Sessions

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

I'm excited. I'm working all weekend to complete stuff before I hop on a plane for Philadelphia Tuesday morning (two days before you can possibly read this).

I'm going to be disconnected from Nevada during the wrap-ups and analysis of this legislative session. I was amazed at what the governor pulled out of the most conservative Nevada Legislature in memory. A large percentage of Republican legislators showed themselves to be hypocrites, absolutely betraying the people who put them in office—the very people who voted down the margins tax in large numbers. I truly do not believe liberal types could have had a better session if Democrats had swept the offices back in November. And we owe it all to those dogmacrats who showed such shining examples of how not to govern. And since adding businesses to existing taxes will not be new taxes—thus getting around Jim Gibbons' two-thirds idiocy—we're potentially seeing a new dawn in Carson City.

But I'm missing it for an awesome reason. I'm headed to the annual Investigative Reporters & Editors conference. I've only been to one before, and it was great. My trip is paid for by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, in conjunction with my project EncuentrosMortales.org, which is a side project of FatalEncounters.org. Fatal Encounters is my project that tracks officer-involved shootings nationwide.

I intend to focus on coding and visualizations. I signed up to learn Tableau, a software primarily used by business and journalism to make complex statistics visually digestible. I've played with it a bit in the past, but I hope this will allow me to move from middle amateur to low pro. We'll see.

This is very geeky reporting stuff: “Finding Money Stories in Census Data”; “How reporters can use data to identify ‘positive deviants' and add fresh angles to investigative stories”; and “Geolocation for investigations.” I'm sure if I took 30 more seconds I could find a half-dozen that would further horrify most reporters I know.