This year at the CIJ Summer School, Robert Miller and Martin Tomkinson offered advice for how to get the best visual and audio footage of your interviews. Their top tips have been summarised below…
Spraying the camera results in confusing pictures. To add to this, only use the zoom image in extreme circumstances as it will pixelate quickly. Continue reading
We’ll be liveblogging from the BBC’s ‘Fusion Data Day’ from 10-3 today, embedded below and on Twitter @helpmeinvestig8
Abbey Hartley and Kristina Kashtanova will be liveblogging throughout the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School from Friday to Sunday. Follow her updates below:
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.
European data journalism event #Dataharvest13 kicked off this year with a panel on European information laws. Host Brigitte Alfter kicked off the introductions:
And the Corporate Europe Observatory talked about their experiences of using information laws to look at lobbying interests:
Joao Sant’Anna talked about the European Ombudsman’s role in gaining access to documents held by public institutions:
And Scott Crosby provided a legal perspective:
For more coverage from the event see the links at the official site.
Help Me Investigate has compiled a list of MPs who operate throughout the UK.
The list has been scraped from the Parliament website.
The dataset shows the name, political party and constituency of all 674 MPs in the UK. In addition to this, a URL link to each MP’s biography has been displayed.
This information is also available on a Google spreadsheet.
If you use this information, please let us know – especially if any have been changed since publication. Continue reading
The investigation everyone was talking about at Dutch-Flemish data journalism event #Dataharvest13 was Offshore Leaks: a collaboration between over 80 journalists in dozens of countries on one of the biggest and ugliest data leaks in the history of journalism. The resulting stories on the use of tax havens have made front pages across the world and led to discussions – if not much action – at the G8.
David Leigh and Mar Cabra were involved in the investigation in the UK and Spain – in the audio below they talk about the issues they faced.
For more on Offshore Leaks follow live coverage of this weekend’s CIJ Summer School on the Help Me Investigate blog and contributor Abbey Hartley’s Twitter account @abbey_hartley.
Video of David Leigh talking afterwards is also embedded below:
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:
This year’s Data Harvest festival – #dataharvest13 – featured a number of speakers involved in environmental investigations. We were there to record some fascinating speakers. Continue reading
Over on Help Me Investigate Health, we’ve published a list of Freedom of Information emails for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) – the new bodies controlling local health spending in England.
The list was compiled two months ago for Health Service Journal by Tom Warren and Matt Burgess, shortly after the new bodies took control, but is only now being published by HMI.
As part of the process, Matt and Tom also compiled a spreadsheet of CCG websites and FOI webpages.