Bits, Bytes and Barks
Membership Message
You can join IRE via our Web server, or you can download a copy of our membership form in Adobe Acrobat format from the Web site and submit it by fax to (573) 882-5431. For more information, check out http://www.ire.org/membership.html IRE Memberships are $40 for professional journalists and journalism educators, $25 for students and $55 for international journalists. For a detailed account of what IRE has to offer, contact the IRE main office at (573) 882-2042.
NICAR Net
Talk in never cheap on the IRE and NICAR listservs. A wealth of topical discussion awaits you. To subscribe to IRE-L or NICAR-I, send e-mail to listproc@lists.missouri.edu In the body of the message, type: subscribe NICAR-L<your name> subscribe IRE-L<your name> Also, check out the IRE-L and NICAR-L mailing list archives on our website at http://www.ire.org and http://www.nicar.org. You can see posts to both lists organized by thread, author and date. The list archives are available in html or in plain text format.
Moving on
IRE board member Shawn McIntosh has moved from The Dallas Morning News to become managing editor at The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss. If you have recently switched locales, let us know of your whereabouts.
Campaign Finance
Jack Dolan, director of the Campaign Finance Information Center, is continuing to update the CFIC Web site at http://www.campaignfinance.org. Campaign contribution data is now available from 6 states - Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. The data can be easily downloaded, and comparisons can be made by joining tables between the state files. CFIC hopes to enable such comparisons to be made online once common fields are established and standardized. CFIC's overriding goal is to acquire campaign contribution data from as many states as possible to allow national contribution patterns to be discerned. The CFIC Web site also has added new stories to its story library, links to related Web sites and the inaugural issue of the newsletter Tracker. To subscribe to the newly formed CFIC listserv, send an e-mail to majordomo@campaignfinance.org In the body of the message, type subscribe CFIC-L yourname <your e-mail address>.