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.

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.

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.

I was warned prior to IRE and NICAR’s CAR Boot Camp that many attendees leave feeling overwhelmed.

And at the end of the five-day class in Minneapolis in early October, I felt … overwhelmed.

Gregg Hennigan covers local government out of the Iowa City office of The Gazette.

Long-held conventional wisdom maintains that some college athletes take jock majors with less-demanding courses, more sympathetic professors and easier grades. Recent changes by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to improve academic standards among athletes, however, may be encouraging athletes to cluster into certain majors. But no one – not even the NCAA – was clear about how much clustering actually went on at the nation's top athletic schools.

Jodi Upton is the database editor for sports at USA Today
Steve Berkowitz is the sports projects editor at USA Today.

It didn't take long to detect doctors' broad disdain for insurers. In interview after interview, doctors expressed frustration that their treatment decisions are repeatedly dictated by insurance companies, sometimes harming their patients.

Steve Eder is an investigative reporter with The (Toledo, Ohio) Blade.

It seemed like such a simple request: My editor would be on vacation, but while he was gone maybe I could look at the federal contracts database and do an easy story about defense spending in the area in recent years. That “easy story” quickly turned into a 12-part series.

More importantly for journalists, it turned into a series that was important, timely and easy to do.

Dan Stockman is projects reporter for The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Ind.

In the fall of 2007 my wife became pregnant with our first child. Like many expectant parents, one of the first things we began worrying about was daycare.

There is an acute shortage of child care services in Canada. Often the only way to get your child in to one is to get your name on their waiting list as soon as you get pregnant.

But when it came time decide which daycare to apply to, it was hard to choose.

Government lists showed us which daycares were near our home, but we had no way of knowing which facilities had a history of problems.

Chad Skelton is a reporter with The Vancouver (B.C.) Sun. Contact him at CSkelton@png.canwest.com.

In March, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court published new rules in a legal publication directing state courts to omit more information from their public records including birth dates, addresses, work history, status as a crime victim and medical and financial details.

The action came after other court records and proceedings were being moved out of public view, including one that involved a state legislator attempting to keep his divorce proceedings closed.

Ginnie Graham is a projects writer at Tulsa World in Tulsa, Okla.