Rural Computer-Assisted Reporting workshops start

Twelve journalists from five Appalachian states learned computer-assisted reporting or honed their basic CAR skills Oct. 21-23 at a workshop sponsored by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and Investigative Reporters and Editors. IRE provided the training at the workshop at East Tennessee State University, where journalism program director Andrew Dunn is the Institute's academic partner. It was the first of two Rural CAR workshops funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Daniel Gilbert, left, with Mike Owens at the workshop

The R-CAR program was started with a gift from Daniel Gilbert, a Wall Street Journal energy reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Bristol Herald Courier in 2010 with his reporting on state and energy-company mismanagement of pooled natural-gas royalties in Southwest Virginia. He donated his $10,000 prize from another contest, the Scripps Howard Awards, to the Institute's endowment to create a fund that sends journalists to IRE's six-day CAR boot camp, at which he learned the skills that enabled him to do the series. The Scripps Howard Foundation matched his gift, and the state of Kentucky matched both, creating a $40,000 fund that generates enough earnings to sponsor two journalists each year.

The Institute asked the foundation to fund two "mini-boot camps" for reporters in rural areas, the first one in the same area where Gilbert did his prize-winning work. The money flows through IRE, but the Institute will host a second R-CAR Mini-Boot Camp at its University of Kentucky headquarters in May 2012. (Read more)