IRE Radio

In this episode of the IRE Radio Podcast, veteran reporter, editor and computer programmer Ben Welsh discusses his journalism career and how he got to where he is today. As founder of the Reuters News Applications Desk, where he is currently an editor, Welsh has gained a multitude of tips and tricks for data journalism. We explore his career advice and his personal website’s archive of data journa...

In this episode of the IRE Radio Podcast, two judges for the 2024 IRE Awards share a behind-the-scenes look at their committee’s selection process. Judges chose winners and finalists from a pool of 546 entries across 19 categories. IRE announced the contest results on April 16, 2025. Featured guests: Contest Committee Chair and Emmy-winner Walter Smith Randolph (executive producer of investigation...

In this episode of the IRE Radio Podcast, Bloomberg reporters Eric Fan and Zachary Mider take you inside the investigation that earned them the 2024 Phil Meyer Award. Their winning work, “How Thousands of Middlemen Are Gaming the H-1B Program,” (published July 31, 2024) explored new data developments that showed a pattern of certain staffing and outsourcing firms exploiting the U.S. H-1B visa lott...

“40 Acres and a Lie,” a collaborative investigation by Mother Jones, The Center for Public Integrity, PRX and Reveal, dives into unfulfilled promises to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. The investigation used artificial intelligence to unearth hidden documents from the Freedmen's Bureau, shedding light on the systemic failures and deliberate actions that prevented land redistribution...

On this episode, Francisco Vara-Orta — IRE’s director of diversity and inclusion — reads an excerpt from his Nieman Lab Predictions for Journalism 2025 piece titled, “The quest for diversity evolves.” In it, he conveys what he believes is the future of diversity, belonging, equity and inclusion in the journalism industry, and how we, as journalists, can continue to strive for inclusion in these co...

More than 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. reported having a disability in 2022, yet people with disabilities have long been underrepresented in news coverage and in newsrooms. To explore this topic — and related concerns facing the news industry — IRE’s 2024 AccessFest Conference featured a panel titled, “Supporting journalists with disabilities and improving disability coverage.”  In this episode of IR...

Although there has been a move to diversify journalism from the stories we tell to the people we interview, the sad reality is that not enough journalists prioritize disability coverage. As part of IRE’s virtual AccessFest conference in 2024, a group of distinguished disabled journalists discussed how to cover topics like climate change, mass incarceration, and poverty through the lens of disabili...

On this episode, host Nakylah Carter chats with Knight Election Hub’s Erica Peterson and Scott Klein. The hub — an initiative funded by the Knight Foundation — contains more than 100 free and discounted resources for reporters and editors covering elections. There are voter guides, data sets, source lists and other helpful tools to answer questions about candidates’ backgrounds, policies, election...

On this episode of the IRE Radio Podcast, host Nakylah Carter discovers how the Georgia Department of Corrections came to win the 2024 Golden Padlock Award for frequently and deliberately withholding public information. Guest Lois Norder, senior editor for investigations at The Atlanta Journal Constitution, explains her colleagues’ struggle to cover the government agency despite heavily redacted i...

On this episode, host Nakylah Carter chats with the 2024 Don Bolles Medal winner Eric Meyer, publisher of The Marion County Record. The Don Bolles Medal acknowledges investigative journalists who have “exhibited extraordinary courage in standing up against intimidation or efforts to suppress the truth about matters of public importance.” Victim to a police raid in August 2023, the newsroom of the...

In this episode, IRE editorial assistant Nakylah Carter tackles the topic of mass shootings and how one team changed the way some newsrooms report on them. In the spring of 2022, an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas was victim of a mass shooting, resulting in 21 lives lost – a massive tragedy for the community. The ABC News Investigative Unit, lead by Cindy Galli, decided it was time to stay. Uva...

On this special episode of the IRE Radio Podcast, IRE editorial assistant Nakylah Carter pulls from 2023 and 2024 NICAR Conference recordings to explore how Phil Meyer inspired countless reporters, students and colleagues. Meyer pioneered the field of computer-assisted reporting and introduced social sciences methods to newsrooms. His groundbreaking book, “Precision Journalism,” turned 50 years ol...

On this episode, IRE editorial assistant Nakylah Carter recaps “Separate and unequal: 5 must-have stories from the K-12 education beat,” a panel from IRE’s inaugural AccessFest 2023 conference, featuring two veteran journalists who cover education. Melissa Barragán Taboada is the editor of the Globe’s “Great Divide” education team, which examines inequities in education. Prior to coming to the Glo...

Police rely on alcohol breath tests to convict drunken drivers. But what happens when the machines they use aren’t reliable? Stacy Cowley of The New York Times looked into the problem of faulty breath test machines and found thousands of cases where the tests were thrown out. On this episode, Stacy breaks down how she discovered unreliable breath tests and the consequences they pose for real peopl...

Opioid addiction is a decades-long crisis that killed roughly 47,000 people in 2017 alone, largely due to the potency of fentanyl. But despite all the warning signs, Congress didn’t pass any legislation on opioids until 2016. On this week’s episode, we’ll hear how Katie Zezima of the Washington Post tracked inaction in Congress and visited a small town in rural Massachusetts to witness the consequ...

Investigative Reporters and Editors was formed in 1975, the year before Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was killed by a car bomb. He died days before he was scheduled to speak at IRE’s first annual conference. Now, decades after his death, the team at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com found tapes Bolles recorded before he was killed. On this special episode, we’re sharing the first insta...

On this bonus episode, we’re sharing audio from the 2016 IRE Conference. In a session on narrative storytelling, reporters T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong explain how they wrote their Pulitzer-winning story “An Unbelievable Story of Rape”. Their reporting is the basis of a new Netflix limited series called “Unbelievable". EPISODE NOTES: bit.ly/2PXWzLW

When protests rocked Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, few realized the tensions could be traced to a policy-based problem — local police were fining residents at abnormally high rates to fund the city’s operating budget. Mike Maciag of Governing Magazine spent a year looking into other communities reliant on fines. He found a trend that’s destabilizing governments in low-income communities across the...

When police kill civilians, the victims are often people of color. So, when Arizona Republic reporters Uriel Garcia and Bree Burkitt decided to investigate police shootings in their state, they knew their sources should be as diverse as their community. On this week’s episode, we’ll go behind the reporting to learn how they tallied police shootings, identified sources, and used data and documents...

On this week’s episode, we’re sharing audio from the 2019 CAR Conference. Reporters from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, Newsy, KUT Austin and ProPublica explained how they got data on “cleared” cases from more than 100 police departments across the country. The data showed police weren’t solving as many rape cases as they claimed. EPISODE NOTES: www.ire.org/archives/38358

On this special episode, students at the Missouri Investigative Journalism Workshop discuss their experiences at the weeklong summer program. Investigative Reporters & Editors supported the workshop, which was held at the Missouri School of Journalism. Corey Johnson of the Tampa Bay Times and Paula Lavigne of ESPN served as guest instructors. Host: Matthew O'Stricker of Woodward Academy (Georgia)...

Investigations today are full of data, documents and computer programming, but that wasn’t always the case. On this bonus episode, we’re sharing audio from the 2019 CAR Conference. Data journalism pioneer James B. Steele discusses his work with longtime reporting partner Donald L. Barlett. He also offers tips for finding stories and staying curious. EPISODE NOTES: www.ire.org/archives/37860

For decades, children passed through the doors of Catholic orphanages. Some never walked out. On this week’s episode, Christine Kenneally takes us behind her work investigating hidden abuses in orphanages around the world. Her BuzzFeed News investigation uncovered that dozens of children had died violently, their deaths covered up and lost to time. EPISODE NOTES: http://bit.ly/2ZJEXWH

Think about the last time you got a call, email or direct message from someone who wanted to share a crazy story. You might have thought there was no way what they were telling you could be true. That’s what happened to Brett Kelman, a reporter at the Tennessean. A tip about military health care fraud back in 2015 seemed too wild to be true — until it wasn’t. On this episode, Brett breaks down how...

On high school graduation day, the future looks bright, especially for Boston’s valedictorians. But as years pass, things come to look quite different for the city’s top students. A quarter of them didn’t finish college within six years. Many wanted to be doctors, and today, none of them are. On this episode, Meghan Irons and Malcolm Gay of the Boston Globe take us behind their investigation into...