Tag Archives: MPs expenses

#newsrw: Heather Brooke – ‘How do any journalists in the UK do their job?’

The main difficulty for data journalist in the UK is gaining access to meaningful data, Heather Brooke said in her keynote speech at news:rewired – noise to signal.

Brooke, a journalist, author and freedom-of-information campaigner, who is best known for her role in bringing the MPs expenses to light and who went on to work with the Guardian on the WikiLeaks cables, compared the difficulty in accessing data in the UK compared with the US, where she trained and worked as a political journalist and a crime reporter.

When working in the US, Brook explained how she was “heavily reliant on public records” and said the “underpinning of my journalism was state records”. As a crime reporter she used a police scanner, likening it to those familiar with US series ‘The Wire’.

“As a journalist I would decide what the story was,” she said, based on the data from public records. She was able to note patterns in the incident reports and able to notice a spate in domestic violence, for example.

Brooke told of how many UK police forces limit the release of their data to media messages left on a voice bank.

Public bodies in the UK “control the data, they control the public perception of the story,” she said.

“How do any journalists in the UK do their job?” she asked. And it was that problematic question that led her to becoming an FOI campaigner.

When she asked for receipts for US politicians’ expense claims in the States, she had them within a couple of days.

It was a different story in the UK. It took her five years and several court cases, including taking the case to the High Court which led to the release of second home allowance for 10 MPs.

The House of Commons “sticking their feet on the ground” refused to release further data, which had been scanned in by the fees office.

A CD of the data which was touted round Fleet Street and sold for £110,000.

The Telegraph, rather than Brooke, then had the data and had to verify and cross check it.

What is purpose as journalists in the digital age?

Brooke’s answer to that question is that “we need to change an unhelpful attitude” of public records being withheld.

“The information exists as if they own it”, she said.

“They don’t want negative information to come out” and they want to try and manage their reputation, she said in what she described as “the take over of public relations”.

“We need to be campaigning for these sets of data” and gave the examples of courts and the release of files.

“We make the FOI request and that should open the whole tranche of data so any other journalist can go back and use it for their reporting.”

She said data journalism is “not just about learning how to use Excel spreadsheets but you have to have something to put in those spreadsheets”.

Brooke made a “rallying cry” as to why professional journalists, particularly those who practice investigative journalism, are vital.

The “one unique selling point, why people would come to a professional news organisation” is the training and experience journalists have in “sifting through for what is important and what is true”.

Brooke said as people have more and more information, a journalist’s role is distilling and signposting the information.

The second key point she made is journalists must establish “what is true”.

When a politician claims that crime has gone down, a journalist must be able to verify it and “test the truthfulness” of it, she said.

She explained that journalists need to know how that data was collected and, ideally, have access the data itself.

Brooke told how she tried to pitch stories on MPs expenses on an almost daily basis before they came to light. She said editors thought it was a non-story and “almost took the word of parliament” and had the perception that the public was not interested. But they were.

“It’s a symptom of the public not having meaningful information and are not able to take action. That’s our role as professional journalists.”

This article is a cross post. It was originally published on news:rewired.

Heather Brooke: ‘Transparency keeps those in power honest’

In case you missed reading an extract of Heather Brooke’s new book, ‘The Silent State’, in the Mail on Sunday, here’s a link…

A second excerpt will be published next Sunday. Last weekend’s extract focused on expenses.

An early reporting experience in America taught her ” that transparency keeps those in power honest: more than any regulator, any bureaucracy or set of rules,” she writes.

The Telegraph did a phenomenal job presenting the data, and I don’t begrudge them anything, even if they did take away my scoop.

Brooke collected the judge’s award at last night’s British Press Awards for her campaigning over MPs’ expenses.

BBC iPlayer: On Expenses

Missed last night’s BBC Four drama about American journalist Heather Brooke’s fight for the disclosure of MPs’ expenses?

Catch up here: BBC iPlayer at this link.

Jon Slattery praised the show on his blog, saying it showed how much the public owed freelance journalist Brooke, for expenses exposure.

Brooke told Journalism.co.uk she hoped the film would help people understand the importance of investigative journalism and the role they play in holding political leaders to account: “If we don’t want corruption then we each have some responsibility, if only to care about where our taxes are going.”

Heather Brooke and Telegraph named in PSA Awards

Reporting on the MPs’ expenses scandal was recognised yesterday with awards for both the Telegraph and investigative journalist Heather Brooke.

Brooke took the ‘Influencing the Political Agenda’ prize at the Political Studies Association (PSA) Awards for her ‘tireless and inspiring’ campaign to uncover details of MPs’ expenses.

The Daily Telegraph was named as best political publication of the year for its investigation into MPs’ expenses; while the BBC’s Newsnight and business editor Robert Peston also received prizes.

The full list of PSA Awards winners is available at this link.

Anger over army equipment motivated MPs’ expenses leak

Promoting its new book out today, the Telegraph discloses that a lack of army supplies for soliders fighting in Afghanistan motivated the whistleblower who leaked the unredacted MPs’ expenses data earlier this year.

The Telegraph will continue to protect the identity of its source, although it named another intermediary – former SAS major John Wick –  in May.

Today the Telegraph reports:

“Workers who processed the MPs’ claims included serving soldiers, who were moonlighting between tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan to earn extra cash for body armour and other vital equipment.

“The soldiers were furious when they saw what MPs, including the Prime Minister, were claiming for and their anger convinced one of their civilian colleagues that taxpayers had a right to know how their money was being spent.

“The mole who leaked the data has told his story for the first time, in the hope that it will shame the Government into finally supplying the right equipment for the thousands of soldiers risking their lives in Afghanistan.

(…)

“Five months after The Daily Telegraph broke the story of MPs’ expenses, the mole angrily denounced politicians who ‘still don’t get it’ and were still preoccupied with their own financial situation rather than the plight of troops.”

Full story at this link…

New book: ‘No Expenses Spared

Telegraph paid £110,000 for MPs’ expenses leak

Finally, in its new duck-adorned book, the Telegraph reveals how much it paid to the source for the MPs’ expenses data: £110,000.

It doesn’t really sound that much (and much less than speculated figures) when you consider that the group pays Boris ‘chicken feed’ Johnson £250,000 a year for his weekly column.

Assistant editor Andrew Pierce, who has previously refused to disclose the details of the deal, defended the payment on this morning’s Radio 4 Today Programme:

“So far the tax payer has been reimbursed by MPs £500,000 and there’ll be more. We’ve got a much better commons as a result of it and  I think the Telegraph took the decision – not lightly – but we were given 24 hours to read that file: it blew our minds when we saw what was in that file. It was money well spent in the public interest.”

Will Lewis’ defence of Telegraph expenses coverage

A special programme from BBC Radio 4 aired yesterday: ‘Moats, Mortgages and Mayhem’ which looked at media coverage of the whole scandal.

The editor of the Daily Telegraph, Will Lewis defended coverage of MPs’ expenses, rubbishing suggestions that his paper had irreparably damaged Parliament.

“Will Lewis told the BBC his paper’s reports about MPs’ claims would make Parliament more ‘open’ and allow a ‘new generation’ of people to be elected,” reported the BBC.

(….) “former Tory leader Michael Howard said some of the paper’s coverage had been “inaccurate and unfair.”

You can listen to Lewis’s comments here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8123362.stm

Or the programme, presented by Nick Robinson and produced by Martin Rosenbaum,  in full here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lh47j

Nick Robinson’s own comments are also very insightful: his frustrations about the lack of time to ‘ponder’ on the revelations, and the questions raised about presenting accusations fairly.

Hat tip: Journalism student and blogger, Nigel Barlow. On his blog he says: that he has a couple of problems with the Telegraph’s reportage: “Firstly that there was no differentiation between claims that were accepted or rejected. Secondly that the paper has been selective in the MPs that it has targeted.”

Jon Bernstein: What MPs’ expenses tells us about the clash between new and old media

The narrative is familiar to anyone who has followed the broader technology industry for any length of time – new triumphs over old.

The reality, inevitably, is more complex, more layered, more textured.

Certainly change is disruptive, but old technology rarely disappears completely. Rather it coexists with the new.

Just look around your office if you want proof of that.

You may not use the fax machine but someone does, and you’ve certainly sent a letter or made a call on the land line. Communication is not all mobiles, email and instant messaging.

As it is with technology, so it is with media.

And nothing demonstrates the laziness of the ‘winners and losers’ legend more than the domestic news story of the year – MPs’ expenses. Here we have seen the best of old and new media, one feeding off the other.

Let’s retrace our steps:

What was meant to be a public domain story, put there by a hard-fought freedom of information request, turned into an old-fashioned scoop.

The Daily Telegraph acquired the data and did a first class job poring over the numbers and putting in place an editorial diary for the drip-drip of expenses-related stories.

The first fruits of this were splashed across the front of the paper on Friday May 8 and, by my count, the story set – and led – the news agenda for the next 23 days.

To this point it was only a new media story in the sense that the Telegraph was enjoying an uplift in traffic – one in every 756 expenses-related searches led to the site.

But what the paper was offering was fairly conventional fare. It took others to do some really interesting things with it.

A fine example was work done by Lib Dem activist Mark Thompson who spotted a correlation between the safeness of an MP’s seat and the likelihood that they are involved in an expenses scandal.

Elsewhere, there were mash-ups, heat maps and the rest.

And then the deluge. Parliament released its data – albeit in redacted form – and for the first time the Daily Telegraph was in danger of losing ownership of the story to another newspaper.

True to type the Guardian offered the most interactive experience inviting readers to: “Investigate Your MPs expenses.”

Wired journalist Jeff Howe, the man credited with coining the phrase crowdsourcing, will nod approvingly at this development.

According to one definition Howe uses, crowdsourcing is ‘the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open cal’l.

In this instance the Guardian was taking a task traditionally performed by its journalists (designated agents) and outsourcing it to its readers.

Where the Telegraph did its own number-crunching, the Guardian farmed much of it to a third party, us.

So has the Guardian’s crowdsourcing experiment been a success?

On Sunday the paper boasted that almost 20,000 people had taken part, helping it to scour nearly 160,000 documents. So far so great. But by Wednesday, the number of documents examined by the army of volunteers was still 160,000.

With some 700,000+ receipts and other assorted papers to classify could it be that the Guardian’s efforts were running out of steam?

If they were, this didn’t stop its rival from following the lead.

One Telegraph correspondent may have dismissed those engaged in this kind of ‘collaborative investigative journalism’ as ‘Kool-Aid slurping Wikipedians’, but his paper seemed to take a different view.

By the middle of the week, the Telegraph was offering its far-less redacted expenses documents in PDF form and all its data in a Google spreadsheet, while simultaneously asking readers directly: “What have you spotted?”

Both papers – and the wider media come to that – have enriched our understanding of a complex and sprawling story. What started as a proprietorial scoop is now in the hands of the crowd.

Old media and new coexisting.

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is the first in a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.

Nieman Journalism Lab: Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s expenses experiment

A great post from the Nieman Journalism Lab, offering a US perspective on the Guardian’s feat with expenses data. The title says it all really: ‘Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment’.

Full post at this link…

Telegraph.co.uk: Guide to the full MP expenses database

Telegraph.co.uk has now published a searchable database of all MPs’ expenses. It reports:

“The searchable database will include exclusive documentary evidence as well as detailed figures assembled over recent weeks as part of an exhaustive investigation into Parliament’s expenses claims system.”

“In the coming weeks, the database will be extended to include the uncensored documentation for the claims, including receipts and correspondence with the Parlimentary authorities, of all MPs.”

Full guide at this link…

MPs’ expenses database at this link…

More to follow from Journalism.co.uk on users’ experiences later today. How have you found using the data provided by the Commons, the Guardian and the Telegraph? Drop judith at journalism.co.uk a line, or via Twitter to @jtownend.