Member Benefits

Become a Member of IRE

The need for quality journalists has never been more dire. Fulfill your full potential with indispensable resources from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

With your membership, you’ll get: Premium Reporting Tools

Here’s a recap of our current partnerships, how you can benefit and instructions on getting access to premium tools.

FOIAengine : Free 1-Year Subscription for IRE Professional members
(This is limited to members with a professional membership.)

FOIAengine, a tool created by PoliScio Analytics co-founders Randy Miller, an attorney, and John Jenkins, a journalist, searches requests made through the federal Freedom of Information Act. It helps replace the public record request database previously available at FOIAonline.gov, until the federal government shut it down in October 2023.

FOIAengine provides data about the requests themselves not the files, in essence creating a FOIA log to help users see what has already been requested. The new tool has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. You can search and filter records by agency, requester’s organization or type (news media, law firm, financial institution, etc.), requester’s name, date or text of the request. You can also copy or export 100 records at a time to analyze in other tools, including Microsoft Excel. FOIAengine provides one-click links to LinkedIn (for researching requester backgrounds) and real-time stock-market data (for publicly traded companies)

What does this mean to you? As an IRE professional member, you can receive a free 1-year subscription to access FOIAengine, a searchable database with more than 230,000 FOIA record requests from 2021 to the present. It is updated in as close to real time as availability allows. This special subscription is the only way an individual can access the database. IRE is the only media association authorized to access this resource.

To request a subscription: Current IRE members with a professional membership should email [email protected]. If you’re not a current IRE member, you can join here. If you need to renew, sign into your IRE account and click “Members Dashboard” located in the upper right corner of the page.

Note: If you have questions about FOIAengine, please contact David Meyers, [email protected].

View the IRE announcement here.