The Help Me Investigate blog

A case study in online journalism: investigating the Olympic torch relay

Over at the Online Journalism Blog I’ve written three posts on the background to the investigation into the Olympic torch relay which resulted in a number of national, local and international stories, and the ebook 8,000 Holes. 

Par…

Six questions to ask before you submit an FOI

David Higgerson suggests six questions that journalists can ask to improve the end results of a possible FOI request – or save you sending one entirely. they are:

Is this information available elsewhere?
Will they release the infor…

New guidelines on the ‘FOI for environmental reporting’ – EIR

Cleland Thom provides another of his useful roundups on ‘right to know’ laws in the UK. This time it’s the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR), a set of regulations which work in a similar way to the Freedom of Information Act, but …

FOI and redaction costs – why they don’t count

If you come across a public authority which claims that it cannot meet your FOI request because of the costs involved in redacting data, quote the following decision by the Information Tribunal (PDF) between South Yorkshire Police and …

Help Me Investigate’s first ebook: 8,000 Holes: How the 2012 Olympic Torch Relay Lost its Way

As the Olympic Torch Relay enters its final week Help Me Investigate has published our first ebook: 8,000 Holes: How the 2012 Olympic Torch Relay Lost its Way.The book details how exactly the 8,000 torchbearer places were allocate…

Can you help? Crowdsourcing mystery torchbearers with The Guardian

Yesterday we published a spreadsheet on The Guardian's Datablog of 500 torchbearers running without a story. Want to help investigate?  There are plenty of curious names in there alongside the sporting stars, celebs and genuine co…

Tracing individuals online: How to identify mystery torchbearers

Over on Help Me Investigate the Olympics we've posted a guide to tracing individuals. It's specifically related to the 'mystery torchbearers' who don't have a nomination story, but has wider application for tracing any i…

More on how we investigated Olympic sponsor torchbearers

I've written a piece for the Telegraph about the process behind our investigation on Help Me Investigate the Olympics. This expands on some of the details in a previous post for The Guardian, adding how the collaborative publishing proc…

How we investigated Olympic sponsor torchbearers

I've written a post explaining some of the processes used in the ongoing investigation by Help Me Investigate Olympics into Olympic torchbearers. The post follows a request form the Guardian's datablog, who have published it here. …

A search engine for data from FOI responses

Tony Hirst has created two basic tools that allow you to search for data supplied in response to FOI requests: this search tool for local councils; and this one for universities (ignore the word 'council' – it's an error).The …