Courses
← Home18 courses in Research & Reporting
REPORT-00The Reporter
Reporter 00: What a Beat Is
A beat is a territory you hold, not a story you are assigned. How to map one, how to listen in a community before you need anything from it, how to keep a source who has nothing for you today, and how to notice an emerging issue while it is still boring. The start of the Reporter track, written for people who already report.
Coming soonREPORT-01The Reporter
Reporter 01: Public Records
Asking for records, and what to do when they say no. Who is covered and who is not, what counts as a record, writing a request that cannot be misread, fees and the public-interest waiver, exemptions and the answer that refuses to say whether a record exists, reading a denial, and the appeal. Federal FOIA as the spine, Indiana as the worked example, and your own state as the homework.
Coming soonREPORT-02The Reporter
Reporter 02: Reading Somebody Else's Report
A beat reporter is handed reports constantly, and most of what goes wrong happens between the executive summary and the table underneath it. Worked end to end on one real 84-page document: who published it and what they do, an anatomy, a summary sentence chased back to its table, what a data definition changes, how to resolve an endnote, and a publisher that writes down its own limits. Sits directly on top of How to Read a Number.
Coming soonREPORT-03The Reporter
Reporter 03: Interviewing People Who Did Not Seek This
Talking to someone who did not choose to be in a story: what informed consent means when you are not a researcher, what trauma does to an account and why that is not lying, giving a source control over pace and order, minors and guardians and who is actually consenting, what you may promise, when to stop, and what you owe after publication. Written for reporters, not clinicians.
Coming soonREPORT-04The Reporter
Reporter 04: Verification on Deadline
What an hour actually buys. Breaking a claim into checkable pieces, finding the original rather than the copy, establishing source, date, location, and motivation, corroborating with something genuinely independent, and looking for the evidence that would prove you wrong. Ends where the track's whole argument lands: the decision not to publish, treated as a professional act rather than a failure.
Coming soonREPORT-05The Reporter
Reporter 05: The Law You Work Inside
A map, not legal advice. What a defamation claim actually requires and where the actual-malice standard came from, the four privacy torts and which one a reporter really meets, why how you gathered something is judged separately from what you published, recording consent, shield protections and their limits, publishing material somebody else obtained, and the specific moments to stop and call a lawyer. Federal law and leading cases as the spine, Indiana as the worked example, your own state as the homework.
Coming soonREPORT-06The Reporter
Reporter 06: Solutions Journalism, and What It Is Not
A method, not a mood. Rigorous reporting on responses to problems: the four qualities that define it, the two things it is constantly confused with, how to find a response worth reporting, what counts as evidence of results, why the limitations section is the part that makes it journalism, and how it sits beside accountability reporting on a working beat rather than replacing it.
Coming soonREPORT-07The Reporter
Reporter 07: The Pitch, and the Shapes a Story Can Take
How to pitch an enterprise project so an editor can say yes, and how to choose the form a story takes for a reason rather than a habit. The five parts of a pitch, what a refusal actually tells you, matching a shape to the question rather than to the material, and what a newsletter, a social-first piece, and a short video each demand that the others do not.
Coming soonREPORT-99The Reporter
Reporter 99: Capstone, Report the Beat
Run the whole method once, on a beat you choose. One records request filed and followed. One public data report read against its own tables. Two interviews conducted to the standard the track sets. One quick-turn story and one enterprise pitch. And a written note of what you could not confirm, which is the piece of work this capstone is actually graded on.
Coming soonRSRCH-00The Researcher
Research as a Job, Not a Mood
The difference between being curious and being paid. A brief you can be held to, a budget of hours, a negative result you can deliver, and a file somebody else can build on without calling you. The start of the Researcher track, for people who already know how to look things up.
Coming soonRSRCH-01The Researcher
Search Craft
Most people were never taught to search. This is the trade version: what a database actually indexes, why controlled vocabularies find what free text misses, how to read a failed search for information, and how to harvest the vocabulary of a field from the first document you find. The biggest speed multiplier in professional research.
Coming soonRSRCH-02The Researcher
Archives, and How a Collection Is Actually Organised
A library is arranged by subject so you can find a known thing. An archive is arranged by origin so you can understand an unknown thing in context, and searching one like the other is why capable researchers conclude a document does not exist. Finding aids, provenance and original order, the hierarchy from fonds to item, reading-room practice, and what a catalogue's silence means.
Coming soonRSRCH-03The Researcher
Tracing a Person Through Records
Nobody documented your subject. Institutions documented their own business, and the person appears as a by-product: in a census, a payroll, a deed, a docket, a passenger list. How to build a life from records made for other reasons, how to handle a name that changes spelling every time it is written, and what to do when the records were never made at all.
Coming soonRSRCH-04The Researcher
Fact-Checking as a Discipline
The checker's job, done properly: annotate every assertion, back-check each one to its actual source rather than to another article, grade what cannot be confirmed, and hand it back in a form the writer can act on. A defined role with a defined method, and the most directly hireable skill in the Researcher track.
Coming soonRSRCH-05The Researcher
Rights, Permissions and Clearances Research
Who owns this image, is it really free to use, what does the licence oblige you to do, and who do you write to. The research method behind clearing archival material, taught from the real refusals a working image project ran into: the public-domain tag that was wrong, the iconic photograph nobody can publish, and the difference between having the right and having the file.
Coming soonRSRCH-06The Researcher
Documents Against People
A record says one thing and a witness says another. The instinct is that paper wins, and it is wrong often enough to be dangerous. What a document can and cannot establish, what testimony can and cannot establish, why a confident document is more hazardous than a vague one, and a method for reporting a conflict you cannot resolve.
Coming soonRSRCH-07The Researcher
The Research File
The operations of handing work over: capturing a citation at the moment you find it, notes that survive a year, confidence grades applied consistently, the research memo that says what it all means, and a handover somebody can actually pick up. The course that turns everything you found into something usable by a stranger.
Coming soonRSRCH-99The Researcher
Capstone: Build a Handoff-Ready File
One subject, worked end to end, producing a file a stranger could pick up and continue. Scoping something you can actually finish, planning by institution rather than by hope, a mid-project checkpoint that catches the usual failure, a self-review against the handoff test, and the finished file as the first item in a portfolio.
Coming soon