Blog for Help Me Investigate, a project to make it easier for journalists, bloggers, and anyone else to collaborate on investigating questions of public interest.
In addition to this blog there are sub-sites on health, welfare and education, and open source tools (code available on GitHub and there's a Wordpress plugin here too). For more on the project, see this 'About' page.
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Ben Harrow
Natalie Eccleshall
Robert Dale
Kellie Maddox
Andrew Mackenzie
Chie Elliott
Teodora Beleaga
Chris Dodd
Paul Bradshaw
Paul Bradshaw
Paul Bradshaw
A search engine for data from FOI responses
"It strikes me that if I crawled the response pages, I could build my own index of data files, catalogued according to FOI request titles, in effect generating a “fake” data.gov.uk or data.ac.uk opendata catalogue as powered by FOI requests…? (What would be really handy in the local council requests would be if the responses were tagged with with appropriate LGSL code or IPSV terms (indexing on the way out) as a form of useful public metadata that can help put the FOI released data to work…?)
"Insofar as the requests may or may not be useful as signaling particular topic areas as good candidates as “standard” open data releases, I still need to do some text analysis on the request titles.
"[...] PS via a post on HelpMeInvestigate, I came across this list of FOI responses to requests made to the NHS Prescription Pricing Division. From a quick skim, some of the responses have “data” file attachments, though in the form of PDFs rather than spreadsheets/CSV. However, it would be possible to scrape the pages to at least identify ones that do have attachments (which is a clue they may contain data sets?)"
"Public Business: A new way of supporting public interest journalism" - Maha Rafi Atal at Hacks/Hackers London
Maha Rafi Atal started her talk at Hacks/Hackers London by describing the cognitive dissonance of studying to be a business journalist, with the ethics and aspirations that involves, with the day-to-day reality of business journalism as it occurs in newsrooms.
Whilst the financial crisis was unfolding, she explained, at the time when the public most needed an understanding of what was happening, the ability for news organisations to do decent business coverage was contracting.
In part, she said, this is because it is a highly technical and specialised area of reporting, and journalists are no longer able to get the training they need in reading company reports or state finance predictions.
This is especially crucial when a story like financial collapse is moving from the specialist business pages into being the main splash of the day.
There is a skills gap at the intersections where stories might be involving both the business and the politics desk, or the business and the science desk.
She suggested that business reporting was uniquely conflicted. Unlike any other area of a news organisation, the business desk has to report directly on the very companies that are bankrolling the operation via advertising.
The drive for 24 hour digital news has increased everybody’s output to the extent that journalists have to rely on keeping contacts at big companies happy in order to be able to churn out the required number of stories a day, and the increasing scarcity of advertising dollars means it is now much harder for an organisation to run stories that might “burn” an advertising account with negative coverage. She described this as “the dual capture of journalists”.
Public Business started as a research project to try and find out these things about business journalism, and Maha said they rather naively fixed up interviews with editors, walked in knowing nothing, and basically asked “So why are you doing this all wrong then?” Which sounded somehow vaguely familiar to me.
The premise now is that people can apply to Public Business for funding to support investigative business journalism, or projects that are too costly or time-consuming for a newsroom to undertake.
They are also building a platform to encourage collaboration between journalists and academic researchers.
Maha made the point that people had actually spotted that the housing crash was coming, or the off-shore drilling by a particular company was a disaster waiting to happen, but that often these claims were based on research that didn’t get published until it was issued as a mighty academic tome two years later that no journalist was ever going to read beyond the abstract anyway.
The idea is that people receiving grants from Public Business will do their journalistic endeavours on the platform, making that available for researchers to collaborate - it sounds something like Help Me Investigate but with a specific focus on business reporting.
Maha Rafi Atal was very passionate that decent reporting of the financial sector was a vital public service. “We are all investors now” she said, pointing out that anyone with a pension, whether they actively manage it or not, effectively owns a basket of shares in companies. There is a duty to help people understand that.
Maha finished with an appeal for donations, and, since this was Hacks/Hackers an appeal for developers to help work on the platform side of the service. You can contact Public Business via Twitter - @publicbusiness - or on email: publicbusinessmedia@gmail.com.
This blog post is cross-posted from currybetdotnet - “Supporting public interest business journalism” - Maha Rafi Atal at Hacks/Hackers London
One minute of investigation tips from Panorama's Tom Giles
VIDEO: Using parliamentary sources (Jon Walker)
Jon Walker is the political correspondent of the Birmingham Mail and Post, and Coventry Telegraph. Here he explains how to look for leads and useful information in written questions and answers, committees, consultations and other sources.
VIDEO: The role of repetitive work in investigation (Adrian Goldberg)
As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates and Radio WM talks about how some investigations simply come down to doing the hard slog of a repetitive task - in this example, ringing round garages asking a simple question.
VIDEO: Adrian Goldberg on how running a website helped uncover police surveillance of muslim areas
The Stirrer was an independent news website in Birmingham that investigated a number of local issues in collaboration with local people. One investigation in particular - into the employment of CCTV cameras in largely muslim areas of the city without consultation - was picked up by The Guardian's Paul Lewis, who discovered its roots in anti-terrorism funds.
The coverage led to an investigation into claims of police misleading councillors, and the eventual halting of the scheme.
As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, founder Adrian Goldberg - who now presents '5 live Investigates' and a daily show on BBC Radio WM - talks about his experiences of running the site and how the story evolved from a user's tip-off.
VIDEO: Working with sources - and what to do if they won't appear on film (Adrian Goldberg)
As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates and Radio WM talks about how to work with sources and the options available when they're not prepared to talk on-camera or on radio.
VIDEO: Adrian Goldberg on leads in 5 Live Investigate's investigation into dodgy lease agreements
As part of a series of interviews for Help Me Investigate, Adrian Goldberg of 5 Live Investigates talks about an investigation into misleading leasing agreements that had left many schools with large debts and only overpriced, unserviced equipment to show for it - a situation that seems to be happening beyond the education sector too.
How to investigate Wikipedia edits
By Ian Silvera (www.iansilvera.co.uk, @ianjsilvera)
First, click on the ‘view history’ tab at the top right of the Wikipedia entry you are interested in. You should then be directed to a page that lists all the edits that have occurred on that entry. It looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Bradshaw_(journalist)&action=history
Second, to identify if someone has been deleting unhelpful criticisms of an organisation or person on their Wikipedia entry, you could read through each edit, but with large Wikipedia entries this exercise would be too time-consuming. Instead, look for large redactions.
To do this scan through the red coloured numbers in brackets. Low numbers such as (-700) mean that a reasonable amount of information has been deleted from the Wikipedia entry. Also, the date the Wikipedia entry was edited is located on the left-hand side of the page.
7 ways to follow a field you want to investigate
Here's a part by part guide to how you can follow different 'streams' of information as a journalist to understand what's going on in a particular field, and how they can inform your real-world digging. Most of them involve using an RSS reader like Google Reader to follow feeds to keep in touch with developments.
1. Prepackaged news
While much is made of the ‘exclusive’ in journalism, and students will be harangued for recycling work done by other journalists, the truth is that the first thing most journalists do every day is check out their competitors, and get a feel for the current news agenda. A journalist has to balance being ‘on top’ of developments that others are covering (“Why don’t we have something on this story?”), while also reporting information that others don’t have.
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