For 20 years, an obscure Virginia regulatory board has forced thousands of landowners to lease their mineral rights to private energy corporations.

Daniel Gilbert is a reporter for the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier.

New Jersey residents have long lived under a broken property tax system that has more in common with feudal states than the United States. Nearly half of our $47 billion in tax revenue comes from property taxes — which are based on the government's perceived value of a person's home rather than what he or she actually earns.

The average property tax in 2008: $7,045, or about 11 percent of the median household income. It's about four times higher than the national average, and higher than what the average worker pays in Social Security and Medicare taxes, combined.

Paul D’Ambrosio is Investigations Editor for the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press. He has been involved with computer-assisted reporting for 20 years. Paul and his team have shared the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, the Farfel Prize, APME and national Headliner public service awards, and two dozen other national honors.

In February, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, designed to stimulate the economy by injecting $787 billion into the nation’s infrastructure and tax relief programs. Getting a handle on that spending has proved a challenge.

Jake Kreinberg is a freshman at the University of Missouri, where he works with Investigative Reporters and Editors as a Discovery Fellow.

California's Board of Registered Nursing oversees more licensees, some 350,000, than any state nursing agency in the country. It is responsible for ensuring that nurses at patients' bedsides are not only competent, but sober, sane and law-abiding. So when we became suspicious that the board was fumbling its duties, leaving members of the public at risk, we wanted to ground our reporting in more than anecdotes, although those were rich and plentiful. Figuring out how to do this proved both time-consuming and hugely rewarding.

Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein are senior reporters at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization in New York. Prior to joining ProPublica, they were investigative reporters for the Los Angeles Times.

Maloy Moore, senior librarian at the Los Angeles Times, has spent the last decade teaming with reporters on breaking daily stories and the paper's most prominent investigative projects.

It started by reading the Oregon school report card — and grew into a Statesman Journal investigation on how poverty, race and teacher placement are linked to student achievement in the Salem-Keizer School District.

One school stood out as the only one to earn a "low" rating among all elementary schools in the state: Hallman Elementary School, a 450-student school in northeast Salem.

Mackenzie Ryan is the education reporter at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., where she writes about the second largest school district in the state. She joined IRE while investigating train derailments for the St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, a project that won multiple awards. It was the first time she used a database to investigate an issue, and she was hooked.

It’s almost a tradition in Washington. If you’ve got some bad news to release, put it out on a Friday and hope it gets no more than a for-the-record story that many will overlook.

That’s not to say the Federal Aviation Administration was hoping for an under-the-radar reception when it released its database of aircraft wildlife strikes on a Friday morning in April. Still, the difficulties of doing a substantial story on a Friday, when many in the government are getting ready to leave town, were there nonetheless.

Robert Benincasa is a producer for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., and a lecturer for Georgetown University’s Master of Professional Studies program in journalism.

If you're reading the news these days, then you don't have to turn too many pages in a newspaper or follow too many links on a Web site to run into a story about the federal stimulus package.Also known as the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, the stimulus has been a hot topic since President Barack Obama introduced it to the country days after taking office.

With an estimated $787 billion allocated for the recovery act, everyone has been asking, "Where is the money going?"

Elizabeth Lucas is a master’s student at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she is studying public policy reporting.

Often in computer-assisted reporting we can envision the perfect database to answer the burning questions of our days. We see what it should contain and how it should be constructed. We even visualize what our results will show.

More often than not, what data we find have, shall we say, challenges. And someone may have collected them for a purpose other than what we intend.

Such is the case of the dataset from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, otherwise known to CAR journalists as HMDA.

David Donald is data editor at The Center for Public Integrity and a former IRE training director.

Every day, cities buy land to make way for parks, streets, sewer lines and flood plains. It’s often more than they need.

Sometimes they buy full lots in fairness to property owners who may not have use for the leftovers and sometimes they buy excess to prepare for future growth.

In some cases, cities buy swaths of land for projects that may never happen.

All these transactions can add up to hundreds of millions dollars worth of unused land, including worthless patches along highways and large plots of “conservation” land that developers covet.

Brent D. Wistrom is city hall reporter for The Wichita Eagle, where he routinely works on investigations and special projects.

I drive by an elementary school on my way to work every day. More than once there’s been a police cruiser idling in the school’s parking lot with lights flashing and the officer standing nearby.

Although those incidents never involved a major crime, on several occasions this year the Tulsa World has chronicled arrests at schools.

Gavin Off is the data editor at the Tulsa World in Oklahoma and a former analyst for the IRE and NICAR Database Library.