IRE gets Joyce grant — Uplink Archive

IRE received a $342,000 grant from the Joyce Foundation to create an online Campaign Finance Information Center that will serve as a repository of federal, state, and municipal campaign finance databases with training resources for journalists. The center will initially focus on the Great Lakes region and begin operations in early fall at the Missouri School of Journalism.

IRE gets Joyce grant

By Brant Houston IRE Executive Director

By this time next year, there should be a new center on campaign financing open at the headquarters of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.

IRE has just received the first half of a $342,000 two-year grant from the Joyce Foundation to create and operate the on-line Campaign Finance Information Center.

The center will serve as a repository of federal, state, and municipal databases on campaign contributions and spending. The center will also keep other related public records and offer training to journalists both on-line and at seminars.

Although IRE Envisions a nationwide archive, the initial effort with the Joyce Foundation's funds will concentrate on the Great Lakes region, which includes the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin.

The center will collect the databases of campaign finances and make them easy to use and search on the Internet. The center will not be in the business of doing data entry.

In addition to this electronic data repository the center will offer links to other pertinent Web sites, provide on-line tutorials to teach reporters how to access, analyze and work with campaign data, and publish a newsletter on the subject.

As usual, IRE and NICAR will coordinate its work with other campaign finance study groups to prevent duplication of efforts and to expand the number of resources available.

IRE and NICAR expect the center to begin operations in the early fall once staff and equipment are in place in the offices at the Missouri School of Journalism.

While the grant is a large one, the new center is an ambitious project and we're hoping that we may get additional funds.

NICAR already has an extensive database library of government information, including campaign information that will become a part of the center's archives. The center hopes to collect databases of state and municipal campaign reports that have been created by news organizations and other groups.

The Joyce Foundation is a private foundation based in Chicago with assets of $650 million. Its Money and Politics Program supports efforts to reform the campaign finance system to reduce the influence of special interest and enhance the public's participation in elections.

Some databases have already been created with the help of the Joyce Foundation.

Up and coming

While we gear up for the creation of the new center on campaign finance, we're working hard to keep our on-the-road training program up to date and useful.

We will continue to offer our traditional basic one to two-day regional seminars, but we plan to add more seminars on particular topics.

Late this summer we hope to focus on education reporting and databases at a three-day seminar in Philadelphia.

We also plan to offer workshops in other areas such as medicine, business, and managing CAR.

In addition, you will see more seminars that combine workshops on better reporting techniques that IRE has traditionally offered with NICAR's hands-on training.

If you are interested in helping host one of these seminars or have ideas about workshops, we should do, please email brant@ire.org