So many CAR options
By Brant Houston IRE Executive Director
The optional computer-assisted reporting day of the National IRE Conference is coming up fast. The so-called optional day will be on Thursday, June 12, at The Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona and will offer about 20 panels and workshops. Some panels will be popular repeats from our NashCAR conference in March such as reporting on air, rail and car crashes. We will also have two-hour panels on special topics in which panelists will show attendees how to produce stories from education, health, and business databases. Other panels will be two to three hours long and broken into one-hour sessions. For example, Nora Paul of the Poynter Institute will lead a "training the trainers" program that will go from 9 a.m. to noon and be divided into three sections. Another two-part panel on using CAR at small to medium newspapers will be coordinated by reporters from smaller news organizations.
As usual at the national conference, NICAR will keep a demonstration room open from Thursday through Saturday for journalists to share techniques and talk about specific problems or stories. For the main program on Friday and Saturday, we have scheduled a series of exciting and ground breaking panels composed of award-winning journalists. Many of those panels will have CAR sprinkled throughout. And on Sunday the Poynter Institute will guide the program with a group of thoughtful sessions on writing and other topics. You can find information on the conference at www.ire.org both before and after it happens.
Indianapolis, March 19-22
Meanwhile, we are already planning for our next national CAR conference, which will be Indianapolis, March 19-22, 1998. This conference is a return to a city where IRE did two joint conferences with CAR pioneer and University of Indiana professor James Brown in the early 1990s.
We're happy that Jim has invited IRE and NICAR back to the university's campus in Indianapolis where there are great computer labs and lecture halls.
Please send us ideas and stories (as they emerge during the year) that you think should be subjects for panels and hands-on training in Indianapolis. You can e-mail them to brant@ire.org
Global = Local
As IRE and NICAR do more international work it's becoming clear to us that global is becoming local and the local is becoming global.
In Nashville, reporters from Iowa talked to Lise Olsen (the director of our reporting institute in Mexico City) about the effects of NAFTA on agriculture in the Midwest. Our panels on immigration looked at immigration's effects on the United States, Latin America and China.
Several IRE members have asked us to put together panels and handouts on global economics issues.
Colleagues in Mexico, Sweden and Denmark are sharing ideas and techniques as the Internet and Web browsers make international reporting easier.
One of our challenges in the coming year is to show how our programs for small to medium news outlets (print and broadcast) and for international journalists actually bolster each other.
One way we hope to meet that challenge is by holding a border seminar Nov. 14-16 this year along the Mexico and U.S. border for journalists from both countries. We expect that many of the journalists will be from smaller news organizations.
Coordinating coordinators
And speaking of our efforts for those organizations, IRE and NICAR are rejuvenating our regional coordinator system. We are looking for members to volunteer to be regional and state coordinators.
We are asking the volunteers to sign up more members, hold informal gatherings of local reporters, and eventually help us arrange workshops in every state over the next year or two. We believe this will keep IRE in touch with reporters no matter what size their organizations.
Cory de Vera, IRE's membership coordinator, is collecting the names of volunteers. You can e-mail her at cory@ire.org or call (573) 882-2042.