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 […]
Note: this is a lengthy post so you may want to get yourself comfortable! There is more to leaking than Wikileaks, and a more interesting tale to be told than theirs. In This Machine Kills Secrets, Andy Greenberg looks at that story – and it’s an important read for any journalist interested in working with […]
3 examples this week show how you can still tell important stories based on Freedom of Information requests even when you don’t get any results. In the first, a national story, 54 FOI requests were sent to mental health trusts. 6 could not say how often any form of restraint was used, and: “Half of […]
Nicole Froio has interviewed me for Wannabe Hacks on ‘Getting started with investigative journalism’ – you can read the post over there.
On February 28 the Birmingham Datablog Meetup hosted a visit from Vikki Holland and Debbie Whittingham from the West Midlands Fire Service. They answered questions on how the Service uses data in both fire prevention and monitoring its activities. Here is a summary of the meetup. The Fire Service are one of the most advanced users […]
Over on Help Me Investigate Education Beth Ashton writes about her experiences of discovering what appeared to be a data leak by the education regulator Ofsted – and the ethical decisions which followed: “In the end, this was a story about Ofted’s own rules not working retrospectively, or taking into account the permanence of the […]
At a recent Birmingham Datablog meetup we hosted probation data analyst Jason Davies, who very generously spent time highlighting the mistakes that journalists should avoid in reporting the justice system, and useful resources for finding both data and context on crime and justice. Jason began by making an important distinction between crime data and justice data. Crime data […]