Investigative Reporters and Editors

Welcome to the AccessFest 2026 schedule! Browse sessions and speakers.

The award recognizes leadership in making information available to everyone. This year, it honors the fight to keep local journalism from disappearing. October 1, 2026 — Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) has been named a recipient of the 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award, alongside the Poynter Institute, for preserving local news online. IRE’s mission is to foster excellence in investigative journalism, which is essential to a free society, and that work starts with the record.

Greg Shea / GBH Archives By | Published October 1, 2026 In 2008, GBH’s investigative news program Frontline was putting together their regular special on the year’s presidential candidates: The Choice, featuring Barack Obama and John McCain. Working on a hunch, the editors went back into GBH’s local news footage, searching Ten O’Clock News stories related to Harvard Law School in the 1990s to see if they could find any footage of Obama as a law student.

September 19, 2026 | Investigative Reporters and Editors condemns President Donald Trump's ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House in apparent retaliation for their coverage of the Trump Administration. In a post on Truth Social, President Trump said the news organizations would be banned because of articles he claimed were “fake news.” He also threatened that other news outlets would be banned, as well. These outlets are doing important work to inform the public.

In the United States, investigative journalists can often begin their work with a powerful tool: a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. But access to public records isn’t created equally, especially in countries more hostile to investigative reporting. In Yemen, there is no comparable system that reliably opens government records to journalists.

Investigative Reporters & Editors is honored to announce that Laura Barrón-López will headline our keynote conversation for AccessFest26, the organization’s sixth virtual-by-design conference Oct. 8-10. Barrón-López serves as an MS NOW White House Reporter.

By | Published September 8, 2026 Inclusive reporting is more important than ever as basic democratic freedoms are under attack in the U.S. More and more, LGBTQ+ people are being excluded from spaces like public bathrooms and youth sports, the government is restricting their access to medical care, and some states are even changing laws to invalidate trans people’s driver’s licenses. LGBTQ+ individuals and communities rarely have the opportunity to see themselves in mainstream reporting.

AccessFest is our most affordable and accessible annual conference! No travel, no hotels, no early-bird deadlines, just world-class training at your fingertips. Join us online, October 8-10, for AccessFest 2026. Professional, Early-career professional, Academic, Retiree and Associate members can register at any time for just $76 (a nod to our very first IRE Conference in 1976). Student members can register at any time for just $26 (a nod to our 50th year of conferences).

Nadia Nadesan & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ AI may bode ill for the journalism industry as a whole, but for us data journalists, it opens up a new method for answering important questions in ways readers should trust. LLM classification — and its cousin, extraction — sits in the Venn diagram overlap: an AI tool that helps us do more valuable, credible work, and that we can convince our readers to trust.

Watchdog training is coming to students in the Midwest and Puerto Rico this fall. As higher learning institutions work to hinder, pressure or punish student newspapers over reporting controversial stories, IRE, in partnership with Open Campus, is proud to bring watchdog training to two universities in September.