Schedule

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.

Level: Beginner

Learn how newsrooms get important information out of large volumes of documents (pdfs, audio transcripts) and vet the results to power reporting.

Level: Beginner

Around the world, shadowy firms are siphoning location data from apps, telecom networks, and rogue brokers to track people with chilling precision. Whether it’s journalists, Silicon Valley executives, or visitors to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, no one is off-limits. This panel brings together journalists who have exposed how invisible surveillance infrastructure is being used to follow people worldwide—and how little stands in the way. The journalists will explain how they uncovered these stories, how they obtained covert datasets through techniques ranging from identifying misconfigured cloud storage buckets to scouring undocumented APIs. They’ll break down how journalists can use data to expose the inner workings of the shadowy tracking systems and offer practical methods for investigating the rapidly expanding global surveillance industry.

Level: Beginner

Learn how to find and use personal financial and economic interest disclosures to report on candidates and elected officials in every state. We’ll demo digging into two state systems, share collaborative datasets available to participants and a comprehensive tipsheet on what data is available in each state in 2026, and run through tips on how to track changes and new filings. Reporters with basic Python skills will be able to follow along, but all attendees can benefit from the discussion of open data and workflow-building using these public documents. Participants will leave better prepared and kitted out to do strong accountability reporting on candidates and incumbents in significant elections across the country in 2026. We'll also discuss how these records can be used for deeper investigations into business connections, real estate, environmental issues and more.

Level: Intermediate

"If you build it - they will come": Many local reporters might not have the time and/or knowledge to incorporate data skills to their work. So how do you get into thinking and then doing data journalism? This session will include examples and ideas on where to start and how to work to raise awareness about data and how to use it. 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.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

College sports have changed faster in the past five years than in the previous five decades. Join us as we break down the changes in college athletics and look at what’s coming, all of which makes accurate data critical, especially financial data. We’ll walk through the college finance data, explain new categories available and how to use them (and how not to). We’ll also discuss how journalists can secure information about athlete name, image, and likeness deals obtained via Freedom of Information requests. Panelists will also explore current and emerging financial trends in the industry, highlighting issues that journalists across the country should be monitoring, including the $1B in severance paid to get coaches NOT to coach. We'll cover rising student fees, challenges to equity, and new athlete revenue-sharing payments. The panelists will also discuss other stories of interest in the future of college sports, including the prospect of Congressional intervention and the possibility that college athletes become employees. This panel is especially suitable for college students or anyone looking for college sports data and trying to navigate the new rules.

Level: Beginner

In this introduction to spreadsheets, you'll begin analyzing data with Excel, a simple but powerful tool. You'll learn how to enter data, navigate spreadsheets and conduct simple calculations like sum, average and median. This class will be taught on PC computers. This session is good for: Data beginners. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

In this session, you'll learn how to use Visualping, an AI website change detection tool, to automatically monitor and get instant alerts for important changes to any websites you need to track for your beat, whether it's local court dockets, government agency websites, a politician's social media pages, or something else. We'll walk through setting up a Visualping alert, using different features and settings, and tips for using Visualping's AI criteria and summary features. Attendees are welcome to sign up for a free Visualping account at visualping.io to follow along.

Level: Beginner

Join Ben Welsh and Andrew Briz to learn how journalists use large-language models to organize and analyze massive datasets. This three-hour, hands-on class will give you hands-on experience creating a machine-learning model that can read and categorize the text recorded in newsworthy datasets. It will teach you how to: - Submit large-language model prompts with the Python programming language- Write structured prompts that can classify text into predefined categories- Submit dozens of prompts at once as part of an automated routine- Evaluate results using a rigorous, scientific approach- Improve results by training the model with rules and examples By the end, you will understand how LLM classifiers can outperform traditional machine-learning methods with significantly less code. And you will be ready to write a classifier on your own.

Level: Intermediate

In this session, Mike Reilley of JournalistsToolbox.ai will show you the latest and greatest AI and other free software tools for data journalists. We'll work with datasets and use AI tools to analyze and visualize them. We'll explore weaknesses, flaws and ethical issues with tools. We'll also work with a few multimedia tools as well. This session is good for beginners. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

This hands-on workshop will teach journalists basic programming concepts using the Python programming 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.

Level: Intermediate

You've finished your FOIAs. You've done the data analysis. You've talked with experts. Now you're ready to put your story together. There's just one problem. You haven't yet spoken to the people who are impacted by the findings found in your research. In this panel, journalists from across the media landscape talk about ways they've found people who are impacted by the topics they were covering and/or data they were researching. Plus, once you've found the people, how do you convince them to go on the record? The panelists are here to answer your questions and talk about how they centered their stories around the people they found.

Level: Beginner

A session that shows participants a variety of tools and tricks for investigating Telegram chats and channels. Telegram is a primary source for a lot of newsworthy activity: militias in armed conflicts around the world, neo-Nazi terror organizations, illicit markets, etc. Telegram also has a very open and accessible API, which makes fetching and working with their data easier than many other social media platforms. But there's a lot of features of and knowledge about Telegram that often isn't always apparent, which can cause pitfalls for journalists and researchers who aren't familiar with it.

Level: Beginner

The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income nation, with stark differences within the U.S. along racial and geographic lines. Early evidence suggests that system shocks like Covid and state-level abortion bans may have made pregnancy and childbirth even more dangerous. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has slashed public health initiatives, altered childhood vaccine schedules and gutted many federal data collection projects, including those focusing on maternal and infant health outcomes. This panel will explore the ways we can use available data to report on maternal and infant health, and discuss ways we can continue this work at the state, regional and national level despite the loss of some federal data sources.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Intermediate

Learn how to explore, clean and reshape data using OpenRefine, a versatile tool that great for data novices and power users alike. This session is good for people with some basic experience working with data. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

The issues we cover in education reporting are wide-ranging – from who manages our education institutions, to how students perform, to how colleges are funded. 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! You must bring your own laptop (no tablets) to participate.

Level: Beginner

Much of Excel's 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 class will be taught on PC computers. This session is good for: Anyone who is comfortable navigating Excel. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

Data sets and public records offer critical context for coverage of immigration enforcement actions taking place in communities across the country, but it’s often difficult to know where to look for this information or how to respond when access is denied. This session will provide practical tips for journalists on how to obtain data and records for reporting on immigration issues, and the resources available to push for greater transparency when necessary.

Level: Intermediate

The SLAPP Back Initiative: Building a first-of-its-kind databaseHave you considered building a database of your own but are not sure where to start? Join lead researcher Susanna Granieri of The SLAPP Back Initiative, a first-of-its-kind database tracking strategic lawsuits against public participation, meritless and frivolous actions used to chill speech and deter scrutiny. In this demo session, Susanna will outline the team's steps from inception to launch: What research tools were used? How was the methodology developed? How did they interrogate the data and bulletproof their findings? What questions have they answered, and what questions remain? She'll also show you how, as the database grows, it can help empower your journalism, identifying common offenders and frequent targets in your state.

Level: Beginner

Data can provide context, show trends, and debunk false claims. But journalists don't always recognize its power to elevate even the more traditional parts of reporting. Data analysis can help you find human sources (often with names and contact information in the spreadsheet itself). It can also help you pinpoint where to go for field reporting. We'll explore all these possibilities in this panel with a handful of examples you can take back to your newsroom.

Level: Beginner

ChatGPT, widely misunderstood and in some cases misused, can be a powerful tool to improve efficiency in our day-to-day work. Give ChatGPT a few rows of publicly available data and ask it to write a data dictionary. We'll use ChatGPT to help write a public records request for us, have it help us make sense of data and we'll even use it to write a Python script to reshape unruly Excel data. The best part? You don't need to know Python to write this code. This session is good for everyone. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).

Level: Beginner

A new election cycle means a brand new open source tool for parsing the Federal Election Commission's custom .fec file format! This year `libfec` has been released, a new toolkit that parses FEC files even faster than pre-existing tools, and uses the FEC's API to find the filings for the exact candidate, election, or PAC that you care about. This class will go over how to use libfec in a midterm election year — finding all individual donors for all candidates in a House or Senate race, seeing where campaigns spend their money, and tracking down Super PACs that fuel outside spending in a newsroom's district. Along the way participants will learn how to use libfec to source all this data, including how to export data into CSV, SQLite, or JSON for further analysis or data visualizations. Participants should have a basic knowledge of using the command line. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Intermediate

This panel will discuss how to investigate the environmental and social impacts of new data centers being built in the US. Panelists will present strategies for revealing hidden costs of the data center boom, exploring how data centers strain resources and reshape rural communities, particularly in drought-stricken and farming regions.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Intermediate

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.

Level: Intermediate

Things are tough right now for international journalists and students who want to work in the US and need visas. We face challenges 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!

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

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 class will be taught on PC computers. This session is good for: Anyone familiar with formulas, sorting and filtering in Excel or another spreadsheet program. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Intermediate

Learn design tips for polishing your graphics to tell clear and compelling stories. This session will involve participatory discussion where we review example charts and maps as a group, covering design challenges like focusing the user’s attention, making complex data understandable, and using non-standard chart types. This session is good for: People who create graphics and are interested in learning how to improve their design. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

Searching for relevant evidence for a story through a never-ending pile of documents, legal forms, contracts, emails, videos, or cell phone data can be taxing and time-consuming, even for the best investigative teams out there. The team at Everlaw will demonstrate their tools to help with automatic transcription of audio and video (think bodycam footage, depositions, interview recordings), making documents text-searchable through optical character recognition, file management tools (like search, labeling, AI summaries), analysis tools (like data viz and topic clustering), and story-building tools (drafting, citations, and AI writing assistance). They'll show how newsrooms like the San Francisco Chronicle, ProPublica and Fast Company uncover key information using their tool. You'll also learn about Everlaw’s free offering for journalists, which includes unlimited users, training and support at no extra cost.

Level: Beginner

Make some new friends over lunch! Show up and we'll connect you with other folks who want to chat and network over the lunch break -- a great way to make a big conference feel smaller.

Level: Beginner

The housing crisis is touching communities of every size — not just coastal cities or low‑income renters. In this session, we’ll walk through practical data tools, sources, and reporting techniques to cover affordable housing challenges, evictions, and homelessness. Whether you’re new to the beat, jumping on a fast-moving daily story, or looking to deepen your expertise, you’ll learn accessible methods for finding, analyzing, and localizing housing data to produce clearer, more impactful reporting.

Level: Beginner

AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning ... what do these terms really mean, and what is the difference? Many journalists are still grappling with an explosion of buzzwords and concepts. This session aims to demystify the jargon and provide a clear, practical explanation of key AI terms and tools.

Level: Beginner

There’s a lot of publicly available sports data. How can you use those sources to build new datasets and tell compelling stories about what’s happening off the field? Learn how to quantify trends and debunk myths by leveling up your ability to scrape popular sports data websites, then analyze that data in creative ways. Attendees will come away from this hands-on session with experience scraping and analyzing data from the website Sports Reference, which maintains data for all the major sports, plus a better understanding of basic web-scraping concepts. Attendees should have some familiarity with R and RStudio. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Intermediate

Explore the Python libraries for the MuckRock Requests and DocumentCloud APIs and how they can be used with large language models (LLMs) to streamline records requests assist in analyzing responsive documents. Participants will also be introduced to llm-documentcloud, a plugin for LLM command-line tool/Python library that enables feeding documents for analysis in various LLMs for analysis. The session will cover strategies for crafting clearer, more effective public records requests, as well as techniques for summarizing, organizing, and extracting data and insights from responsive documents. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own projects, ideas, and questions for exploration. This session is good for those with some Python experience. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Intermediate

A hands-on walkthrough of an entire network visualization workflow. Starting with processing the data, converting it into a network format, laying it out in Gephi, and visualizing it using one of several visualization libraries (Holoviews, Sigma.js, Cosmograph, etc). While discussing different choices throughout the process (aggregation, layout algorithm, filtering, etc.) and their impact on the visualization. This session is good for those with experience working with data and visualization libraries. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Advanced

n/a

Level: Beginner

Forget murder, robbery and burglary. Do you know how many ATM thefts your local police logged last year? Or carjackings? Or stalking cases? Most police agencies now log a wealth of detail on 58 crimes via the National Incident-Based Reporting. Learn how to get started using this invaluable but complicated data.

Level: Intermediate

Political influence is getting harder and harder to track, but the Lobbying Disclosure Act Reports helps cut through some of the noise. With LobbyR, researchers, journalists, and others can easily access, clean, and visualize a much more comprehensive version of federal lobbying disclosures to understand what companies, groups and other interests are asking Congress and the administration for. In this session, you’ll learn how just a few lines of R code will allow you to query, summarize, and plot real-world lobbying transparency data, enabling rapid insights and automated workflows. And there's no complex setup required. If you want to ask questions like “who lobbied on issue X in the last five years?”, or “how many dollars did registrant Y report?”, or “are there clients/registrants filing that overlap?”, LobbyR makes this work programmatic, reproducible, and transparent. Participants should have a basic knowledge of R. Laptops will be provided. Participants should pre-register for an API key through this link.

Level: Intermediate

The new IRE Resource Center is here! Members can now access an enhanced, user-friendly search interface with more opportunities to easily surface thousands of tipsheets, contest entries and other training materials. In this session, the volunteers who built the app will demonstrate its new features, talk about how it was made and solicit live feedback from the audience.

Level: Beginner

Tracking government spending has never been more convoluted. In the last year, DOGE took a “chainsaw” to federal contracts and grants, entire departments canceled awards en masse, and award recipients lost faith in the federal government as a financial partner. In the midst of it all, reporters do have public tools to dig through what some might see as a trail of chaos. In this session, we will break down two specific data resources any reporter needs to follow federal money: USA Spending and Sam.gov. Whether reporters are interested in funds from a specific federal department, funds going to a specific county, or even funds meant to achieve a specific purpose, this session will cover what is knowable, how to know it, and how to fact-check it. Panelists 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 all levels of experience. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

As the next generation of journalists enters the field at a time when the Committee to Protect Journalists has warned that “press freedom in the United States is under siege,” we explore how student reporters are navigating that threatening climate on and off campus. We hear from student journalists whose universities have encroached on editorial independence or withdrawn institutional support. We also hear from a student journalist who was arrested and convicted for doing his job. As the industry reckons with this reality on a broad scale, we speak with a senior reporter at the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker and invite all in attendance to join us in a conversation as we ask: How can we best support our student colleagues under such conditions?

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Advanced

We're the hiring managers who've seen it all: the 11-page resumes, the glamorized headshots in applicant packages, the ones that come with a reference letter from Mom. We also know what we're looking for when we get your materials, and we're ready to spill out secrets. Come ask us anything, about resumes, cover letters, interviewing, etc. Participants should walk away with an actionable tipsheet of ideas and ways to improve their job searching techniques and give their materials a boost.

Level: Beginner

R is great for quick data exploration, visualization and spatial analysis. But did you know you can extract text from images, send customized emails and chat with PDFs all without ever leaving the cozy comfort of R? In this session, we'll zip through a few lesser-known or relatively new R packages for working with large language models, media and databases. Though pitched at intermediate users interested in getting more mileage out of R, this demo will also give beginners a taste of what's possible. As a bonus, we'll invite attendees to complete a short survey sharing some of the unexpected ways they use R in their newsrooms and circulate the results in a tip sheet after the session. This session is good for people with some experience working with R. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Intermediate

As newsrooms shrink more journalists are collaborating with academics, nonprofit organizations and other groups for investigations. While collaborating allows us to do work we couldn’t otherwise, they also come with specific challenges. What do you do when stakeholders want different things? Or when one team isn’t able to deliver what was promised?

Level: Beginner

Are you a data-oriented reporter working at a public radio station? Interested in presenting findings from a data-driven investigation on a podcast or talk show? This session will debunk the common saying heard in many public radio newsrooms that "numbers and radio don't mix." This panel will provide practical tips on how to effectively present data-driven reporting in different audio mediums, ranging from long-form podcasts to short-form newscasts. It'll also be a open forum for discussing how reporters have found creative ways to put data journalism on air.

Level: Intermediate

This session will introduce journalists to using R to ingest large numbers of lawsuits, transcripts, news articles and similar material and to discover story leads through content analysis methods. Journalists will learn the benefits and drawbacks of sentiment analysis, keyword in context text retrievals, language dependency parsing, and extraction of top two- and three-word phrases. These tools in R's tidytext package can help reporters discover themes and tips in large groups of documents that otherwise could do undetected. This session is good for those with some experience using R. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Intermediate

Do you use React to create interactives, or are you interested in solidifying your knowledge of component-based javascript libraries? Join this hands-on session to nail down the basics of mapping, filtering, state values, useEffects and other confounding concepts. This session is good for those with some experience using JavaScript. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Intermediate

Thanks to recent FOIA lawsuits and the efforts of organizations like The Marshall Project, The Data Liberation Project, Behind Bars Data Project, and Mapping Police Violence, data on deaths in custody is more accessible than ever. This panel will guide reporters on how to find and use this data to investigate deaths in prisons, jails, and police custody. Attendees will learn about what data is available, what's missing from the data, and how the data can reveal problematic patterns in trends in the local law enforcement agencies.

Level: Beginner

Learn how to run powerful language models like Llama, Mistral, and Gemma directly on your own computer. This hands-on session covers the basics of local LLM deployment using LM Studio, hardware requirements (spoiler: you don't need a supercomputer), and practical reporting applications. We'll discuss the trade-offs between local and cloud-based models, explore use cases where local models excel, and demonstrate workflows for integrating LLMs into your reporting toolkit. This session is good for beginners and anyone who wants to learn to run LLMs locally. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Intermediate

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.

Level: Beginner

Level: Beginner

In investigative journalism, data often provides the core evidence to hold powerful actors accountable — proving wrongdoing, harm or scale. But how can you know what data tools and skills you’ll need when you start an investigation? This session will break down the basic structure of a data investigation, outlining a few frameworks for how data provides that proof. We won’t focus on specific tools — the best tool for the job will be different for every story. Instead, we’ll practice how to think about using data to strengthen an investigation, so that you know exactly what questions you want data to answer before you spend time finding and analyzing it. This session will include audience participation and is well-suited to early career journalists or anyone seeking to get more comfortable with thinking and planning for data-based investigative reporting.

Level: Beginner

n/a

Level: Intermediate

Want an automatic digest of news on your beat or what your city council has been up to? Get pinged on Slack with a summary when an editor takes a pass at your story? All without touching a line of code? In this session we'll learn to use no-code AI pipeline tools like n8n and ActivePieces to automate journalistic processes. Learn what agents and pipelines are, what they do, and the bevy of vocabulary and technical terms you'll need to put your own workflows to... work! - What APIs are and how they can supercharge your workflow- Schedule monthly, weekly, or hourly automatic processes- How to set up and use webhooks to trigger actions- Differences between providers and models- Unraveling technical settings like temperature and structured output Participants will learn the fundamental basics of how no-code AI pipeline tools work and integrate with other services, and will be well-prepared to start exploring on their own. This session is good for people with some experience working with data. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Intermediate

In this demo, we will go over a range of free or cheap scraping tools that reporters can use to scrape websites without programming. Some of those include Chrome extensions— Instant Data Scraper and WebScraper— as well as scraping with Google sheets. This session is good for beginners. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this demo class.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

Led by California and New York, states across the U.S. have begun adopting laws to give the public access to police accountability data, including use-of-force and discipline records. But what’s available varies by state, and there are no central repositories for tracking problem police officers (and some agencies fail to access what is available). In addition, laws that are intended to make sure problem police never work in law enforcement again are riddled with inconsistent application. This panel will take a deeper look at the documents and data across the country, and the stories reporters have done in multiple states to illuminate what has previously been shielded from the public. We dig into how we went about forming news/university/private partnerships to report on unevenly enforced police discipline, and how you could execute a similar project with the data and documents in your state. This panel was planned in conjunction with "Utilizing new police misconduct and employment databases," scheduled for Friday at 9:00 a.m. This panel will focus on changing laws, data partnerships and developing stories; the next panel will give specific how-tos using available data.

Level: Beginner

Level: Beginner

Newsroom archives hold decades of reporting. They represent thousands of sources, events and institutional knowledge built over the years. And yet they’re incredibly unwieldy and difficult to leverage. How many of you search your own newsroom’s archives through Google? In this panel, we'll walk you through how we built Subline, an end-to-end system that extracts knowledge graphs from newsroom archives. We’ll demonstrate how it supports smarter archive search, article link prediction, multi-step investigative queries, and better reader-facing recommendations.

Level: Beginner

Reconnect with longtime friends and make some new NICAR connections. The reception includes a ticket for a complimentary drink and light appetizers will be available. We hope to see you there!

Level: Beginner

Join fellow NICAR attendees for an evening of games, puzzles, etc. IRE provides the board games, you provide the fun! Feel free to grab a snack and a beverage from the reception or from the hotel and join the fun.

Level: Beginner

If you signed up for the conference mentor program, come meet your match at this invitation-only breakfast.

Level: Beginner

Learn about using new, groundbreaking databases to track police misconduct and employment histories: the Police Records Access Project in California, ACLU of West Virginia/Dragline's Police Accountability Dashboard, the New York Police Disciplinary Records database, and the National Police Index. This hands-on session will also briefly cover other related police data projects around the country. This session is good for those with some experience using spreadsheets. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

This session centers around the tools used for three recent stories involving video analysis. The reporting subjects include a deep dive into political podcasters in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election and linking the advertisers propping up right-wing influencers. Through these case studies we will highlight tools to archive videos, inspect metadata, analyze transcripts, map guest networks, and detect text and objects in video. Come learn some new tools for your next investigation!

Level: Beginner

This session will explore tools to create scrapers and structured data from websites with the help of LLMs. Scraping data off the web is not new for journalists, but what about when the data is spread out across hundreds of websites in dozens of formats? Writing and maintaining fleets of scrapers may have previously required a team of data journalists, but new methods allow us to use LLMs to analyze the structure of a website and automatically generate a working scraper. This means we can pursue stories involving more ambitious data collection on deadline. In this session, we will demonstrate a package we built at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism called “Scraper Factory,” which uses LLMs to write Python scrapers. We will discuss stories where we have used this approach and solicit input from the community on best practices and innovations with these new methods. This session is good for those who have a familiarity of the command line, basic scraping skills, and are wanting to work in Python. Laptops will be provided. You will need a GitHub account to participate.

Level: Advanced

From asylum case outcomes at your city's immigration court to detention figures at the ICE holding facility a couple counties over, there's no shortage of data that can help you tell local stories on the sprawling immigration beat. The trouble is the data are often scattered, inconsistent and come with lots of caveats. Hear from reporters who've used data to tell stories about how immigration policies coming out of Washington are impacting residents in their communities.

Level: Beginner

As AI tools move into daily reporting, the real challenge isn't keeping up with the hype, it's the editing. How do we verify AI-assisted analysis, track prompts, and communicate uncertainty? This session treats AI like any other source: trackable, fallible and accountable. Panelists will walk through how editors and data teams can build AI fact-check workflows. Everything from seeding editor-reporter conversations about AI use to increase disclosure to auditing LLM outputs, logging human verification steps and sign-offs before publication. We'll share real newsroom examples where AI summarizing, classifying or lead generation went wrong and how editing workflows caught (or missed!) the errors. The goal is to turn abstract "AI ethics" into everyday editorial practice that builds trust in AI-assisted journalism. What does real AI accountability look like in journalism and how can editors make it part of their everyday workflow?

Level: Intermediate

Every year, the federal government collects and publishes information about millions of home mortgage loan applications across the country: The places they're coming from, the people submitting them and the financial institutions accepting — or denying — them. In this session, you'll learn:- What Home Mortgage Disclosure act data is, what it includes and why it's collected- How The Banner used HMDA data to identify a newly popular, poorly regulated loan product and report on a foreclosure crisis in Baltimore + other questions HMDA data can answer - The R code you need to answer those questions! Folks with an understanding of basics (filtering, sorting, grouping and joining) in R will get the most out of this session. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Intermediate

The most exciting new A.I. tools don't involve chatbots. We all have big documents and datasets. Sometimes we think we know approximately what's inside — but we just need to find it. In this session, we'll show you five more technical ways that A.I. can be used to supercharge the investigative process. We will demo semantic search for text, spreadsheets and images; embedding and clustering; and identifying visual objects in media — all in tools you can use yourself to solve real journalistic problems, without having to endure ChatGPT's excessive use of em-dashes and its other limitations.

Level: Intermediate

Adam Marton and Jerry Zremski demonstrate how they develop the Local News Network's signature online voter guides -- including the one they're working on now, which will cover every Maryland General Assembly primary this year. Using the combined power of Datasette and SvelteKit, the voter guide starts as a simple google spreadsheet before being transformed into a powerful dynamic website. Jerry will talk about the editorial efforts behind the voter guide and the resulting journalism and Adam will discuss the nuts and bolts of development (including code that attendees can use to build their own site).

Level: Intermediate

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.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

The CDC's PLACES dataset provides small-area estimates of health outcomes, risk behaviors, statuses, and health-related social needs. These estimates are available at the county, place, census tract, and zip level across the United States, making PLACES a powerful tool for understanding and responding to local health trends. In this session, you will learn how to navigate the CDC's ArcGIS Online public gallery, search for and bookmark PLACES data layers, add those layers directly to an ArcGIS Online Map Viewer, and use basic visualization and filtering tools to uncover a local public health story from the data. This session is ideal for anyone new to ArcGIS Online who wants to start using spatial data to ask better questions, identify patterns, and tell more compelling public health stories. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

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 NICAR26: We’ll tailor portions of this course for people who may be navigating AI and also offer details on IRE’s new Managers of Color cohort. 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.

Level: Intermediate

Join fellow conference attendees for a hands-on community service project that turns compassion into action. In this drop-in volunteer experience, participants will work together to create no-sew, tied fleece blankets for animals at IndyHumane, helping provide comfort to pets as they await their forever homes. In addition, attendees will write encouraging cards for patients at the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis, offering messages of gratitude, care and support to those who have served. No prior experience is needed, so just bring your willingness to help and connect. This is a meaningful opportunity to step away from sessions, collaborate with colleagues, and make a positive local impact during the conference.

Level: Beginner

Learn about the Gun Violence Data Hub, an initiative from The Trace, and how to use the data to report deeper and better stories in your own community. The Data Hub provides resources for newsrooms to bolster their U.S. gun violence knowledge, as well as an open data library of contextualized and well-documented datasets. This session is good for those with some experience using spreadsheets. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

Imagine a version of ggplot that is 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! Attendees will 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 own 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. Attendees should have some familiarity with R and RStudio. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Intermediate

As trade and tariffs become an increasingly relevant issue, this session will demo a free (but very unintuitive) tool from the U.S. Census: USA Trade! USA Trade has comprehensive, district-level data (with lots of hidden gems) that can be useful for data journalists across beats, especially those relating to global economics, trade, tech, and foreign policy. This session will demonstrate how to use USA Trade and discuss some ways to understand and use the data in your reporting. This session is good for everyone interested in learning more about trade stats. No data experience is necessary! Attendees will need to bring their own laptops (preferably no tablets) for the training.

Level: Beginner

Come to this session for a crash course in some of the issues to consider when meeting basic accessibility requirements for digital news. Panelists will discuss topics including color accessibility, alt text, mouseless navigation, and more.

Level: Beginner

Tools like facial recognition, red-light/speed cameras and crowd-counting have long been the territory of locked-up, super-secret algorithms from private industry and government. But no longer! Learn how to use open-source tools like the Python library supervision and open-source models to unlock real-world analysis abilities. Automate analysis of almost everything – from satellite imagery to TikTok videos – and unlock levels of small-team investigation that were impossible just a few years ago. Learn how AI can sort through images and video to help you wrangle footage from protests and riots (NYT), analyze trends on TikTok (Washington Post), keep an eye on your local school board meetings (Hearst), measure the effects of congestion pricing (Bloomberg), 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.

Level: Intermediate

This training provides a deep dive into the psychology of persuasion so that reporters can increase their odds in getting record custodians to cough up data, reluctant sources to talk, and editors to support their projects. Tips will be research-based and help attendees learn the power of the mind. Note: Use these strategies for good, not evil!

Level: Beginner

A conversation about how to find and vet credible data sources that you can use right away.

Level: Beginner

From offshore accounts to complex layers of companies, this session will show you how to follow it across borders and back again, using public data available to any journalist. This session will show practical ways to trace hidden owners, foreign ties, and influence networks using public records and open data. Attendees will learn proven methods to follow the money, connect global disclosures, and turn complex data trails into clear, high-impact stories.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Intermediate

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.

Level: Beginner

Data journalists have a unique opportunity to reach skeptical audiences who would otherwise reject established scientific facts. Let's highlight some journalistic endeavors to persuade and engage skeptical communities through innovative ways of presenting and explaining data.

Level: Beginner

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 with some spreadsheets experience. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

There's an interesting "alt" social media platform called pilled.net, which is popular in the conspiracy theory community. It has an API that's straightforward to engineer, and it has only about 1 million posts. So it's possible to fairly easily create a scraper, then scrape and analyze the entire platform. The sessions will show how to reverse engineer a social media platform's APIs, how to implement a scraper in Python, how to use the scraper to collect all the data, and then a few high-level analyses that can be done on the data. This session is good for those with some working with Python. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Advanced

This panel will cover the basics you need to understand about crypto to start covering it, including how it works, what is the blockchain, where to find data and where to find experts. We'll put a heavy emphasis on prediction markets, the Trump family's crypto businesses and finding local stories.

Level: Beginner

There's a good nonprofit story waiting to be written on every reporting beat and in every coverage area, if you know where to look. This session will teach you how to navigate the world of nonprofit data and documents. To gain tax-exempt status, organizations like hospitals, charter schools, colleges and humane societies must agree to report annual information on their finances, compensation of key personnel, conflicts of interest and more. If you know how to cut through the accounting language to find what you're looking for, these annual filings — and other documents generated by a nonprofit — can answer questions big and small and add useful context to your reporting.

Level: Beginner

Are you a student journalist who wishes they had a clearer roadmap for getting started with accountability journalism? Let's talk about open records laws, data analysis, tools and what's available to you, even if you're at a private institution. This session is great for total beginners or those looking for story ideas.

Level: Beginner

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. Laptops will be provided, or you can bring your own (no tablets). You will need a free Google account to participate.

Level: Intermediate

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.

Level: Beginner

Leading investigative journalists can be extra challenging, so let us help! Socialize, forge partnerships or find a support group at this NICAR26 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.

Level: Beginner

In this session, we will walk through some stories published by The Minnesota Star Tribune during ICE's unprecedented immigration crackdown and share some tips, data and resources for preparing timely data analysis of federal deportation activities in your state. This session is good for beginners. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Intermediate

You've got the hang of why you should be doing basic accessibility, but do you know what to do when it's time to put it into practice? In this interactive, hands-on session, we'll teach you how to write alt text, then challenge you with photos, infographics and maps right in the session. Whether or not you've attended the panel, Accessibility Basics, this session will be fun and educational. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

With AI taking on a role in nearly everyone’s lives, whether it’s simple interactions through platforms they already use or fully built systems, it’s time for you to level up your data collection practices with AI as well. In this session, we’ll review traditional data collection and explore automation to create dashboards that let your readers and viewers explore topics.

Level: Intermediate

Make some new friends over lunch! Show up and we'll connect you with other folks who want to chat and network over the lunch break -- a great way to make a big conference feel smaller.

Level: Beginner

Are you a member of one of IRE's new student chapters? Interested in starting one on your campus? Or just want to find other students to hang with during lunch? Grab your lunch and bring it with you to our student chapter meetup! Members from IRE's student chapters will share ideas for getting organized and planning successful programming. We'll discuss what's been working, what hasn't, and any hurdles you're facing to getting started!

As journalists, we spend years learning how to navigate data of all kinds and keep our investigations on track. Now students can ask an LLM to write their code or summarize a dataset in seconds... and get something back that looks right. Or let generative AI drive their assumptions about data without doing enough reporting. So how do we actually teach these foundational skills? While there's no finished playbook for this yet (or even consensus within individual schools or journalism departments), this panel will work through classroom strategies that let you use AI tools without short-circuiting critical thinking. We'll also get into which concerns about AI are real problems and which are overblown, plus where it might genuinely help students learn. You'll walk away with things to try in your next class, whether it's a new course or a curricular refresh.

Level: Beginner

Anthropic released Skills in October - a new mechanism for adding capabilities to AI agent tools such as Claude Code. Skills have a wide range of applications in data reporting. A skill is a Markdown file that explains to the coding agent how to achieve a task. It might explain how to connect to a database, or provide preferred patterns for building front-end components, or how to obtain and process US Census data, or common mistakes to avoid when reporting on jobs report. NICAR already has a strong culture of tipsheets. A skill is just a tipsheet with an AI agent as its intended audience! This session is good for those with some familiarity with coding agent tools, such as Claude Code. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Advanced

"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! Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

Analysis of large text datasets can be difficult, and finding story ideas can be even harder, especially when you’re not sure what you’re looking for. This session teaches you to explore large sets of documents using semantic maps—visual clusters with similar documents grouped together in a two-dimensional chart. Users will learn how to convert text documents into embeddings, visualize them in two dimensions, and explore the data for insights by applying filters by keyword or time period. Applications include: parsing FOIA responses, tracking similar legislative language, or finding new areas of concern in school board comments. Participants will leave with the ability to map and cluster a sample of text data with provided code. This session is good for those with some Python experience. Laptops will be provided. You will need a GitHub account to participate.

Level: Intermediate

Accessing openly published maps and models from the latest research has never been easier through platforms like Google Earth Engine (GEE), enabling journalists to expose systemic patterns of environmental harm at scale—including those not already captured in government statistics—while honing in on, based on data, the most salient case studies for detailed ground reporting. In this session, you will learn how to access the forest change dataset powering Global Forest Watch for free through GEE with just one line of code. You’ll then quantify changes to forests in a local area and, most importantly, analyze this remotely sensed data together with detailed local data to illuminate impacts of environmental change on communities. This session is good for those with some experience working with geospatial data. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Intermediate

The Post collaborated with 1,100 readers to create a unique dataset of TikTok watch histories -- which they used to investigate political content, the app's addictiveness, and how the algorithm favors certain kinds of content over others. They also published the first Map of TikTok that hasn't been published yet but will hopefully break the internet. We'll discuss this project from beginning to end, including participant recruitment, secure/private data processing, and technical hurdles to digging into a giant dataset.

Level: Beginner

Learn best practices for thinking about simple data visualizations to help tell your story – plus, a peek at some free tools!

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Intermediate

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.

Level: Intermediate

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.

Level: Beginner

Level up your reporting with Gemini. This session focuses on key features like Deep Research for multi-step investigations, Custom Gems for scalable tasks, and Canvas for interactive drafting. Plus, discover how Gemini in Pinpoint enhances your research across large document sets.

Level: Intermediate

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.

Level: Advanced

Level: Beginner

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. This session is good for people with basic experience working with data. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets).

Level: Beginner

Geographic data can do more than make pretty maps—it can help you find stories. In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to use Geopandas, a Python tool that lets you work with location data just like you work with spreadsheets. We’ll focus on how to ask and answer reporting questions with geographic data: Which neighborhoods have the most potholes? Which schools are near industrial sites? Where do service gaps overlap? You’ll learn how to combine and compare different datasets, look for patterns and boundaries, and measure what’s happening where. We’ll also look briefly at how to show your results on a map, but the main goal is to help you use location data for analysis—not just visualization. This session is good for people with experience working with Python. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Intermediate

Writing Python scripts to extract data from PDFs is always a nightmare - misshapen tables, arbitrary form formatting, tiny text or low-quality scanned texts. Your champion is here in the form of Natural PDF, a new Python library for wrangling data that's focused on usability and cramming in as many features as possible. Write your code just like you'd ask "real-language" questions: - "Find the bold text that ends with a colon and get the text to the right of it"- "Show me all pages that include diagrams"- "Ignore everything above the thick horizontal line" Natural PDF also comes bundled with all sorts of modern AI-based magic: - Categorize pages or entire PDFs by text or vision models- Use powerful layout analysis engines to recognize images, tables, headers, and paragraphs- Multilingual OCR powered by multiple engines + LLM-correcting integration Participants will leave with a solid understanding of how to extract data from difficult (and simple) PDFs using Python. This session is good for those with some experience working with Python. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Advanced

This session will focus on how to scrape data from public websites in breaking news and quick-turn situations. Use a tool like ChatGPT to help you quickly understand a website's structure and API calls to get data fast. This session is good for beginners. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

In this session, we will demo Cheatsheet, an internal tool developed at The New York Times that has helped in the reporting process for dozens of breaking news and investigative stories. Cheatsheet is a smart spreadsheet application that makes it quick and easy to analyze large datasets, document dumps and media collections at scale using A.I. systems. Cheatsheet gives reporters the ability to quickly find needles in large haystacks using recipes such as A.I. classification, translation, summarization, quote extraction and web search.

Level: Intermediate

Take your Datawrapper skills to the next level. This session will cover advanced features and techniques to make your visualizations more powerful, polished and interactive. Learn how to customize design themes and use advanced chart types to communicate complex data clearly and creatively. Some basic HTML knowledge is preferred, but not necessary. Laptops will be provided.

Level: Beginner

The Data-Driven Reporting Project was founded to support newsrooms who might otherwise lack the tools, training or capacity to do more technically-focused investigative reporting. These are often smaller newsrooms with fewer resources. This in-person panel discussion at NICAR will show examples of how journalists, who have received support from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, are navigating complex and data-driven stories on small and underserved communities. Speakers will share stories and how they problem-solved connecting with the people behind the data. Good for beginners.

Level: Beginner

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.

Level: Intermediate

A data deep dive into the 2025 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.

Level: Beginner

This session will empower you to use data from the National Transportation Safety Board to investigative major railway accidents and overlooked safety recommendations. You'll gain practical skills to identify your own local stories on railway safety. Some spreadsheets experience will be useful for this session. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

In this session, learn how to get exactly what you want from government agencies, in the format you want it in, and with all the fields you want. This hands-on session is great for beginners and anyone who wants to polish their FOIA skills. Attendees will need to bring their own laptop (no tablets) to participate in this class.

Level: Beginner

Level: Beginner

Sometimes you don't need 45 minutes to explain a useful technique or interesting resource. Join your colleagues for a session of short (5-minute) talks about doing data journalism, web development and related topics.

Level: Beginner

Join fellow NICAR attendees for an evening of games, puzzles, etc. IRE provides the board games, you provide the fun! Feel free to grab a snack and a beverage from the reception or from the hotel and join the fun.

Level: Beginner

Celebrate the Philip Meyer Award winners at a reception to honor them. Light appetizers and a drink ticket will be provided.

Level: Beginner