NICAR has taken its show on the road. In addition to its week-long seminars held at the University of Missouri, NICAR is offering on-site training for news organizations throughout the country.
NICAR kicked off its traveling program in the great white north with one-day training programs for the Alaska Press Club, the Juneau Press Club and the Anchorage Daily News in April. We've also conducted training overviews for a regional conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and the Kansas City Star.
Our next stops include Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento with more penciled on our calendar, including appearances in Philadelphia, Nashville, Atlanta, and Evansville.
The on-site training ranges from a basic overview on computer-assisted reporting to hands-on training for a variety of software, including databases, spreadsheets, and statistics. The program can be tailored to your specific training needs. The cost of the program depends on its complexity and whether we provide hands-on training. Smaller news organizations or associations may pool resources to bring a seminar to their area.
For those of you in warmer climates, please consider having NICAR visit November through March as we are not yet used to Missouri winters.
For more information about our on-site training programs, call NICAR training director, Jennifer LaFleur at (314) 882-0684.
Data library and analysis
With the arrival of two number-crunching computers, new storage devices, and a CD writer, NICAR is ready to do data analysis and serious slicing and dicing of data for news organizations, large and small.
For a small fee, we can download data from a nine-track tape, carve out just the information you need, and send it to you on diskettes. We also can help with data analysis and technical problems. At the same time, we already are collecting data and increasing the catalog of information we have. Give us a call if you think we may have the data you need. If we don't, we may be able to acquire it inexpensively and get you the information quickly.
Advanced seminars
NICAR is starting to develop advanced seminars. We are hoping to offer one in early August and are considering covering how to use statistics for news stories, mapping, advanced cleaning of data, and some basic programming. Please let us know what you think is needed for such a course.