{ "id": "1997-april-ire-gets-joyce-grant", "slug": "1997-april-ire-gets-joyce-grant", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-april-ire-gets-joyce-grant.html", "year": 1997, "month": "April", "monthNum": 4, "headline": "IRE gets Joyce grant", "kicker": "NICAR/IRE Notes", "author_name": "Brant Houston", "author_title": "Executive Director", "affiliation": "IRE and NICAR", "summary": "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.", "keywords": [ "campaign", "journalism", "database" ], "topics": [ "Government & Politics", "Data & Databases", "Journalism & Newsroom" ], "technologies": [ "Internet", "World Wide Web" ], "full_text": "IRE gets Joyce grant\n\nBy Brant Houston\nIRE Executive Director\n\nBy 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.\n\nIRE 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nAlthough 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nAs 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.\n\nIRE 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.\n\nWhile the grant is a large one, the new center is an ambitious project and we're hoping that we may get additional funds.\n\nNICAR 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nSome databases have already been created with the help of the Joyce Foundation.\n\nUp and coming\n\nWhile 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.\n\nWe will continue to offer our traditional basic one to two-day regional seminars, but we plan to add more seminars on particular topics.\n\nLate this summer we hope to focus on education reporting and databases at a three-day seminar in Philadelphia.\n\nWe also plan to offer workshops in other areas such as medicine, business, and managing CAR.\n\nIn addition, you will see more seminars that combine workshops on better reporting techniques that IRE has traditionally offered with NICAR's hands-on training.\n\nIf you are interested in helping host one of these seminars or have ideas about workshops, we should do, please email brant@ire.org\n\nMore CAR stories in Resource Center\n\nIRE's recent contest attracted dozens of new CAR stories and each of those has been indexed and catalogued in IRE's Resource Center. You can search the indexes by going to www.ire.org and choosing the resource center pages. From there you can search the indexes for new and old CAR stories by key words.\n\nHandouts from our computer conferences are also available as abstracts and sometimes in pdf format, which can be easily downloaded and printed out.\n\nA complete set of the handouts, is available through the IRE resource center for $75, including shipping.\n\nAlso, to order a set of abstracts from any of NICAR's national computer conferences, call the resource center at (573) 882-3364 or email Bruce Moores at bruce@nicar.org\n\nBrant Houston can be reached at (573) 882-0684, or email him at brant@nicar.org", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1999-october-political-coverage", "score": 0.34 }, { "slug": "1999-september-tipsheets-on-campaign-finance", "score": 0.296 }, { "slug": "2000-januaryfebruary-the-money-trail-tracking-campaign-cash", "score": 0.267 }, { "slug": "2003-novemberdecember-readmetxt-ire-tipsheets-on-campaign-finance", "score": 0.259 }, { "slug": "1999-januaryfebruary-searching-for-influence", "score": 0.251 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-april-ire-gets-joyce-grant.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-april-ire-gets-joyce-grant.json" }