Inside ‘Coachella for Journalists’

All told, there were 430 speakers and 210 sessions over four days. (Fifteen Times staff members spoke about their work.) The sessions covered such topics as improving investigative interviews, writing compelling narratives and mining data on websites.

Despite IRE’s growing membership, there continue to be calls to increase diversity in the organization. “It was definitely very white, and it was just reflective of what our industry looks like, unfortunately,” said Carlos Ballesteros, who is participating in a yearlong Report for America fellowship at The Chicago Sun-Times and is Latino. “Hopefully we will see more journalists of color next year in Houston.”

IRE organizers have been working to attract more minority journalists to the conference through fellowships and other efforts, Mr. Haddix, the executive director, said. “We’ve decided part of our mission is to help broaden the base of journalists of color who have the skills to do investigative reporting,” he said.

For those who attend, IRE can be a valuable resource and reporters often find senior colleagues are happy to offer support. “When I was younger and I was just starting out, there was so much I didn’t know, and there was so much I needed to learn,” said Ellen Gabler, an investigative reporter at The Times, “and all these really great experienced journalists willing to explain it to me and spend time with me.”

At one of her first IRE conferences, when she worked for The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, Ms. Gabler met the Times correspondent Ron Nixon and pumped him for information about Small Business Association loans. After she returned from the conference, she sent Mr. Nixon an email with some questions about the loan data. Within minutes of sending the message, her phone rang. “He just got on the phone and was like, ‘All right Ellen, this is what you need to know.’”

Melissa Gomez, a reporting intern at The Times, was in the front row for Mr. Baquet and Mr. Baron’s panel.

“People tend to think both papers are at each other’s throats,” Ms. Gomez said. “It was nice to see these are two of the top editors in the U.S. and to see they were united and stood together in terms of holding the values. For me as a young journalist, it is just proof that journalism will still be around a long time.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/pageoneplus/investigative-reporting-newspapers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss