Earlier this week, two of our staffers -- Jennifer Peebles and  Lee Ann O'Neal -- returned from the CAR Conference in Indianapolis put on by the group Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc..

CAR stands for "computer-assisted reporting," and I was thrilled they were able to go. They came back jazzed about what they had learned and energized to implement those skills. Journalism training like this is important for any reporter, but for us at Texas Watchdog it helps us doubly: We will use those skills to beef-up our investigative and enterprise journalism, of course, but as part of our mission we also help bloggers, citizen-journalists and reporters at small papers boost their original reporting. This training will help us with that even more.

So what do you learn at a CAR conference? Just some of topics include computer mapping, better Internet searching, the syndication of Twitter feeds, resources for researching the stimulus, bank bailouts and lots of tricks concerning how to crunch database numbers.

I am especially grateful that Lee Ann was able to attend because she was awarded a Philip L. Graham Diversity Fellowship. This minority fellowship program was established by the Philip L. Graham Fund (named for the former Washington Post publisher) and Investigative Reporters & Editors to allow more professional journalists to attend IRE's conferences.

We appreciate so much the work that the Philip L. Graham Fund does, and all of us over here are big supporters of IRE.

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