Today sees the biggest release of government spending data in history. Government departments have published details of all spending over £25,000 for the past six months and, according to this morning’s announcement, will continue to publish this expenditure data on a monthly basis.
We’ve already released a revolutionary amount of data over the last six months, from the salaries of the highest earning civil servants to organisation structure charts which give people a real insight into the workings of government and is already being used in new and innovative ways.
A huge amount of public spending data has indeed been published under the current government, and today’s release is a significant addition to that. So who is doing what with the vast amount of new data? And who is making it easier for others to crunch the numbers?
The Guardian is usually streets ahead of other newspapers in processing large datasets and today’s coverage is no exception:
Pets are not only being fed, according to Thinq.co.uk, but kept on trend: “Among the more bizarre payments listed is £1,000 given the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to a company that sells jewel-encrusted dog collars.”
The Financial Times (registration required) has done some analysis of the effect of cuts on the private sector, but also made sure to dig some dirt: £750 an all-day meeting in a bar for Equalities and Human Rights Commission staff and £164,000 on water coolers for staff at HMRC.
There are, of course, different ways of looking at the numbers, as one Guardian commenter, LudwigsLughole, highlights:
There are 90,000 HMRC staff. They spent £164,000 in six months on bottled spring water. That equates to an annual spend per head of only £3.64. So the FT are seriously suggesting that £3.64 per head to give staff fresh bottled water is excessive? Pathetic journalism.
Exploring the data yourself
“The biggest issue with all these numbers is, how do you use them? If people don’t have the tools to interrogate the spreadsheets, they may as well be written in Latin.” – Simon Rogers, Guardian Data Blog editor.
“Releasing data is all well and good, but to encourage the nation’s ‘armchair auditors’, it must be readily usable.” – Martin Stabe, FT.
Here are some of the places you can go, along with the Guardian, to have a crack at the numbers yourself. Please add your own suggestions in the comments below.
Open University communications and systems lecturer Tony Hirst has been working on a ‘Government Data Spending Explorer’:
Lots and lots of data. So what? My take on it was to find a quick and dirty way to cobble a query interface around the data, so here’s what I spent an hour or so doing in the early hours of last night, and a couple of hours this morning… tinkering with a Gov spending data spreadsheet explorer:
Head to Where Does My Money Go? for more good work in making the data searchable and interactive:
[T]he real power of this data will become clear in the months to come, as developers and researchers – you? – start to link it to other information, like the magisterial OpenlyLocal and the exciting WhosLobbying. Please make use of our API and loading scripts to do so.
Also see the good suggestions on Where Does My Money Go? for how government data publishing might be improved in the future.
The National Council for the Training of Journalists has paid tribute to its former head of accreditation Stephen Chambers, who passed away last weekend after a long battle with cancer.
Chambers joined the NCTJ in July 2006 and was head of accreditation for two years, continuing to be involved with the council as a consultant until he stepped down last year due to ill health, the council said.
A former NCTJ trainee, Stephen began his career on the weekly Hunts Post before working for the Bristol Evening Post and the Daily Telegraph. In the late 1970s he moved into television journalism and worked for ITN, Thames Television and Anglia TV, where he presented the regional evening news programme. Before joining the NCTJ he worked for six years as a media relations and public affairs consultant in his native Northern Ireland.
In tribute the NCTJ’s chief executive Joanne Butcher said he was a “much loved member of the NCTJ team, a wonderful colleague and a friend who I will miss terribly”.
His distinguished track record in newspaper journalism and successful broadcasting career made him a huge asset to the NCTJ. As head of accreditation he worked closely with course leaders and editors, a role he found both intellectually stimulating and fun. He believed passionately in the importance of journalism standards and loved giving back to the cherished trade that had provided him with so much over the years.
The full issue of the Economist will be available to purchase through the applications every Thursday evening for £3.49 each week for a single issue.
Digital and print subscribers to the Economist will receive full access to the print edition and website’s content via the apps.
Oscar Grut, managing director of digital editions for the Economist, says in a release that he expects digital downloads to match the title’s print circulation of 1.5 million “in a relatively short period of time”. He hopes the free apps will help attract new readers to the title, who will be encourage to take out subscriptions to the full edition.
Says editor John Micklethwait:
We have reformatted the newspaper to make the most of iPad, iPhone and iPod touch while retaining the familiar feel of the Economist, with all the articles, charts, maps and images from each week’s print edition. And we have integrated our audio edition, read by professional newscasters, for easy switching between reading and listening. We have put a lot of work into making sure that these new versions of the Economist are not just easy to use, but also make our readers feel at home.
Yahoo has started to roll out a new local product offering dedicated pages of news, events and deals for a number of locations in the US, lostremote.com reported this week.
Beta pages for Yahoo Local have emerged for San Francisco, Brooklyn and Michigan, which can be viewed by city or neighbourhood and feature a list of aggregated posts.
Many of the headlines, especially at the neighborhood level, originate from neighborhood blogs. You can post an event, or sign up with Associated Content to become a paid contributor. “We have launched Yahoo! local in a few neighborhoods and towns to refine the experience while gathering more content for the next set of cities,” explains the site.
Journalism.co.uk reported earlier this week that Yahoo had launched a new contributor network which enables its users to publish content onto its sites, following its acquisition of Associated Content earlier this year.
New Scientist looks at some examples of video games that are editorial games too – in particular Burger Tycoon and Escape from Woomera – and asks how the design and principles behind these games might best be used in journalism.
Video games do not offer a panacea for news organisations. But they offer a truly new way for journalism to contribute to civic life by amplifying the how instead of the who. Video games offer models of how the world works and how it might be improved, rather than skin-deep stories about what ails it. That’s why the best journalism of the future might not be read, but played.
Defence secretary Dr Liam Fox said he hoped he could change the “culture of leaks” his department “seems to have inherited”, the BBC reported this morning.
In an interview on the Radio 4 Today programme, Dr Fox was reportedly asked whether comments made by David Cameron to the Commons Liaison Committee yesterday on several unauthorised disclosures to the press represented a rebuke for him and his department.
Cameron had said the department “does seem to have had a bit of a problem with leaks, which is worrying when it is the department responsible for security.”
In response Dr Fox said he was “rebuking them much more”.
It is very easy to get, in a very big department, to get one or two people who will pass things out. I think it is unprofessional and very unfair to their colleagues who are then unable to discuss things in a free way.
I hope it is a culture we can hope to change over time.
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger offers 15 things that Twitter does well and why these matter to news organisations. It’s not groundbreaking, but a great summary that any sceptics should be pointed toward.
The list was given as part of speech delivered by Rusbridger in Sydney last night (or earlier today Australian time):
[W]e journalists find it difficult to look at what’s happening around us and relate it to what we have historically done. Most of these digital upstarts don’t look like media companies. EBay? It buys and sells stuff. Amazon? The same. TripAdvisor? It’s flogging holidays. Facebook? It’s where teenagers post all the stuff that will make them unemployable later in life.
If that’s all we see when we look at those websites then we’re missing the picture. Very early on I forced all senior Guardian editors on to Facebook to understand for themselves how these new ways of creativity and connection worked. EBay can teach us how to handle the kind of reputational and identity issues we’re all coming to terms with our readers. Amazon or TripAdvisor can reveal the power of peer review.
We should understand what Tumblr or Flipboard or Twitter are all about – social media so new they’re not even yet Hollywood blockbusters.
I’ve lost count of the times people – including a surprising number of colleagues in media companies – roll their eyes at the mention of Twitter. “No time for it,” they say. “Inane stuff about what twits are having for breakfast. Nothing to do with the news business.”
Well, yes and no. Inanity – yes, sure, plenty of it. But saying that Twitter has got nothing to do with the news business is about as misguided as you could be.
[I]t is clear that a few years ago a blog really set you apart from crowd, but now with a plethora of people (including many who have no desire to become professional journalists) jumping on the bandwagon, standing out to the extent that the industry recognises you is becoming increasingly difficult – if not impossible.
Unless you have stuck upon a totally unique idea it is unlikely that your blog will be the reason you get a job. Using myself as a case study, I blog about areas that interest me (sport, Asian issues and the media) and I do okay out of it, but I don’t for one minute think that a potential employer will be impressed enough with this site to offer me a job.
If simply having a blog won’t cut it anymore, how else can journalism students make themselves stand out online?
