Tuesday, 8 July 2008, 07:10
Comments
Newsquest rolls out new regional newspaper websites and now requires registration for its sites’ famously, er, robust comments sections.
Tuesday, 27 November 2007, 11:36
Comments
"Malvern Gazette reporter Tarik Al Rasheed was among the top trainee journalists in the country in this year’s professional journalism examinations."
Monday, 12 November 2007, 12:01
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"The [NUJ] chapel at The Press in York has reached an agreement with management over how much news content journalists should upload to the website, following a four-month boycott."
Friday, 2 November 2007, 15:24
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"RUNCORNANDWIDNESWORLD has been named website of the year at the Newsquest Cheshire/Merseyside annual awards." That’s "Runcorn and Widnes World".
Wednesday, 5 September 2007, 06:24
Comments
Newsquest’s Lancashire Telegraph has jumped on the hyperlocal bandwagon with ‘Your East Lancs’, which covers almost 20 local communities, primarily villages.
Monday, 13 August 2007, 08:08
Comments
"On Thursday, [Gannett] filed papers with the [SEC] that included a new change-of-control plan, one that would accelerate payments to top executives in the event of a corporate takeover."
Thursday, 19 July 2007, 19:14
Comments
Industrial dispute? What industrial dispute? We have pressing workflow management issue to resolve! Herald gets "latest database-managed cross-media content-management solution from Atex"
Monday, 9 July 2007, 07:56
Comments
"The Competition Commission has announced it is to re-visit assurances made by Newsquest when it purchased the [Herald] group."
Expert Eye: The new vids on the block
Thursday, 24 May 2007, 09:45
Ian Reeves looks at how he printed press is experimenting with video, from locals to the big players.
Monday, 14 May 2007, 17:26
Comments
"Readers are getting through a staggering average of 38kg of newspapers each per year - and 50 per cent of them are currently being recycled."
Friday, 6 April 2007, 12:52
Comments
“Dozens of staff at The Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times newspapers face the axe following a budget cut announcement yesterday by publishers, Newsquest.”
Brighton crime story shows how far FOI still has to go
Wednesday, 7 March 2007, 07:00
Roy Greenslade yesterday pointed out that the Argus had used the Freedom of Information Act to produce a ward-by-ward breakdown of crime figures in Brighton.
Two thoughts. First, why was it necessary?
Ward-by-ward crime figures are the sort of public data that should be routinely available to the public. There is nothing remotely sensitive about this information, which is inevitably collected by police and is in the public interest to disclose. In an ideal democracy, it wouldn’t really be necessary for a journalist to file a Freedom of Information Act request in order to obtain this data. A glace at a web site, or at most a simple call to the Police press officer, should suffice.
We often hear that the object of the FOIA is to instill a culture of openness in the public sector. Let’s hope that Sussex Police take the hint and start handing this data out regularly so that this can just become another routine story for the Argus. If they don’t, may the Argus bombard them with FOI requests every month until they do. And may other regional papers do the same for every other force in the country.
That, after all, is the beauty of FOIA. Robust use of requests by the press for non-frivolous, public-interest information helps to achieve Parliament’s intent to create a more open government. Responding to requests from journalists is not, as Lord Falconer keeps suggesting, a giant public subsidy to news organisations’ editorial budgets — it’s the Act working as his Government originally intended.
Of course, if Lord Falconer has his way, the Argus might not get to play its role in this. Regional newspapers like the Argus would be hit very hard by his proposed changes to the FOIA fees regime. The proposal to allow public bodies to treat multiple, unrelated requests from an organisation as if it were one request would mean that the Argus would quickly use up its quarterly quota of requests to the local public bodies it covers, like Brighton & Hove City Council or Sussex Police.
So much for the press doing its part to help the Government achieve its purported aim of engendering a culture of transparency in the public sector.
Second, the Argus investigation was obviously very good journalism, but it also shows how far there is still is to go until newspapers start making full use of the sort of data that could become available under FOIA.
When I read that there was a “full online breakdown” on the Argus web site, I followed the link half-expecting a slick GIS mashup of the data. After all, the much-cited example of a great journalistic mashup, ChicagoCrime.org, is based on plotting routinely-available police data onto a dynamically-generated online map.
No such luck, obviously. Maybe next time. If there is one.
