django web framework at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Kansas and has been blogging about software development since 2002 at simonwillison.net.
CAR (data journalism) through the decades
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Join us to learn about how computer-assisted reporting has evolved, how it has influenced IRE, where it's going, what we think might be the next big thing. We’ll discuss advances in technology, trends that turned out to be game-changers and unexpected flops. This panel will be a moderated conversation with time for questions.
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.
Custom dataviz with JavaScript 101
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Birch 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.
This session is good for journalists who are new to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
Instructor
Jovi Dai is a Bay Area News Group data reporter for The Mercury News and East Bay Times, specializing in data-driven stories focused on the San Francisco Bay Area. Previously, he was a data reporter at The Center for Public Integrity, where he collaborated with local newsrooms on data-driven investigations. He is passionate about using data and visual storytelling to enhance investigative reporting.
Digging deep: Scraping government websites
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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.
This session is sponsored by Bright Data. IRE retains control of content, including the topic and speaker selection, for all conference sessions.
Speakers
Extracting data from the worst PDFs on the planet
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Some PDFs defy conventional attempts at parsing (and logic). We’ll walk through a few ways to tackle layout issues, image PDFs and more. Bring your worst and we’ll try them, too.
This session would be good for those who aren’t super technical but are willing to experiment with new tools. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Finding the story: Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law data
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
The Biden administration made historic leaps in devoting funds to infrastructure and climate: roughly $1 billion in direct appropriations and an estimated $527 billion in tax credits to support the transition to clean energy, improve climate resilience, and address long-standing climate concerns. But tracking how much money has been spent is not always a simple task. POLITICO has tracked obligations made from the majority of this funding, reported on the status of the billions of dollars in private clean energy manufacturing investments and launched a massive FOIA effort to achieve a granular understanding of where this money has gone.
In this session, we will break down the specific data resources any reporter needs to follow the money—whether they are interested in funds from a specific federal department, funds going to a specific county, or even funds meant to achieve a specific purpose, we will show you what is knowable, how to know it, and how to fact-check it. We will also walk through what is not knowable and what should always be confirmed with federal agencies before going to print.
This session is good for journalists with an interest in infrastructure data. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Google Sheets black belt: Apps script for data journalists
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: 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
Crystal works closely with Times journalists to ensure that they have the knowledge and technology to make their reporting engaging and accessible to readers. She trains the newsroom on how to use the publishing system to produce articles in a variety of storytelling formats and coaches staff members on how to engage with readers on The New York Times site through article comments and other means.
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.
Jacob Meschke is a editor on the newsroom development and support team at The New York Times, a multidisciplinary team of journalists that works with desks across the Times newsroom to introduce new tools and initiatives. Much of his work focuses on audience data analysis and engagement and data reporting techniques.
How to crowdsource data for your next big story
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
What do you do when you're reporting a story and need the public to give you information? You crowdsource! Come to this session to hear journalists talk about crowdsourcing projects they've worked on and discuss lessons and limitations for this data collection strategy.
Speakers
Asia Fields is an engagement reporter at ProPublica working on community-driven investigations. She’s led crowdsourcing efforts on projects about homeless encampment sweeps and, with the Idaho Statesman, school building conditions. She also focuses on incorporating community feedback into the reporting process. She previously worked at The Seattle Times, where she reported on Title IX and the nation’s first known coronavirus outbreak.
Jeremy B. Merrill is a data reporter at The Washington Post. He likes natural language processing and bad jokes. He lives in Atlanta.
Leon Yin is an investigative data reporter at Bloomberg News. He builds datasets and develops methods to report on technology's impact on society.
Layer Cake: How to build reusable, customizable graphics with D3 and Svelte
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's 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
Michael is an investigative journalist at The New York Times where he has mostly written about online safety. He also maintains a number of open source software projects aimed at helping journalists understand data and present it in visual ways to readers.
Public records for social justice: Uncovering inequity in your community through FOI
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Have you ever wanted to report a story about mistreatment or discrimination but needed more concrete proof? Come to this session to learn how to probe public records for evidene that will help level up your social justice-focused reporting and hold people in power accoutnable for how they impact vulnerable communties.
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.
Gunita is an attorney at RCFP where she litigates FOIA cases and provides newsrooms with trainings in requesting public records. She has co-authored two publications on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to government documents. She attended Georgetown University Law Center and is licensed to practice in California and Washington, D.C.
Connect: LinkedIn
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)
We'll use the tidyverse packages dplyr and ggplot2, learning how to sort, filter, group, summarize, join, and visualize to identify trends in your data. If you want to combine SQL-like analysis and charting in a single pipeline, this session is for you.
This session is good for: People who have worked with data operations in SQL or Excel and would like to do the same in R and have some experience working with RStudio. Laptops will be provided.
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
The chaos in college sports: What all students should know
Time: Friday, March 7, 10:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (2h 15m)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Do you pay tuition? Interested in sports? Regardless of your devotion to your school’s team, the amateur athletics model that has ruled for decades is crashing down, thanks to the recent House settlement. And students may pay part of that price. Most Division I schools are expected to start paying athletes up to $20 million a year (total), but the settlement is wreaking havoc in Athletics departments trying to get ready for implementation July 1. Whether it’s Title IX equity, fundraising challenges, student fee increases, student-athletes losing positions on teams…there are dozens of stories to cover on campus in this new world of college athletics. And all that before the new administration makes changes. We’ll give you details on the settlement arrangement and its expected impact on NIL and other issues, plus hands-on help on how to track the documents and data to cover what’s happening at your school.
This panel will be immediately followed by a networking reception for those who attend the panel.
Speakers
Josh Fine is a two-time IRE Award winner who is currently a visiting fellow at Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship in Washington D.C. Josh’s reports for HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” were the first sports segments to win many of journalism’s top prizes. Before HBO, Josh was an investigative reporter and producer at CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and ABC’s “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.”
Connect: LinkedIn
AI starter pack: Python
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Wondering how to leverage Python for common newsroom AI tasks? In this session, you'll code your way through an example project and get a crash course on the libraries, techniques and learning resources available for Python users who want to pip install their first AI project.
This session is good for people who feel comfortable writing Python.
Instructor
Brandon Roberts is an investigative journalist specializing in applying computational techniques to watchdog and data-heavy journalism projects. He is currently a news applications developer at ProPublica.
Connect: Bluesky
Building the bridge to advanced data journalism
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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
Dhrumil Mehta is an associate professor who teaches data journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and assistant director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He is also a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and was formerly a political journalist at FiveThirtyEight.
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, fourth floor (BYO)
Interested in building data visualizations for the web? This session will continue the exploration in the 101 session of various 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.
This session is good for journalists with a bit of HTML and CSS experience, or participants who already attended "Custom dataviz with JavaScript 101". Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
Instructors
Matt Kiefer is an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School. He's also the creator of FOIAmail, a tool that helps newsrooms automate public records requests at scale.
Connect: LinkedIn
Data reporting for smaller newsrooms
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Description coming soon.
Speakers
Cody is an award-winning senior investigative producer at Arizona's Family 3TV/CBS 5 in Phoenix. He has worked on investigative teams in New Orleans and his hometown of Tyler, Texas. His work focuses on integrating data journalism into stories on television and online presentations. He also compiles annual data to provide news staff with context at their fingertips for future stories.
Kate Martin is a 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.
Justin Myers (any pronouns) is a Chicago-based data journalist, visual journalist, developer and parent. They joined the Chicago Sun-Times in fall 2023 as its interactives editor. Before that, they were the data editor for The Associated Press, where they supported both data journalists across the U.S. and reporting projects around the world. They enjoy making things out of flour, yarn and code — but rarely at the same time.
Junyao is a data reporter at Mission Local, a nonprofit newsroom covering San Francisco.
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: Gray's 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: 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.
Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Google account to participate. Participants need to have Gephi (https://gephi.org/) downloaded to their machine prior to taking this class. This intermediate session is good for journalists with some knowledge of network analysis.
Instructor
Investigating who's behind that website
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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.
Speakers
Priyanjana Bengani is on the data desk at Bloomberg, where she uses data science approaches to tackle news projects. She was previously a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center.
Jon Keegan is a tech reporter and data journalist at Sherwood News. He previously worked at The Markup, The Tow Center and The Wall Street Journal. He covers Big Tech and AI.
Networking for journalists of color
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.
This session is for journalists of color.
Speaker information coming soon.
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)
Learn how to import a wide variety of files in R including spreadsheets, files on the web and HTML tables, and transform the results into usable data. This session will also focus on how to clean and structure the data you've gathered in preparation for analysis using tidyverse packages.
This session is good for: People who have some experience using R and the Tidyverse. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Jasmine Ye Han is a news graphics developer at Informa TechTarget (Industry Dive), where she tells business news stories with data analysis and visualizations. Previously she was a data journalism reporter at Bloomberg Industry Group. Jasmine is an alumnus of the Missouri School of Journalism and NICAR data library. She moved to the U.S. from China in 2014.
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)
In this session, participants will learn how to use regular expressions to explore string and text datasets. Regular expressions can help you get more precise results with your data analysis tasks.
This session will be introductory and is good for journalists who are curious about regular expressions. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Larry Fenn is an Associated Press data journalist based in New York.
dRy - don’t repeat yourself, in R
Time: Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
You may have heard of the DRY principle in coding: don’t repeat yourself. But how do you actually do it? Join us as we walk you through iteration techniques in R to make your data analysis more efficient including how to import multiple files at once, creating unique functions and generating parameterized reports.
This session is good for: basic R users who want to ramp up their data analysis skills. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Ella Barnes is a senior journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin. She previously worked at ORANGE Magazine. As a data fellow for Christian McDonald, she has worked on projects using Texas campaign finance reports and electric vehicle ownership and charging station data.
Karina Kumar is a senior journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin with a certificate in elements of computing. She has worked at The Daily Texan, Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine and will be working at the Minnesota Star Tribune this summer as a data intern. Under Professor Christian McDonald, now as the data fellow editor, she has worked on projects with campaign finance reports, school attendance records, prison data and much more.
Christian McDonald is an associate professor of practice and the innovation director in the school of journalism and media at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches classes about data, coding and news products. His last newsroom position was as data and online projects editor at the Austin American-Statesman. In his 28 years in journalism, he also worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, East Valley (Arizona) Tribune and the Longview (Texas) News-Journal.
Connect: Bluesky, GitHub, GitHub (org), LinkedIn, Mastodon
15 health datasets in 60 minutes
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
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: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Wondering how to leverage JavaScript for common newsroom AI tasks? In this session, you'll code your way through an example project and get a crash course on the libraries, techniques and learning resources available for JavaScript users who want to npm init their first AI project.
This session is good for people who feel comfortable writing JavaScript.
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)
Learn how AI can sort through images and video to help you wrangle footage from protests and riots, analyze trends on TikTok, keep a (remote) eye on your local school board meetings, measure the effects of congestion pricing, and a hundred other tidbits for when the cameras might be rolling.
With a little Python and a dash of foundational knowledge, this session will tackle downloading videos, building and evaluating transcripts, splitting scenes, categorizing images, and detecting/counting/tracking objects. We'll work from real-life examples pulled from newsrooms like Bloomberg and the NYT. Participants will get the most out of this session if they have a working knowledge of Python.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Jonathan Soma is Knight Chair in Data Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, where he directs both the Data Journalism MS and the summer intensive Lede program. He regularly publishes tutorials on everything from basic Python and analysis to ai2html and machine learning. At the moment he unfortunately cannot stop talking about AI. When Soma isn't boring his students to tears he's probably rescuing cats.
Beginner track: Making your data story ironclad
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Using data in your storytelling doesn't have to feel like running with scissors. Learn the best practices to make sure your stories and data aren't wrong.
Speakers
Sandhya Kambhampati is a data reporter on the Los Angeles Times data desk, where she specializes in demographic and statistical analyses. She previously worked at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Correctiv and ProPublica Illinois. She is an adjunct at the Annenberg School at University of Southern California.
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
Teghan Simonton is a data reporter for the business and health teams at the Tampa Bay Times, where she's written about housing, cost of living and public health. She joined the newsroom in 2023 after working as a research assistant for Investigative Reporters & Editors. When not writing words or code, she likes to bake, train for marathons (three, so far) and get lost in bookstores.
De-mystifying cryptocurrency data: How to find stories on ransoms, scams and betting markets
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth 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.
This session is good for: all levels.
Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
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.
Do you really need a map? How to make the most of your data viz
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
This is a panel for folks interested in data viz but who don't have a design background. It can be tempting to throw data into a variety of forms that end up not making sense to the readers (and can sometimes amount to journalistic malpractice!). Panelists will go through their approach to simple data viz and feature some go-to tools.
Speakers
Emily Hopkins is an Indianapolis-based data reporter focused on accountability for Mirror Indy. They've investigated a variety of topics and institutions, including quality of care at Indiana nursing homes, Chicago's automated traffic enforcement system, financial issues at utilities in Michigan and Indiana, mismanagement of the Minnesota Board of Nursing and failures at the Indianapolis Housing Agency.
Finding the story: Wildfire data
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Using data from the National Interagency Fire Center, we’ll demonstrate how to clean it using R and create a basic interactive map with MapLibre, an open-source mapping library. This session is good for journalists with basic knowledge of R and HTML/CSS/Javascript.
Laptops will be provided.
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 millions of records in seconds with Amazon Web Services and SQL
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
We’ve all been there. Excel can’t hang. Your dataframe locks up. And that damn SQL query has been running for two days now. There’s no way around it. This database is just too big for your laptop to handle.
You don’t want to give up, but we all know what will happen if you ask your boss for a new computer.
Attend this rapid-fire session to see the solution: Amazon Athena. Katlyn Alo and Ben Welsh will show you how newsroom nerds use this powerful tool to rip through millions of records with ease. We’ll demonstrate every step in the process and prepare you to slay any dataset.
Speakers
Katlyn builds tools to help reporters take on ambitious stories.
Get help editing and improving your basic data visualizations
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
More data journalists are using easy tools to make data visualizations to aid storytelling, but especially on small teams, you may not have a visual editor to identify ways to make them better. Bring us your charts and graphs that you feel like could be better but aren't sure how. We'll give live and unscripted critique and constructive suggestions to take your charts from "fine" to "wow!"
Speaker
C.J. Sinner is the director of graphics and data visuals at The Minnesota Star Tribune. Her work has spanned several roles in visual storytelling and audience strategy over 15 years, including video storytelling, on-and-off platform curation, and data/graphics storytelling, designing for legacy and emerging platforms.
Google Sheets: Importing & data prep (repeat)
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch 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
Using data and docs to fact-check immigration rhetoric
Time: Friday, March 7, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
We often hear that undocumented people don't show up in many official data sources, but how can journalists looking to cover these improtant stories still equip themselves with important information that can level up thier reporting? Come to this session to find learn what data and docs exist to help you do important, thorough work that centers immigrants.
This session is sponsored by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. IRE retains control of content, including the topic and speaker selection, for all conference sessions.
Speakers
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)
Learn how to interact with AI via API using R for data journalism. In this hands on, we'll use R and Google Gemini's free tier to create short descriptions of data to be used in graphics. In short: AI-powered pop-up boxes. This session is good for beginner and intermediate journalists with some familiarity with R.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Beginner track: Creating meatier stories: Sourcing, documents and other tools to start investigative reporting
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Best strategies for taking daily reporting to the next step.
Speakers
Aaron Mendelson is the news developer for The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub. Previously, he was an investigative and data journalist at the Center for Public Integrity and at Los Angeles NPR affiliate KPCC/LAist. His work has spanned beats and formats and was recognized with an IRE Award in 2020.
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)
Fuzzy matching is a process for linking up records that are similar but not quite the same. It is often an important part of data-driven investigations as a way to identify connections between public figures, key people and companies that are relevant to a story.
Max Harlow, who developed the CSV Match command line tool, will cover how fuzzy matching typically fits into the investigative process, with story examples, as well as show you how to perform different types of fuzzy match on some real datasets, including the pros and cons of each.
This session is good for: intermediate participants with some data experience.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Finding the story: Trade data
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Birch Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
USA Trade, part of the U.S. Census, is an incredible tool for data journalists across most beats, especially those relating to global economics, trade, tech, and foreign policy. Whether it’s a story on manufacturing or supply chains, or tariffs and their impact on certain goods and trade flows – USA Trade has very comprehensive, district-level data that can help frame larger trends and analysis. The website itself, however, is not the most intuitive to figure out. This session will demonstrate how to use USA Trade and discuss some ways to understand and use the data in your reporting. You will need to make a free account on https://usatrade.census.gov/ to follow along. This session is good for everyone, especially for those to whom U.S. import/export data would be useful. No data experience is necessary! Attendees will need to bring their own laptops (preferably no tablets) for the training.
Instructors
Paroma Soni is a data and graphics journalist covering trade, immigration and agriculture for Politico Pro. She worked previously as an associate visual journalist at FiveThirtyEight, where her graphics focused on electoral politics and abortion. She was also a fellow at Columbia Journalism Review and a video producer at BuzzFeed India. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she is currently based in New York.
Findings and using undocumented APIs
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's 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
Leon Yin is an investigative data reporter at Bloomberg News. He builds datasets and develops methods to report on technology's impact on society.
How to approach an investigative data question: How many rats are in the Rainforest Cafe?
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Join us on a wild safari as we transform the quirky question, "How many rats are in the Rainforest Cafe?" into an adventure in logical thinking and strategic planning for data-based investigative journalism. We will journey through a hypothetical investigation into cleanliness at the Rainforest Cafe, breaking down the steps needed to tackle reporting questions on deadline with documents and data and showing how to expand from a seemingly simple query to a broader, impactful investigation. This will be a lively, interactive panel, ideally suited to early career journalists, or anyone else seeking to get comfortable with the process of approaching a story from an investigative mindset. By the end of the session, participants will leave equipped to craft an investigative data story from scratch — even starting from the most unexpected or whimsical question.
Speakers
Adiel Kaplan is an investigative reporter and editor, most recently with NBC National News, where she worked on investigative projects with a data focus. She has covered topics ranging from climate change to criminal justice, healthcare, and labor in print and for television. She teaches investigative reporting for the Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and the Data Program at Columbia Journalism School.
Veronica Penney is a graphics editor at Science, where she analyzes data to build visualizations and maps for the newsroom. She specializes in data reporting, climate change and cartography, and she previously worked as an investigative data reporter for Colorado Public Radio and as a climate and graphics reporter for The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Connect: Bluesky
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.
How to be your own archivist
Time: Friday, March 7, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Journalists like to say they're writing the first draft of history, but what happens when you're the sole record of that history, whether it's data, documents or other media? Come to this session to talk about creating, managing and maintining and archive in your newsroom, best practices, and what it means for your organization and the public at large.
Speakers
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)
311 data, or citizen complaint data, can help you feed the beast while feeding into investigations. In this session, we’ll do an example analysis using Python in a Google Co-Lab.
This session is good for: People comfortable with Python and Jupyter notebooks. Taking or having taken "introduction to Python for data analysis" or "first Python notebook" is strongly recommended.
Laptops will be provided. Participants will need to log in to a Google account for the class.
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: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Newsrooms need interactive maps, but the flexibility, cost and longevity of third party APIs are common obstacles. This session walks through how to build your own in-house mapping stack using the Protomaps toolset. We'll cover data preparation with Minneapolis open data, generating PMTiles vector tile archives, acquiring OpenStreetMap basemaps, and styling with MapLibre in the browser. We'll also explain how to deploy this with only S3 object storage - no servers required - and compare trade-offs with other mapping solutions.
This sesion is good for: Those familiar with JavaScript, Python and front-end development. Laptops will be provided.
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: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Kickstart your investigations with OCCRP Aleph, the leak taming, company registry matching and huge dataset wrangling tool that enables the Organized Crime Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to launch multiple cross-border projects a year. Learn about how to conduct advanced searches, cross-reference data across multiple leaks, and create your own investigation workspace — including building network diagrams and timelines. Make use of the billions of records that OCCRP Aleph hosts for your next investigation.
This session is good for all levels.
Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for this session.
Instructor
Originally hailing from Houston, but based in Tbilisi, Georgia, for 20 years, Eric Barrett joined OCCRP in 2019, managing the Data Desk for 6 years before co-managing the Research and Data Team to support OCCRP's network of journalists, leveraging data to shine a light on corruption. Previously, he directed Georgia’s first data non-profit, JumpStart Georgia, and later managed technology and security at Azerbaijan’s leading independent media outlet in exile, MeydanTV.
Connect: Mastadon
Beginner track: Tools to save you time
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
A review of tools and shortcuts that can help you with documents, data, organizing your work, etc., such as PDF converters, DocumentCloud, Wayback Machine, Pinpoint, Tabula, OpenRefine.
Speakers
Pooja Dantewadia is a data journalist at Realtor.com. She was previously a data and graphics reporter on the Los Angeles Times Data Desk. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she has also worked at IndiaSpend, Mint and CNN-News18, specializing in investigative reporting and data-driven storytelling on economics, politics and social justice.
Tyler Dukes is editor for AI innovation in journalism at McClatchy Media, leading a team that helps the company's local newsrooms harness data, automation and AI to elevate and strengthen their reporting. He teaches data journalism at Duke University and was previously an investigative reporter at The News and Observer, where he specialized in computational journalism. In 2017, he completed a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Building your own Chatbot to find public records
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
ChatGPT is a useful tool, if you use it correctly. But, what if you could build your own GPT? And what if you could limit it to search and learn from only the sources you direct it to? We'll demo how you can use your state's open record laws, retention policies, and state websites to search for important public records.
Instructor
Charles Minshew is the data storytelling editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, helping journalists tell stories with data and digital tools. Charles is the former director of data services for IRE. In 2012, Charles was on the staff of The Denver Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of a shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Command-line data analysis with VisiData
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette 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.
Laptops will be provided.
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.
Debunking sports myths with data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Defense is more important than offense. Golf tournaments are won on the green. Great players have the hot hand. To win, you must reduce turnovers.
We'll learn how to debunk these and other common cliches with basic spreadsheet skills and a few easy-to-learn statistics.
This session is good for all levels. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
In recent years, journalists have been identified, harassed and threatened using information obtained using OSINT; accused of hacking or wiretapping for utilizing basic computer-assisted reporting techniques; and targeted with lawsuits, investigations and restraining orders by politicians aiming to halt or claw back investigative reporting. While a new administration will have taken office, these will remain threats to journalistic work. This session will focus on exposing the evolving threats to journalists' safety both on- and offline, and bring together journalists and attorneys who've experienced such threats to discuss ways to safeguard yourself, your work, your sources and your loved ones.
Speakers
Ben Camacho is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary photographer. His work focuses on state-sanctioned violence and the communities impacted by it. He was sued twice by the city of Los Angeles in a failed effort to censor public records. He is an organizer at IWW's Freelance Journalists Union. He has spoken at Yale, USC and other institutions about press freedom. He enjoys street photography, shows and breathing clean air.
Olivia Martin is the safety and security fellow at The New York Times, where she supports the newsroom with field security monitoring, threat assessments and online harassment mitigation and response. Before joining the Times, Olivia was on the digital security training team at Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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.
Finding narratives in a pile of documents
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
This hands-on session will show how to dig through a large batch of files and find common themes and narratives. We will use R and the tidytext package to explore two-word pairs, sentiment analysis and then the quanteda package to examine keywords in context.
This session is good for journalists with some R experience. Laptops will be provided!
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: Education data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
The issues we cover in education reporting are wide ranging – from who manages our education institutions, to how students perform on standardized tests, to how teachers are compensated. Let’s go over some ways to set yourself up for success as an education data reporter by learning about helpful datasets, how to request and organize information, and how to avoid common pitfalls when working on an education team.
This session is good for anyone! Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
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. Laptops will be provided.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructors
Alexandra Kanik is the data editor for Hearst Texas, which includes the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. She leads a team of reporters that produces unique analysis, interactive charts, custom graphics and reader-focused storytelling. She joined Hearst in May '21 after a decade in nonprofit news at organizations including Louisville Public Media and PublicSource. She holds a bachelor's degree in graphic design from MICA.
Ryan Little is the data editor at The Baltimore Banner, where he leads a team of data reporters and a visual investigator. His work analyzing large datasets and scraping the web has won multiple national awards and led to at least one Department of Justice investigation. Little is a dedicated mentor to aspiring data journalists and frequently speaks on the role of data in uncovering vital stories.
How to investigate special-interest influence on your Congressional delegation
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Two decades after an embarrassing ethics scandal forced the U.S. Congress to revamp its disclosure requirements for members accepting private trips from special interest groups, those organizations have blown a hole through those rules. An investigation by veteran IRE members and their student teams at The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and Boston University reveals, for the first time, how special interests paying for House members and their staff to travel around the world are skirting requirements limiting the access lobbyists involved in the trips have to House members. The reporters examined 17,000 trips since 2012, also showing how 24 House members turned scores of trips into “influence peddling vacations” for themselves and their relatives. The team’s work led to a series of national investigative stories published in September 2024 with more on deck this year. You will leave this session ready to mine congressional private travel records and deeply probe special interest influence on House members in your state.
Speakers
Maggie Mulvihill is a veteran reporter, data journalism trainer, news entrepreneur, First Amendment advocate and attorney. Mulvihill is an associate professor of the practice in computational journalism at Boston University and a member of IRE’s Academic Task Force.
Connect: X
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.
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.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Jovi Dai is a Bay Area News Group data reporter for The Mercury News and East Bay Times, specializing in data-driven stories focused on the San Francisco Bay Area. Previously, he was a data reporter at The Center for Public Integrity, where he collaborated with local newsrooms on data-driven investigations. He is passionate about using data and visual storytelling to enhance investigative reporting.
Networking for international journalists
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Do you dread checking the box on job applications that ask if you will need visa sponsorship now or in the future? Does navigating the American immigration system seem like an insurmountable task? It's hard to break into the field in general, but even harder as an international student or journalist trying to land a long-term job in the US. This session can be a space to share experiences, offer some tips, ask questions, find support, or just have a dedicated space to vent and connect.
Speakers
Jasmine Ye Han is a news graphics developer at Informa TechTarget (Industry Dive), where she tells business news stories with data analysis and visualizations. Previously she was a data journalism reporter at Bloomberg Industry Group. Jasmine is an alumnus of the Missouri School of Journalism and NICAR data library. She moved to the U.S. from China in 2014.
Paroma Soni is a data and graphics journalist covering trade, immigration and agriculture for Politico Pro. She worked previously as an associate visual journalist at FiveThirtyEight, where her graphics focused on electoral politics and abortion. She was also a fellow at Columbia Journalism Review and a video producer at BuzzFeed India. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she is currently based in New York.
PyCAR *pre-registered attendees only
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 a.m. – 5:45 p.m. (7h)
Location: Birch 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.
This session is good for beginners who want to get started with Python.
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
Irene Casado Sánchez is a data journalist at Big Local News, a Stanford University project providing data, training, and tools to help journalists better cover their communities. She collaborated with Reuters’ Global Enterprise team to investigate the misuse of climate finance and debt-burdening financial mechanisms. She worked with The New York Times’ Investigative Local Fellowship, providing data expertise and mentoring fellows.
Caroline Ghisolfi is the deputy data editor for the Houston Chronicle. Before coming to Houston, Caroline was at the Austin American-Statesman, where she was part of the team selected as a Pulitzer finalist in public service. She trained in data journalism in multiple roles at the Associated Press and holds a journalism master's degree from Stanford University.
Tom Meagher is a senior editor at The Marshall Project, the nonprofit newsroom covering the criminal justice system in the United States, where he oversees coverage of prisons, jails and the death penalty. Before joining The Marshall Project, he led an interactive team for the Digital First Media newspaper chain and was the data editor at the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. He got his start in journalism covering night cops for a small daily paper in Kansas.
Connect: Bluesky
Quantifying history
Time: Saturday, March 8, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
New tools allow us not just to quantify what is happening in the world today, but also to find new revelations in historical collections that previously have been inaccessible. This panel will talk about their projects to tell previously ignored stories and give you tips and resources for doing your own work.
Speakers
Michael Corey is the geospatial, technical and data lead, and associate director, for Mapping Prejudice. Before transitioning to public history, Michael spent 20 years as a data journalist at the Star Tribune, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Des Moines Register. His previous work has spanned zoning and segregation, mortgage disparities, the U.S.-Mexico border fence system, human-induced earthquakes and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Connect: Bluesky
Alexia Fernández Campbell is an investigative journalist at Bloomberg Industry Group. Her work has exposed widespread wage theft at the U.S. Postal Service and potential business fraud in a federal pandemic relief program. Her radio and magazine series, “40 Acres and a Lie,” won a duPont-Columbia award and Philip Meyer award. She previously worked as a reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, Vox, The Atlantic, National Journal and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Jennifer LaFleur teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and works with newsrooms. She was the Center for Public Integrity editor on 40 Acres and a Lie, a 2.5-year investigation into a long misunderstood government program that gave land to formerly enslaved people. She has worked for CPI, Reveal, ProPublica and several newspapers, and is on the boards of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the National Center for Disability and Journalism.
Connect: Bluesky
Joyce Sohyun Lee is an award-winning reporter who helped launched The Washington Post’s Visual Forensics team. She joined The Post in September 2017 as a video editor on the international desk. Prior to her time at The Post, she worked as an associate video producer for Time magazine and holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Connect: X
Andrew Ba Tran is an investigative data reporter at The Washington Post. He has worked on stories that have won the Goldsmith and Pulitzer Prizes for Investigative Reporting. Some of the papers he’s worked at include The Boston Globe and The South Florida Sun Sentinel. He is an adjunct professor at American University and has crafted several online courses teaching the statistical language R to journalists.
Airtable: Building better and easier-to-use databases
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Cedar Lake, fourth 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. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
A data deep dive into the 2024 Philip Meyer Award winners. Hear from reporters on how they gathered, cleaned, analyzed and visualized the data behind some of the year's biggest stories.
Speakers
Eric Fan is an investigative data journalist at Bloomberg News.
Alexia Fernández Campbell is an investigative journalist at Bloomberg Industry Group. Her work has exposed widespread wage theft at the U.S. Postal Service and potential business fraud in a federal pandemic relief program. Her radio and magazine series, “40 Acres and a Lie,” won a duPont-Columbia award and Philip Meyer award. She previously worked as a reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, Vox, The Atlantic, National Journal and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Climate change has changed natural disasters; we must change how we prepare
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Wildfires and hurricanes. Excessive heat and bitter cold. Extreme weather events have become stronger, more prevalent, and more unpredictable thanks to human-caused climate change.
While these events provide an opportunity to capture an audience's attention and explain the connection between extreme weather and climate change it isn’t always apparent how we can — whether we should — do that.
This moderated panel will combine firsthand insights from those covering extreme weather events with breaking news threat modeling to develop a framework for the age of human-caused climate change that emphasizes the "So What" and "Here's Why This Matters" of the unfolding story.
Speakers
Adiel Kaplan is an investigative reporter and editor, most recently with NBC National News, where she worked on investigative projects with a data focus. She has covered topics ranging from climate change to criminal justice, healthcare, and labor in print and for television. She teaches investigative reporting for the Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and the Data Program at Columbia Journalism School.
Christopher L. Keller joined The Associated Press in 2023 as a member of its award-winning data journalism team. His particular focus is building datasets that can help provide big-picture context in breaking news situations. Christopher has worked in a variety of roles in various newsrooms since 2002. He grew up in Wisconsin, attended the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and currently studies interpersonal communication at the University of New Mexico.
Teghan Simonton is a data reporter for the business and health teams at the Tampa Bay Times, where she's written about housing, cost of living and public health. She joined the newsroom in 2023 after working as a research assistant for Investigative Reporters & Editors. When not writing words or code, she likes to bake, train for marathons (three, so far) and get lost in bookstores.
A graduate of Indiana University-Bloomington's journalism school, Mary Katherine — or, MK — Wildeman got her start as a beat reporter in Charleston, South Carolina, covering health care, business and the effects of climate change on the coastal tourist destination. She earned her master's degree in data science at the University of Missouri, and is now on the Associated Press data team, covering the climate change emergency.
Connect: LinkedIn
Customizing ggplot for yourself or your organization
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Imagine a version of ggplot customized to your organization’s style guidelines, in which you no longer have to write the same theme styling or geom_text layers every time you make a new chart. We’ve done that at Pew Research Center by writing our own graphics package made up of functions that modify, combine and extend existing ggplot functions (wrappers), and we want to share what we learned! We’ll demonstrate how to write these types of functions and give examples of the situations in which they’re particularly useful. At a minimum, attendees would leave the session knowing how to get much closer to publication-ready graphics without leaving R in far fewer lines of code. For those who may want to go beyond streamlining their personal ggplot use, we’ll also go over why (or why not) a custom R graphics package could be the right solution for their organizations — and how to start building one if it is.
This session is good for: intermediate R users familiar with ggplot.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Athena Chapekis is a computational social scientist at Pew Research Center.
Connect: LinkedIn
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.
Everything you need to know about political dark money
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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.
Robert Maguire is the vice president for research and data at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), where he leads efforts to investigate dark money, corruption and other malfeasance. Prior to joining CREW, he founded the dark money tracking program at OpenSecrets, where he won SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi award for his reporting. He has collaborated with major outlets nationwide like NPR, The Washington Post and CNN on reporting focused on dark money and conflicts of interest.
Connect: Bluesky
Shanna is senior legal counsel for campaign finance at Campaign Legal Center, where she advances transparency and accountability in our political system using a variety of legal strategies, including litigation, engagement with the Federal Election Commission and public advocacy. Shanna holds a law degree, worked in the FEC’s Office of General Counsel and spent time in private practice advising political campaigns and other organizations on election laws.
Connect: LinkedIn
Albert Serna Jr. is an investigative reporter and educator from the San Gabriel Valley who founded the Los Angeles Center for Investigative Journalism. His work has ranged from investigating the national spread of a right-wing sheriff's group to investigating the abuse of tribal sovereignty.
Connect: Bluesky
Google Pinpoint for research and investigations
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Learn how to use this free-of-cost research tool that allows journalists to transcribe, search, and analyse large collections of files using Google's Search and AI technologies.
Instructor information coming soon.
How to adjust for inflation
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Come for a gentle introduction to spreadsheets, stay for the lesson on how you can (and should) inflation-adjust almost anything you write about with a dollar sign. You'll also learn how to find inflation rates for slices of the economy like energy or housing, and how to build your own indexes as well.
This session is good for anyone. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Paul Overberg is a data reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He worked on USA TODAY’s data team for many years and led its demographic coverage. He also has taught at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and served as an instructor and senior fellow for the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Connect: X
Networking: Women in data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
In this session, women, trans and non-binary folks in data journalism and investigative reporting will discuss the unique challenges they face, including the nuances of working in the field, issues of imposter syndrome and how to be our own advocates. Participants will have a safe space to ask questions, share experiences and network with one another.
Speaker
Khushboo is the Roy W. Howard Fellow at Wisconsin Watch. She specializes in data and early childhood education reporting, with a particular focus on government infrastructure meant to support child care organizations. She also works with others in her newsroom to improve data literacy and create graphics. In her free time, she enjoys jigsaw puzzles, raising service dogs, reading and playing video games.
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: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
Let's make charts with language models! In this session, we'll have a hands-on demonstration of ways to use LLM chatbots like ChatGPT to build charts, graphs, tables and other kinds of data visualizations including interactive graphics. The session leaders will demonstrate a few ways that they have done it for production graphics, and then attendees will build their own! At the end, we'll have a short demo where everyone can share what they have built. We will also collect the charts that everyone makes alongside the initial prompts they used and a transcript of their conversation, which we will put together as an artifact that folks can reference after the session.
This session is good for all levels of experience. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Dhrumil Mehta is an associate professor who teaches data journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and assistant director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He is also a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and was formerly a political journalist at FiveThirtyEight.
Workshop your public records request
Time: Saturday, March 8, 10:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (2h 15m)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Never filed a public records request yet? No worries! Bring your request ideas and get help from public records experts as you file your first request. At the end of the session, you’ll have a submitted a public records request to the agency of your choice and leave with tips that can help you file even more requests.
Speakers
Dillon Bergin is MuckRock's data reporter. He uses data and public records to power investigative reporting with partner newsrooms. He's also the director of the Data Liberation Project and hosts FOIAFriday, a monthly community podcast about all things public records.
Connect: Bluesky
Gunita is an attorney at RCFP where she litigates FOIA cases and provides newsrooms with trainings in requesting public records. She has co-authored two publications on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to government documents. She attended Georgetown University Law Center and is licensed to practice in California and Washington, D.C.
Connect: LinkedIn
Matt Topic is a partner at Loevy + Loevy, where he leads the firm's media and intellectual property practice. Matt's team has litigated hundreds of state and federal government records/FOIA cases. Matt also represents several news publishers in copyright cases against AI companies.
Beginner track: Writing with numbers
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Going from data to story: Best practices for writing about your data findings, reporting on other's surveys and studies and how to avoid common problems.
Speakers
Jennifer LaFleur teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and works with newsrooms. She was the Center for Public Integrity editor on 40 Acres and a Lie, a 2.5-year investigation into a long misunderstood government program that gave land to formerly enslaved people. She has worked for CPI, Reveal, ProPublica and several newspapers, and is on the boards of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the National Center for Disability and Journalism.
Connect: Bluesky
Covering transportation with data and docs
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
From highways to railways to runways, transportation issues impact safety, the supply chain, interntional trade, and so much more. Come to this session to learn where to find important data and docs and how to use them to cover this sprawling topic, especially after high-profile incidents.
Speakers
Paul Overberg is a data reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He worked on USA TODAY’s data team for many years and led its demographic coverage. He also has taught at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and served as an instructor and senior fellow for the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Connect: X
Wesley Ratko is a newsroom developer at the San Antonio Express-News. He was an AICP-certified transportation planner with the Montgomery County Planning Commission in suburban Philadelphia for eight years before joining the Express-News in 2022. He’s leveraged his professional experience working with federal, state and local governments to cover infrastructure and the built environment with engaging and interactive visuals.
K. Sophie Will is an investigative data reporter at Bloomberg Law, Government and Tax. Previously, she was a congressional action reporter at CQ Roll Call and Utah Investigative Journalism Project's Alicia Patterson fellow. The award-winning Utah native graduated from Boston University with bylines found in the Deseret News, USA Today, AP, Thomson Reuters, HuffPost, WGBH and more.
Cutting-edge web scraping techniques
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Interested in new and effective advanced web scraping techniques? Join this session to learn about:
- Video scraping: a new technique where you take a screen capture video and feed it into Google's Gemini 1.5 models to turn it into structured data.
- Using image models such as Gemini, GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet are also extremely effective. It's possible to extract structured data from images, or poorly structured PDF files
- Other modern scraping techniques using libraries like Playwright - a modern alternative to Selenium - for browser automation. Browser automation becomes a lot less complicated if you combine it with video or image analysis models.
This session is good for: journalists with some web scraping experience. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
Instructor
Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, an open-source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time building open source tools for data journalism built around Datasette and SQLite. Simon completed a JSK Journalism Fellowship at Stanford and has worked for the Guardian. He co-created the Django web framework at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Kansas and has been blogging about software development since 2002 at simonwillison.net.
Finding the story: Labor data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Labor market numbers are the bread and butter of most news organizations' monthly coverage cycles. In this session, a former labor reporter and current data reporter will help you move past the buzz of the latest unemployment rate to responsibly and soberly report on trends that affect the largest demographic in the world: workers.
This session is good for anyone comfortable with the basics of working in Google Sheets. Computers will be provided.
Instructor
Adam Yahya Rayes is a data reporter for Michigan Public (formerly Michigan Radio). Adam was born and raised in Michigan and graduated from Western Michigan University. Before returning to his home state last year, he covered rural/small communities in Colorado and labor/employment in Indiana.\
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.
Google Sheets 1: Getting started with spreadsheets (repeat)
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
In this introduction to spreadsheets, you'll begin analyzing data with Google Sheets, a simple but powerful tool. You'll learn how to enter data, navigate spreadsheets and conduct simple calculations like sum, average and median.
This session is good for: Data beginners. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Google account to participate.
Instructor
Karina Kumar is a senior journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin with a certificate in elements of computing. She has worked at The Daily Texan, Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine and will be working at the Minnesota Star Tribune this summer as a data intern. Under Professor Christian McDonald, now as the data fellow editor, she has worked on projects with campaign finance reports, school attendance records, prison data and much more.
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: Grand Portage 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?
Speakers
Bianca Muniz is data analyst at Agência Pública, an independent Brazilian news outlet, and journalist specialized in data-driven reporting. She holds a MSc and a BSc in Biomedical Sciences from UNIFESP, and a BA in Journalism from USP. Since 2020, she has conducted data-driven investigations on human rights and socio-environmental issues. She currently leads the Projeto Escravizadores, tracing slave-owning ancestors in the genealogies of Brazilian political figures.
Spatial analysis using geographical Census data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Lafayette Bay, eighth floor (Mac)
How to find more about your community with spatial analysis: This session will touch on how reporters can aggregate Census data using spatial analysis.
This session is good for journalists with some Python experience.
Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Michael Corey is the geospatial, technical and data lead, and associate director, for Mapping Prejudice. Before transitioning to public history, Michael spent 20 years as a data journalist at the Star Tribune, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Des Moines Register. His previous work has spanned zoning and segregation, mortgage disparities, the U.S.-Mexico border fence system, human-induced earthquakes and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Connect: Bluesky
Sandhya Kambhampati is a data reporter on the Los Angeles Times data desk, where she specializes in demographic and statistical analyses. She previously worked at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Correctiv and ProPublica Illinois. She is an adjunct at the Annenberg School at University of Southern California.
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: Grand Portage 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.
Speakers
Caitlin Gilbert is a data reporter at The Washington Post, where she covers health, wellness, science and tech stories. Before joining The Post, she worked as a U.S.-based data journalist at the Financial Times, where she covered the economy, U.S. politics and abortion access across the country. She received her PhD in neuroscience and genomics from Rockefeller University.
Connect: Bluesky
Jeremy B. Merrill is a data reporter at The Washington Post. He likes natural language processing and bad jokes. He lives in Atlanta.
Journalism jobs for internationals
Time: Saturday, March 8, 12:45 – 1:30 p.m. (45m)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Things are about to get tougher for international journalists and students who want to work in the US and need visas. We might face more challenges under the new administration finding newsrooms willing to hire or sponsor us, navigating the visa landscape and helping our employers understand the process. It’s time for us to band together.
Journalism Jobs for Internationals was created by volunteers to share resources that address those challenges facing international journalists and build a community where one supports another. In this session, we will present the information we compiled, answer any questions and listen to your feedbacks. Help us better help you!
Speakers
Matt Carroll is a journalism professor of the practice at Northeastern University. Previously, he worked for 26 years at the Boston Globe, specializing in data storytelling. He was a member of the Spotlight team when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003 for its coverage of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal. That story was turned into the movie “Spotlight,” which won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Connect: X
Jasmine Ye Han is a news graphics developer at Informa TechTarget (Industry Dive), where she tells business news stories with data analysis and visualizations. Previously she was a data journalism reporter at Bloomberg Industry Group. Jasmine is an alumnus of the Missouri School of Journalism and NICAR data library. She moved to the U.S. from China in 2014.
Kai Teoh leads a team of journalists responsible for The Dallas Morning News' data reporting, interactive projects, illustrations and graphics. He's passionate about advocating for immigrant journalists and enjoys mentoring data journalism students. With a career spanning different roles in the newsroom, he's committed to empowering his colleagues and elevating their work through collaboration.
Connect: LinkedIn
AI tools for your newsroom
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 4:30 p.m. (2h 15m)
Location: Gray's 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.
This session is good for everyone.
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Best practices for thinking about simple data visualizations to help tell your story and a peek at some free tools.
Speakers
Adriana Aguilar is a Visual Content Producer for the ABC OTV Data team. Adriana began their journalism as a fellow in partnership with ABC7 Chicago for Northeastern University in 2019 and is grateful they get to combine their love for visuals, storytelling and facts in a way that helps audiences digest information in an ever-changing world.
Connect: LinkedIn
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
C.J. Sinner is the director of graphics and data visuals at The Minnesota Star Tribune. Her work has spanned several roles in visual storytelling and audience strategy over 15 years, including video storytelling, on-and-off platform curation, and data/graphics storytelling, designing for legacy and emerging platforms.
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.
This session is good for journalists with an interest in regulatory agency data.
Laptops will be provided.
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: Grand Portage 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
Leah Douglas is a Washington-based award-winning journalist covering agriculture and energy, including competition, regulation, federal agencies, corporate consolidation, environment and climate, racial discrimination and labor, previously at the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Connect: X
John McCracken covers the meat industry and industrial agriculture for the nonprofit newsroom Investigate Midwest. A former Grist reporting fellow, his coverage of agriculture and climate change has won him a 2023 Peter Lisagor award, a SEAL environmental journalism award and a Wisconsin Newspaper Association investigative reporting award.
Gavin Off has been the Charlotte Observer’s data reporter since 2011. Previously, he worked as a data reporter at the Tulsa World and at Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C. He’s won national awards, including an IRE Award, a National Headliner Award and Sigma Delta Chi Award. Gavin teaches classes on data and data reporting at several universities in the Carolinas.
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: Lafayette 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
Google Sheets 2: Formulas & sorting (repeat)
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
Much of Google Sheets' power comes in the form of formulas. In this class, you'll learn how to use them to analyze data with the eye of a journalist. Yes, math will be involved, but it's totally worth it! This class will show you how calculations like change, percent change, rates and ratios can beef up your reporting.
This session is good for: Anyone who has taken Google Sheets 1 or has been introduced to spreadsheets. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Google account to participate.
Instructor
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
From challenging police narratives to tracking police violence and tallying inflating police budgets, data has played a crucial role in holding police agencies accountable across the country. Come to this session to learn how to equip your reporting with crucial data that will help inform and improve your public safety journalism in your own communities.
Speakers
Lakeidra Chavis is a staff writer for The Marshall Project. She has written extensively on gun violence and gun enforcement in Chicago, as well as Black suicides, gang structures and the opioid crisis. Her work currently focuses on juvenile justice. She previously reported at ProPublica Illinois and for NPR stations in Chicago and Alaska. Lakeidra was a 2021 Livingston Award finalist. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Connect: Bluesky
Jeff is a Minneapolis-based journalist at the intersection of data analysis, reporting, coding and design.
Connect: Bluesky
Matt Kiefer is an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School. He's also the creator of FOIAmail, a tool that helps newsrooms automate public records requests at scale.
Connect: LinkedIn
Rasters to vectors: Creating original datasets from satellite imagery
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Learn how to turn a stack of satellite images into a new dataset that gives quantitative insight and tells a compelling story. We’ll build a reproducible analysis from start to finish using R and QGIS.
This session is good for: People comfortable using R and QGIS.
Instructor
Tips for successful public records requests
Time: Saturday, March 8, 2:15 – 3:15 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Too often journalists are stonewalled when seeking public records that show how the government is operating at the national, state and local levels. This session will cover strategies to find success with the Freedom of Information Act and state public records laws, including how to get agencies to respond to your requests more quickly, steps you can take to overcome agencies' resistance and where you can find resources to help you appeal denials.
Speakers
Ryan Martin is an investigative journalist working as deputy managing editor of Mirror Indy. He previously worked as an investigative reporter for The Indianapolis Star and State Affairs Indiana. His journalism has been recognized in the Pulitzer Prizes and IRE Awards. When not getting rejected by public records clerks, Ryan spends his time enjoying board games and the outdoors.
Gunita is an attorney at RCFP where she litigates FOIA cases and provides newsrooms with trainings in requesting public records. She has co-authored two publications on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to government documents. She attended Georgetown University Law Center and is licensed to practice in California and Washington, D.C.
Connect: LinkedIn
Matt Topic is a partner at Loevy + Loevy, where he leads the firm's media and intellectual property practice. Matt's team has litigated hundreds of state and federal government records/FOIA cases. Matt also represents several news publishers in copyright cases against AI companies.
Auditing AI algorithms for bias
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
AI is everywhere and reporters are finding new ways to hold AI tools accountable. This panel showcases original investigations into predictive and generative AI tools built by some of the largest technology companies in the world by two award-winning freelance reporters.
Towards the end of the session, we will also discuss how reporters can use AI tools ethically and we would love to hear from the community what is needed to help reporters in newsrooms and freelance reporters.
Speakers
Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy-award winning freelance reporter investigating AI tools for the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. She is the author of the book "The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now," and she is a journalism professor at New York University.
Connect: LinkedIn
Google Sheets: Using string functions to manipulate data (repeat)
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
Maybe you converted a PDF or imported a table into a spreadsheet -- or maybe an agency gave you a poorly formatted file. You can use string functions to reformat your data and get your spreadsheets working for you.
This session is good for: Anyone comfortable using formulas and functions 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
Lucia Walinchus is an award-winning journalist, attorney and ice hockey player/coach. She is currently the managing data editor for NBC Owned Stations. She has been featured as a guest speaker on CNN and was a contracted freelancer for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her work has previously been recognized as the Best Investigative Reporting in Ohio, the Best Data Journalism in Ohio and the Best Public Service Journalism.
Navigating federal campaign finance data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Cedar Lake, fourth floor (BYO)
This class will focus on using the FEC’s web tools to access data. It will feature a hands-on demonstration of accessing reports as soon as they are filed. Participants will learn what is included in the reports, how to interpret entries, and potential pitfalls. The presenter will share a user-friendly spreadsheet template for viewing downloaded report data and walk participants through a simple recipe for creating compelling stories using campaign finance data.
This session is good for everyone. Attendees will need to bring their own laptops (no tablets) for the training.
Instructor
Brendan is the director of insights at OpenSecrets. He started working in the money in politics space with the Campaign Finance Institute in 2001. He has worked extensively with congressional and presidential campaign donor data, modeling public financing proposals and outside spending. He also worked on creating CFI’s database of state laws. Brendan graduated from Colgate University with degrees in political science and history.
Connect: LinkedIn
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
What to do when the owner of the data you are analyzing says no comment.
Speakers
Hannah Fresques is the deputy data editor at ProPublica. She has edited dozens of data-driven investigations, including on Texas’ abortion ban, high-interest title lending, and a Salmonella outbreak. Her prior work as a data reporter covered healthcare, economics and education, and earned recognition from IRE/NICAR’s Philip Meyer Journalism Award. She holds a master’s degree in quantitative methods for social sciences from Columbia University.
Connect: Bluesky
Ryan Little is the data editor at The Baltimore Banner, where he leads a team of data reporters and a visual investigator. His work analyzing large datasets and scraping the web has won multiple national awards and led to at least one Department of Justice investigation. Little is a dedicated mentor to aspiring data journalists and frequently speaks on the role of data in uncovering vital stories.
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.
SELECT * FROM INTERESTING (but in Python)
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Ever found yourself drowning in a sea of data with editors circling like sharks? You're not alone. In this interactive session, Wall Street Journal data people John West and Rob Barry will dive into a machine learning concept called embeddings, which are at the heart of the current AI craze. Using free and open source tools, we’ll show you how to use this technology to keep afloat in your ocean of unstructured images and text.
This session is good for: People comfortable working in Python. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Rob Barry directs data journalism at The Wall Street Journal, leading a team of reporters specializing in data analysis and programming. His work has exposed nation-state hacking, Medicare fraud and the inner workings of social media algorithms.
John West is a writer and software engineer, currently reporting the news with code at the Wall Street Journal, where his work has won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. Previously, he worked as a researcher at the MIT Media Lab and as a writer and engineer at Quartz. His first book, "Lessons and Carols," was published in 2023 and his second book, a digital memento mori, is expected next year.
Surveys 101: A journalist’s guide to writing with polling data
Time: Saturday, March 8, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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: Deer 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. Laptops will be provided.
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
This panel is all about the latest in teaching data journalism to college students. Many NICAR participants have been teaching for a long time, or make side money teaching a class as an adjunct. The panelists will discuss strategies and techniques that help make data journalism accessible to students.
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.
Maggie Mulvihill is a veteran reporter, data journalism trainer, news entrepreneur, First Amendment advocate and attorney. Mulvihill is an associate professor of the practice in computational journalism at Boston University and a member of IRE’s Academic Task Force.
Connect: X
Google Sheets 3: Filtering & pivot tables (repeat)
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Crystal Lake, fourth floor (PC)
A look at the awesome power of pivot — and how to use it to analyze your dataset in minutes rather than hours. We'll work up to using a pivot table by first sorting and filtering a dataset, learning how to find story ideas along the way.
This session is good for: Anyone familiar with formulas, sorting and filtering in a spreadsheet program. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) for the training and will need a free Google account to participate.
Instructor
Julie Christie is passionate about taking data and turning it into something people can use. She's helped newsrooms all across Philadelphia produce quick-turnaround and years-long investigations when she was the director of data and impact at Resolve Philly. She cares most about helping people set up a process to use and understand data that works for them. You can chat with her about nerdy stuff or how much she hates ZIP codes.
Connect: LinkedIn
How to turn your investigation or data findings into narrative audio
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
How do you turn a mountain of data and complex investigative findings into audio storytelling that captivates audiences? This panel explores the art of weaving complex data into character-rich, narrative storytelling in audio form. Whether it’s a podcast or a radio feature, this panel will give you advice on how to make your stories resonate to the ear.
Speakers
Alexia Fernández Campbell is an investigative journalist at Bloomberg Industry Group. Her work has exposed widespread wage theft at the U.S. Postal Service and potential business fraud in a federal pandemic relief program. Her radio and magazine series, “40 Acres and a Lie,” won a duPont-Columbia award and Philip Meyer award. She previously worked as a reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, Vox, The Atlantic, National Journal and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Curtis is a senior editor at APM Reports, an investigative journalism group based at American Public Media. He edits the podcast Sold a Story, which has inspired 25 states (and counting) to pass laws related to reading instruction over the last three years. In 2022, he led a team of reporters from three news organizations to create the podcast Sent Away, and he reported for the first two seasons of In the Dark.
Kate Howard is an editorial director at the Center or Investigative Reporting, which is home to the Reveal podcast and Mother Jones magazine. She was managing editor at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, where she edited the Peabody-nominated podcast Dig, and spent nearly 14 years as a reporter before that. She is board member at Investigative Reporters and Editors and Louisville Public Media. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
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.
Manager meetup: Networking for investigative leaders
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Minnesota, sixth floor
Leading investigative journalists can be extra challenging, so let us help! Socialize, forge partnerships or find a support group at this NICAR25 meetup! Swap best practices, laugh at lessons learned along your journey and find out more about IRE’s upcoming management training initiatives!
This networking event takes place directly after the always-popular, slightly shorter, FREE “Managing Investigators” master class. You don’t have to attend the master class in order to stop by the meetup, though we welcome you to check it out! This networking session is for anyone managing (or aspiring to manage) investigators.
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 4, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
This panel brings together journalists and engineers who are leveraging AI to report groundbreaking stories, surface leads from troves of data, and bolster the integrity of their journalism. Panelists will discuss the shortcomings and risks of this rapidly evolving technology, as well as the opportunities for experimentation and how to responsibly incorporate AI in your newsroom. Attendees will leave with some guiding principles for using AI, some cautionary tales to help them avoid our mistakes, and some inspiration for how they can creatively incorporate these technologies to enhance their accountability reporting.
Speakers
Katlyn builds tools to help reporters take on ambitious stories.
Dana Chiueh is a news innovation engineer at the Minnesota Star Tribune. She has a background in data and investigative journalism, covering police misconduct and prisons.
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.
Ryan Sabalow is a digital democracy reporter for CalMatters. A graduate of Chico State University, he began his career covering local news for the Auburn Journal and The Record Searchlight. He was an investigative reporter at The Indianapolis Star. Before joining CalMatters, he primarily covered California water and environmental policy at The Sacramento Bee.
Connect: Facebook
Scraping without programming (repeat)
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's 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! This session is good for those comfortable with the basics of Google Sheets. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Expensive all-in-one research tools are attractive, especially if your newsroom has the money to pay for them — but what if it doesn’t? Or, what if you don’t want a tool to do your research and sell it back to you? In this panel, we’ll help you drop the subscription and find court records, search news archives and background businesses and people using your own elbow grease. We’ll show you why collecting your own datasets to do these tasks (and saving them over time) helps you more than relying on a tool not made for journalists or by journalists.
You’ll leave our panel confident that you can effectively research on your own and find support when you run into questions. Maybe you’ll even build a Lexis Nexis for your newsroom.
Speakers
Dillon Bergin is MuckRock's data reporter. He uses data and public records to power investigative reporting with partner newsrooms. He's also the director of the Data Liberation Project and hosts FOIAFriday, a monthly community podcast about all things public records.
Connect: Bluesky
Brandon Meyer is a visiting lecturer of journalism at the University of Florida where he built Florida Data, a state-centric public records warehouse used by more than 800 journalists around the state. Meyer also runs FreshTake.Vote, a popular Florida voter turnout tracker.
Connect: X
Teaching lessons from the JedR Academy
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Deer Lake, fourth floor (PC)
While there is a myriad of platforms and methods to teach people R, this hands-on session will showcase the benefits and challenges of interactive lessons using Quarto Live and the posit.cloud platform, which we've used to develop JedR Academy, a fun way to learn and practice data journalism in R with a Star Wars theme. Learn to build interactive lessons that run in a browser without a Shiny server.
This session is good for: Those who teach R or are interested in developing interactive tutorials with Quarto Live and posit.cloud. Laptops will be provided.
Instructors
Yasmin Garcia is a senior journalism and radio-television-film major at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently working as a student worker with El Paso Matters, covering the Texas Legislature and is an editorial Intern at Austin Woman Magazine. She has also worked for several student publications such as the Daily Texan, Cactus Yearbook and Burnt X Orange Magazine.
Christian McDonald is an associate professor of practice and the innovation director in the school of journalism and media at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches classes about data, coding and news products. His last newsroom position was as data and online projects editor at the Austin American-Statesman. In his 28 years in journalism, he also worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, East Valley (Arizona) Tribune and the Longview (Texas) News-Journal.
Connect: Bluesky, GitHub, GitHub (org), LinkedIn, Mastodon
I’m excited to start new projects and bring ideas to life from scratch. In my free time, I enjoy playing video games, watching sports and trying out new cooking recipes. I’m passionate about creating and love the process of turning something small into something special.
Using data to report on the housing crisis in your community
Time: Saturday, March 8, 4:45 – 5:45 p.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 3, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
NBC News created the Home Buyer Index to measure the difficulty potential homebuyers have in the housing market. In the months since, it’s led or accompanied more than a dozen stories, adding depth and meaning to our housing coverage. COme to this session to hear about about the steps NBC took to create this new metric, the obstacles they encountered, and what other newsrooms need to understand should they embark on creating their own metric, whether it’s about housing or anything else.
Speakers
Jasmine Cui is a reporter with NBC News. She uses numbers to engage our wide, wonderful world and make it easier to understand. She developed the NBC News Home Buyer Index, which measures housing market headwinds. Other topics of interest include artificial intelligence and climate.
Teghan Simonton is a data reporter for the business and health teams at the Tampa Bay Times, where she's written about housing, cost of living and public health. She joined the newsroom in 2023 after working as a research assistant for Investigative Reporters & Editors. When not writing words or code, she likes to bake, train for marathons (three, so far) and get lost in bookstores.
Camila is a communications specialist for the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. She’s interested in the impacts of substandard housing, who gets harmed by evictions and tenant organizing. Before joining the lab, Camila was the housing reporter for Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR) through Report for America. She covered housing policy with a social justice lens. Her work has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, PRX’s The World, NPR’s Here and Now and more.
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)
Public transit systems offer a treasure trove of data that can reveal vital insights into accessibility, equity, and efficiency. Together, we’ll learn how to harness the data that powers tools like Google Maps and explore how these datasets can be used to investigate service coverage, travel times, and on-time performance. Whether you're uncovering how well a city serves its residents or tracking disparities in service quality, this session will arm you with the skills to transform transit data into compelling stories. This session is good for: Those who are comfortable using R and working with spatial data.
Laptops will be provided
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
You've picked up some new skills, filled your brain with inspiration and your notebook with ideas, but now what? We'll give you some tips on how to take advantage of what you've learned, avoid letting your skills get rusty and even continue learning when you get back to your job. Bring your questions, too! We'll have lots of time for that.
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.
John Kelly is vice president of data journalism for CBS News, leading a team of data and investigative journalists reporting for the network's news programs such as CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes, as well as 14 owned local CBS Stations and cbsnews.com. He led similar teams previously for ABC News and USA Today.
Connect: LinkedIn
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: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
Description coming soon.
Instructor
Charles Minshew is the data storytelling editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, helping journalists tell stories with data and digital tools. Charles is the former director of data services for IRE. In 2012, Charles was on the staff of The Denver Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of a shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Election data to use after the election
Time: Sunday, March 9, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
For many news organizations, election data analysis ends on election night or soon after. But there are multiple types of election data produced in the weeks and months after the election ends, including cast vote records and voter history files. This session will demonstrate uses of them and ways that you can incorporate them into other types of reporting.
Speaker
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: Lafayette 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.
Laptops will be provided.
⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $40 to participate.
Instructors
James is a software engineer in the interactive news department of The New York Times, a team of technologists that creates tools used by reporters and editors to exceed the capabilities of the content management system.
Introduction to the command line (Macs) (repeat)
Time: Sunday, March 9, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Too often in data journalism we forget about the basics. And it doesn't get as basic as the command line. Even knowing a little will make your job easier. We will run through some simple commands, dive into working with spreadsheets and show you some handy tools he frequently uses at work.
This session is good for: People who feel intimidated by the command line on their computer, but want to explore the power of command line tools. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
R 1: Intro to R and RStudio (repeat)
Time: Sunday, March 9, 9 – 10 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Jump into data analysis with R, the powerful open-source programming language. In this class we’ll cover R fundamentals and learn our way around the RStudio interface for using R.
This session is good for: People with a basic understanding of data analysis who are ready to go beyond spreadsheets. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Destiny is an investigative journalist at the Flatwater Free Press, where she uses data to tell stories that matter to Nebraskans, often focusing on Indigenous affairs and environmental issues. She was previously a Roy W. Howard fellow at FFP, and got her master’s degree in journalism at the University of Maryland as a fellow of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.
Behind the story: Recovery Inc. – Using data to investigate the big business of addiction treatment
Time: Sunday, March 9, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage Ballroom 2, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Go behind the story with members of the team whose multi-year investigation into the business of addiction treatment has sparked reform laws, DOJ kickback and money laundering investigations, FBI raids, and fraud conspiracy indictments.
Speakers
Kelly Dietz is an Emmy award-winning investigative producer for KARE11, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis. Prior to that, she worked in Denver as a senior investigative producer. At her first TV market in Norfolk, Virginia, she founded the station's investigative unit.
Connect: LinkedIn
A.J. Lagoe is an investigative reporter for KARE 11 in Minneapolis. His reporting routinely leads to criminal convictions and legislative hearings, and has resulted in numerous new federal and state laws. A.J. is a two-time IRE Award winner and also the recipient of many of journalism’s other highest honors including the George Polk, along with multiple Peabody and duPont Columbia awards.
R 2: Data analysis and plotting (repeat)
Time: Sunday, March 9, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
We'll use the tidyverse packages dplyr and ggplot2, learning how to sort, filter, group, summarize, join, and visualize to identify trends in your data. If you want to combine SQL-like analysis and charting in a single pipeline, this session is for you.
This session is good for: People who have worked with data operations in SQL or Excel and would like to do the same in R and have some experience working with RStudio. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Using IF statements and VLOOKUP in Sheets
Time: Sunday, March 9, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
In this session, we'll help you take Google Sheets to another level, giving you some tools that are extremely helpful for data cleanup, restructuring and joining columns from another sheet.
This session is good for anyone comfortable with the basics of Google Sheets. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).
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.
When Excel doesn’t excel: Simple python for problem spreadsheets
Time: Sunday, March 9, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
Ever get a spreadsheet that's so big your computer struggles to even open the file, let alone start to sort, filter or pivot on it? Computer scripting can help you here, even if you’re not a programmer. In this session we’ll use Python to write some very basic scripts to make help make big datasets more manageable. No coding experience necessary.
Instructor
Tom Nehil is a newsroom developer at the Minnesota Star Tribune, using data and code to help find and tell stories. He enjoys using Python and Svelte, sometimes simultaneously.
Yes, you really CAN get high-res satellite images for free
Time: Sunday, March 9, 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. (1h)
Location: Grand Portage 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.
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s senior reporter and impact editor. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.
Connect: LinkedIn
Daniel Wolfe is a graphics reporter with the Washington Post.
Connect: Bluesky
Creating simple maps for publication with satellite images and other raster data sources
Time: Sunday, March 9, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: St. Croix I, sixth floor (Mac)
This hands-on session will show you how to recreate five inspiring maps with satellite images or raster data. We will cover example workflows for downloading satellite imagery, understanding the data contained in a geotiff, and adding annotations and design elements for publication.
This session is good for: people who feel comfortable with the basics of QGIS, and anyone who wants to learn more about using satellite imagery analysis in their stories. Attending the "Yes, you really CAN get high-res satellite images for free" panel beforehand is recommended. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
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: Grand Portage Ballroom 1, fourth floor
Session audio will be recorded.
Journalism is an ever-changing, ever-evolving industry and that goes doubly these days. Come to this session for discussion about what it means to be a journalist, how to carve out a path for yourself in the industry, and how to handle the trials and tribulations that come with this work.
Speaker
Teghan Simonton is a data reporter for the business and health teams at the Tampa Bay Times, where she's written about housing, cost of living and public health. She joined the newsroom in 2023 after working as a research assistant for Investigative Reporters & Editors. When not writing words or code, she likes to bake, train for marathons (three, so far) and get lost in bookstores.
Google Sheets: Advanced pivot tables (repeat)
Time: Sunday, March 9, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Gray's Bay, eighth floor (BYO)
You've done a few pivot tables and are getting curious about what more you could do with them. What happens if you aggregate by more than one column? What are those "column" and "filter" boxes for? Come unlock the full potential of pivot tables in this intermediate spreadsheet class.
This session is good for: People familiar with spreadsheets and aggregating data with pivot tables, or anyone who has taken Sheets 1-3. Laptops will be provided.
You will need a free Google account to participate.
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
R 3: Gathering and cleaning data (repeat)
Time: Sunday, March 9, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (1h)
Location: Spring Park Bay, eighth floor (PC)
Learn how to import a wide variety of files in R including spreadsheets, files on the web and HTML tables, and transform the results into usable data. This session will also focus on how to clean and structure the data you've gathered in preparation for analysis using tidyverse packages.
This session is good for: People who have some experience using R and the Tidyverse. Laptops will be provided.
Instructor
Amelia McNamara (she/her) is an associate professor of data science in the Department of Computer and Data Science at the University of St Thomas. Her research is at the intersection of statistics education and statistical computing. She loves doing data analysis, and she enjoys interacting with journalists. She will be on sabbatical the 2025-2026 school year, so reach out if you have a cool project.