As the new year starts, we want to share news on the latest happenings at NICAR and Investigative Reporters & Editors.

New training director

Sarah Cohen, recently of The St. Petersburg Times, becomes NICAR's newest training director. Sarah starts her new job this month and already is scheduled to travel to California and Pennsylvania.

Sarah will be telecommuting from her home in Maryland, following the lead of the previous training director, Neil Reisner, who worked out of his New Jersey home. (Neil begins working at the Miami Herald late this month.)

At The St. Petersburg Times, Sarah worked as a business reporter using computer-assisted reporting extensively. Before that she worked at the Tampa Tribune.

Sarah switched to journalism in 1992 after working as an economist, primarily at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This means Sarah brings a wonderful amount of knowledge of numbers and stats to the job. We hope that Sarah will not only do training, but also will analyze some data for news organizations.

Sarah a journalism master's degree from the University of Maryland's journalism school and a bachelor's degree in economics from University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, both schools at which NICAR has jointly done seminars.

NashCAR

The schedule for panels at NashCAR, March 6-9, in Nashville, Tenn. (register through IRE, 573-882-2042 or on our Web site www.nicar.org/nashcar) is included in this issue. Panelists and instructors are being chosen as this is being written - look for them in the next issue of Uplink. As usual, we plan to cover a wide range of topics with some of the best CAR journalists in the country. Among the panelists and instructors will be CAR guru Philip Meyer, author of "The New Precision Journalism"; Shawn McIntosh, who heads CAR at the Dallas Morning News; training expert Jennifer LaFleur, now database editor at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News and NICAR's first training director; Paul Adrian of WBNS-TV in Columbus, Ohio; Neill Borowski of The Philadelphia (Pa.) Inquirer, David Milliron, head of CAR for Gannett News Service; Bill Casey of the Washington Post; Brad Goldstein of The St. Petersburg Times; Bob Port of Associated Press; Tom Gaumer of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and a host of others from newspapers and TV stations, including some of the newer names in CAR.

At this point, the computer situation in NashCAR looks awesome. We will rent some computers for the hotel, but Vanderbilt University has generously loaned several computer labs containing about 140 computers with Internet connections for the conference.

In addition to panels and three classes of hands-on training, we will have a mentor program in which you can get your worked critiqued, a demonstration room for software, the Internet and Intranets, a section for vendors and rooms for impromptu meetings and brainstorming.

IRE membership

If you use NICAR services, then becoming an IRE member can save you or your news organization more money than ever. Uplink will cost $40 for members, instead of $60 for nonmembers. Data from the database library will cost $10 more for nonmembers. Requests for articles from the IRE Resource Center - articles which often show you how to best use data from the database library - will cost more for nonmembers. If you become an IRE member you also will get the six issues of the IRE Journal free and numerous other IRE services.

Web activities

Our Web site (homepage: www.reporter.org) continues to expand and improve. We hope to have new designs for our pages up and running in mid-February. Wallace Winfrey, our Web administrator, and other staff members are hard at working putting more handouts and other educational material on the site.

We also will have a demonstration soon of a clickable map where you can choose a state and get a list of investigative reporters in that state. We also are making better use of Lotus Notes and Microsoft's SQL server. More on this later. Brant Houston can be reached at (573) 882-0684, or send e-mail to brant@nicar.org