{
  "id": "2001-mayjune-ire-awards-car-winners",
  "slug": "2001-mayjune-ire-awards-car-winners",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-mayjune-ire-awards-car-winners.html",
  "year": 2001,
  "month": "May/June",
  "monthNum": 5,
  "headline": "IRE AWARDS CAR winners",
  "kicker": "IRE AWARDS",
  "author_name": "",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "IRE",
  "summary": "Several IRE Award winners used computer-assisted reporting techniques including databases, mapping software, and data analysis to investigate stories ranging from insurance company practices to legislative conflicts of interest across multiple news organizations.",
  "keywords": [
    "databases",
    "investigations",
    "journalism"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Journalism & Newsroom",
    "Data & Databases"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "ArcView"
  ],
  "full_text": "Several winners and finalists in this year's IRE Awards used computer-assisted reporting as a key part of their investigations. Two of those stories that won certificates, \"The Body Brokers\" by The Orange County Register, and \"Treading on Danger?\" by KHOU-TV in Houston, are featured in this issue [see pages twelve and eighteen].\n\nOther certificate winners: MEDIUM NEWSPAPERS: \"Detroit Fire Department: Out of service,\" The Detroit News, by Melvin Claxton and Charles Hurt. The reporters documented irresponsibility and incompetence in the Detroit Fire Department, outlining myriad flaws - malfunctioning fire trucks, broken hydrants, closed stations - that contributed to deaths. They built databases off paper records that included dispatch tickets, run books, maintenance sheets, out-of-service reports and daily attendance records from each firehouse. IRE Resource Center story #16983.\n\nNETWORK TELEVISION: \"The Paper Chase,\" Dateline NBC, by John Larson, Lynne Dale, Allan Maraynes, Neal Shapiro, Andy Lehren and Mable Chan. Dateline's investigation documented how insurance companies used people with no medical training to write up reports that routinely denied patient claims after accidents. Data work included creating databases of internal company documents and medical reports, obtained from confidential sources. They used ArcView to analyze maps of State Farm district and regional offices. A free-text base was used to look for patterns in paper documents. IRE Story #17394.\n\nONLINE: \"Our Private Legislatures - Public Service, Personal Gain,\" Center for Public Integrity, by Diane Renzulli, Meleah Rush, John Dunbar, Alex Knott, Robert Moore and Ken Vogel. The Center for Public Integrity investigated conflicts of interest involving legislatures in all 50 states. It found more than 20 percent of state legislators sat on committees charged with regulating the legislators' professional or business interests. They built a database from financial disclosure statements for more than 7,000 lawmakers, and another database of employers of state-registered lobbyists. IRE #17325.\n\nSTUDENT: \"Cycle of Influence: How Campaign Contributions, Lobbyist Spending and Personal Financial Interests Affect the WV Legislature,\" Charleston Gazette/University of Missouri, by Scott M. Finn. The report showed through many different windows how personal and business conflicts affect legislation in West Virginia. For the data work, he used databases of personal financial interests of state legislators, West Virginia lobbyist spending, state lobbyists and their employers, and campaign contributions to state legislators. IRE story #17208.\n\nThe full list of winners and videostreamed excerpts of television category winners are available at www.ire.org/history/pr/2000winners.html",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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      "slug": "2003-may-june-car-fuels-tv-other-division-winners",
      "score": 0.391
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-mayjune-ire-awards-car-winners.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2001-mayjune-ire-awards-car-winners.json"
}