IRE/NICAR has a new executive director, replacing Brant Houston who is now Knight Chair for Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Mark Horvit, projects editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas is moving into the job, conditional on becoming a faculty member at the University of Missouri, which hosts…
More and more news organizations are putting data online so readers can drill down to information relevant to them. I did it as part of a Hamilton Spectator series on restaurant safety in 2001, and it became the biggest traffic generator we had had to that point. Since then, organizations such as the CBC, Toronto Star and Edmonton…
Here’s a great example of the kind of enterprising story that can be brought to life with CAR, in any market. The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania gathered height and weight data on high school football players and found they just keep on growing horizontally. An important public health story resulted.
The Ontario Divisional Court has come down against media access to data held by the Toronto Police and the Provincial Weapons Enforcement Unit. Both decisions are based on fine slicing and dicing of the wording of the acts, and have profound implications for access in the province.On the bright side, an appeals court ruling on the…
Congratulations to Toronto Star reporter Jim Rankin, who along with a team at the paper, won the Online Journalism Award for service journalism. The award was presented at the Online News Association conference in Toronto in October. The paper won for Lost in Migration, a project about unscrupulous immigration consultants. As part of the investigation, reporters…
Ever wonder how often air bags fail in cars? So did the Kansas City Star, and the answer was, far too often. The paper looked at U.S. fatal crash data, but since so many cars are common, the story could easily be updated with Canadian data.Here’s how the first story began Oct. 20:Brooke Katz died…
Transport Canada has quietly posted a searchable version of its CADORS aviation database to its website. This is a huge change of course for the department after it spent four years keeping the same data out of public hands. Click for more.
CBC’s investigative unit is at it again with a series of stories on violence in Canada’s nursing homes. The stories started airing on Marketplace October 17, and continued on CBC Radio the following week. This is a murky subject that doesn’t usually get much press, but a critical concern for families of patients who have…
By Fred Vallance-JonesWhen I sat down to crunch the raw data from the third annual CNA FOI audit, I hoped against hope that I’d discover a marked improvement in performance by Canada’s federal, provincial and municipal governments. Alas, I was to be disappointed. The final numbers actually got worse. There’s a chill wind blowing over the public’s…