Digging through data irst it was the industrial scale leak on MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph. Then that was capped by the Wikileaks disclosures to The Guardian of US embassy cables. Now the Government has got in on the act by releasing streams of data from Whitehall, and local government is following with councils having to publish every contract above £500. Never has so much information been released for analysis by journalists and never have there been so few journalists capable of keeping pace with the avalanche of statistics. Ironically, just at the point when the industry is still reeling from coping with 24/7 coverage and local papers are desperately short of staff, a wealth of new information that could provide thousands of stories has just been dumped on journalists’ desks. Data journalism – mining stories from statistics – is seen as the next big thing. Just as the internet and the mobile phone revolutionised the ability of journalists to get instant information and to contact people, the provision of data has added a new dimension. Some believe it could supplant traditional journalism. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web and is on the Government’s public sector transparency board, claimed recently: “Data/arts/ driven journalism is the future. Journalists need to /study/courses www.city.ac.uk l be data-savvy. It used to be that you would get stories m nalism-ma.ht interactive-jour lism na by chatting to people in bars, and it still might be that ur Jo Interactive The new MA in you’ll do it that way sometimes. “But now it’s also going to be about poring over co.uk/data www.guardian. data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse information Interesting data it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it ch www.wikileaks. at all fits together, and what’s going on in the country.” yone is looking er ev The website There is a danger that enthusiasm for the latest fad outstrips its potential contribution and ignores its .co.uk www.govdata ers’ limitations. Freedom of information, for example, has covering minist ts se ta da 0 5,60 ts pay, made a big contribution to the creation of new stories, but an rv , top civil se expenses, gifts the long delays and battles in getting information mean 0 er £25,00 and contracts ov that it can be more useful for authors than journalists, as it can take months or years to get hold of vital documents. The stories that have had the biggest impact – the Daily Telegraph’s exposure of MPs’ expenses and the two
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tranches of Wikileaks documents in The Guardian– mean mining through huge amounts of data and e-mails. But both would never have had the impact if journalists did not have traditional skills and resources to sift through the information in the first place. Of course, the Wikileaks revelations were also somewhat augmented by the dramatic arrest of its founder Julian Assange for alleged sexual offences, and the clamour for retribution for the leaks by some in the US. The Telegraph’s exposure of MPs’ expenses required the setting up of a special team of political and investigative journalists to pull together all the information and carry out the investigation: checking receipts, MPs’ addresses, chasing up information from the Land Registry, and then seeking an explanation from every minister and MP involved. The Telegraph devised its own unique computer program to read and analyse all the expenses information on the leaked disks to facilitate journalists searching for information on MPs. It was the skill in piecing together this information that has led to the conviction of some MPs for false accounting; the raw data itself only provided the clues. Similarly, the Wikileaks operation required not only journalists to sift through hundreds of diplomatic cables and
.uk/index.php/ www.biolap.co .html councilexpenses ove on contracts ab es ns Council expe items. al du vi di in k to chec £500 with tool itter. Tw eunisVilijeon on For updates: Th pot.com/ and storycurve.blogs g /journalism/blo www.bbc.co.uk ure at fe is th in raised Blogs on issues
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David Hencke examines the potential of data-based journalism and finds traditional skills and moles remain vital
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