Finding stories in data. The pursuit of facts in plain sight.
Just to let you know that the Twitter account @Scrape_No10 which tweets out ministers’, special advisers’ and permanent secretaries’ meetings, gifts and hospitalities is back up and tweeting. You can read the post about its creation here and download all the data the account contains. This account needs more coding maintenance than the @OJCstatements account … Continue Reading →
Data is the new word for information. But Information Journalist implies every other journalist is just a churnalist. Which is most definitely not the case. If data is anything in a database then I’m looking beyond that. For me data is any piece of information that can be turned to journalistic use. So rather than … Continue Reading →
Seeing as I like to fly in the face of tradition, I’m going to turn things on it’s head and write a blog post of how I did it before I publish what “it” actually is. That is, I have scraped all the Cabinet Office spending data, cleaned it up and extracted it. But before … Continue Reading →
#opendata from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo. #opendata from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo. You might be wondering what this short documentary has to do with journalism or even what open data has to do with journalism. No doubt you are aware that journalism has been facing a ‘crisis’ for a while now. Not just … Continue Reading →
A recent blogpost by TotalPolitics says: In order to get on top of growing mountains of correspondence and keep on digging through acres of committee and legislative papers MPs are having to take on more staff on a fixed staffing allowance, either paying lower wages or taking people on a volunteer basis. This comes … Continue Reading →
The road to No.10 is paved with advisers, they lead you in, they open doors. Often for themselves. Previous advisers include Alastair Campbell, Ed Balls and the Miliband brothers. Until they’re in the door they generally don’t command the political spotlight. That is, unless they’re on the way out like Andy Coulson. What they do … Continue Reading →
Numerical analysis sounds boring to most and way too complicated to nearly all news organizations. But the advent of multimedia and interactives means that facts and figures can and should be made accessible and exciting. Here is a TED talk using simple Power Point. The topic and research are so affective that I am just gripped … Continue Reading →
Numerical information is becoming more and more important in news reporting. This is not only due to interactive web abilities (I’ll write another post on this) but because big news is news of scale. For instance, the floods in Pakistan are now being put into context with figures. The number of people suffering from the … Continue Reading →