Category Archives: Tips and tricks

The Iraq Inquiry documents on DocumentCloud

I’ve uploaded all 2.6million words of the Chilcot Report (also known as the Iraq Inquiry) to the document analysis service DocumentCloud. The documents can be found on the site here.

You’ll need a DocumentCloud account to analyse the documents by entity or timeline (more on that here), but if you don’t have an account you can also search all the documents using the embedded view below.



Help Me Investigate is on ice (but I’ll still help you investigate)

Help Me Investigate

I’m putting Help Me Investigate, my collaborative investigation project, on ice.

This year has seen the launch of a number of impressive crowdfunded and crowdsourced projects on platforms including Beacon and Contributoria – plus OpenCorporates Missions and the enormously impressive Bellingcat. Their rise, for me, confirms that there is no longer a need for the original mission that Help Me Investigate took on way back in 2009. Now I think it’s time to rip it up and start again. Continue reading

Former HMI Health editor named best new journalist of the year at British Journalism Awards

Former Help Me Investigate Health editor Tom Warren has been named best new journalist of the year at British Journalism Awards.

Tom, who joined the Bureau of Investigative Journalism last year, won the award for stories on payday loan lenders, party political funding, and the flotation of shares in Royal Mail. He said:

“Before I was a professional journalist HMI taught me skills and made me contacts that I couldn’t have picked up anywhere else. It was a great place to cut my teeth – and I’m not the only one. I can think of several former HMI’ers who have gone on to top jobs in journalism. It’s been a real powerhouse in that respect.”

Some of the data for the payday lenders story was collected by Help Me Investigate.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism report on their site that judges said:

“Tom made great use of data and technology to unearth stories and details. He picked targets that no-one else was looking at to bring new information to light on matters of real public interest.

“He used excellent detective work to reveal the privileged bidders who profiteered from the Royal Mail flotation, forcing the Government to release the full list.”

The award came the day after another former HMI contributor, Beth Ashton, won an award for her work at the Manchester Evening News.

Organising investigations: a guide to story-based inquiry

storybasedinquiry

This year at the CIJ Summer School, Adjunct Professor, Mark Lee Hunter, explained how using hypotheses can frame and sell your story. A hypothesis is what the investigator wants to prove or disprove. It takes the best information you have into account and contains factual assertions that can be verified.

How hypotheses frame and sell your story

Hunter suggested three key tips on making a hypothesis work:

  • It needs to be approached slowly
  • It should be viewed in the easiest way possible
  • You do not want to jump ahead to the most difficult approach first

It is also important to consider the worthiness of an investigation before conducting it. If the hypothesis is of high importance and easy to establish, then the investigation is definitely worth pursuing. However, if it is of low importance and difficult to prove or disprove, then do not waste your time. Continue reading

Live coverage of the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School

Help Me Investigate have sent Abbey Hartley to cover the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School, which starts today from 9am.

Speakers include former editor of Help Me Investigate Health, Alex Plough, the tax expert John Christensen; FOI specialists Paul Francis and Brendan Montague; and Andrew Jennings, the man behind investigations into the International Olympic Committee and FIFA

Watch out for her tweets @abbey_hartley and updates here on the Help Me Investigate blog.

AUDIO: Investigating a bank using environmental information laws: #Dataharvest13

One of the most interesting talks at the data and investigative journalism conference #Dataharvest13 was Gavin Sheridan‘s talk about how they tackled an Irish bank using laws on environmental information.

The bank in question was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, despite being Government-owned. But the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) applies differently, and Sheridan, along with Fred Logue, used those to request – then fight for – information on their involvement in property development.

Sheridan and Logue’s talk is split over three audio clips – embedded below:

Following FOI requests – making the most of WhatDoTheyKnow

Over on Help Me Investigate Health, Tom Warren has written a guide to using the Freedom of Information tool WhatDoTheyKnow. Key tips include:

  • Consider sending an FOI directly to the authority if you want to keep it private – but also remember that doing so publicly can be a great way to find contacts and ideas
  • You can use the site to find out an authority’s FOI email address
  • Use advanced search techniques in Google to search just that site

Read the post in full here.

Savile extracted

On Friday the BBC released documents from The Pollard Report into the Savile inquiry.

These were published as scanned PDFs, making it impossible to search text or count mentions of particular terms.

We’ve used document extraction service DocumentCloud to convert the two key documents – appendices 10 (statements) and 12 (emails and documents) – into text. These are linked below. If you use them, let us know so we can continue to do this.

Savile Transcript appendix 10 (PDF)
Savile Transcript appendix 10 (Text)

 

Savile Appendix12 (PDF)
Savile Appendix12 (Text)