Tag Archives: olympics

Help Me Investigate in 2013 – and 2014

As Help Me Investigate starts to plan new investigations in 2014, it’s a good time to look back at what we’ve been up to over the last year across the four sites (not including this blog). It’s easy to forget how much you do in a year – thanks to the many contributors who made everything below happen. As always, we’ve learned a lot and hit the new year wiser.

HMI Health

Help Me Investigate Health kicked off the year by organising an event on reporting the new health system with the BBC College of JournalismIn April we took part in and reported on a masterclass on health reporting organised by the National Union of Journalists and in May we spoke at and liveblogged a Medical Journalists Association event on the reorganised NHS.

HSJ logo

HMI Health editor Tom Warren and HMI Education editor Matt Burgess worked with the Health Service Journal to compile a list of FOI emails for clinical commissioning groups – the new bodies controlling health spending.

And we scraped the data that helped Scotland’s Sunday Post report on councils abandoning elderly people because they couldn’t afford the care at home and a 7% increase in absenteeism in Scottish authorities.

We also reported on Barnet, Enfield and Hillingdon referring fewer than 4% of depressed patientsNHS Merseyside spending £65,000 on re-hiring staff who worked for its predecessor, and the worst times to go to A&E in the Midlands. Continue reading

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

  1. Part one outlines some of the data journalism processes involved 
  2. Part 2 explains how verification, SEO and ‘passive aggressive newsgathering’ played a role.
  3. Part 3 looks at how ebooks offered a new opportunity to tell the story in depth – and publish while the story was still topical.

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 allocated – and how that process made it impossible for Olympic torch relay organisers LOCOG to meet key promises about the numbers of places available to the public, and to young people.

It builds on the work done over the past few weeks by users of HMI Olympics – and adds some new revelations alongside interviews that provide an insight into how the process affected those involved.

It’s free at https://leanpub.com/8000holes – or you can choose to pay whatever you like, with all proceeds going to the Brittle Bone Society.

How we investigated Olympic sponsor torchbearers

Details unearthed by the ongoing investigation have been picked up by a range of national and local newspapers and broadcast outlets.?

We are still unearthing leads, so if you want to get involved let me know.