The Guardian reported over the weekend that the owner of the Daily Telegraph is understood to have called in a private investigative firm look at the leak of Vince Cable’s comments about Rupert Murdoch to the BBC.
The comments, which the Telegraph had decided not to include in its report, were published by the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, on his blog.
Telegraph Media Group said today that it does not comment on internal security matters.
BetaTales takes a look at a new project based on traffic accident data from journalists and programmers at Norwegian media house Bergens Tidende.
Accidents are apparently common fare in the Western part of Norway, with frequent news reports of collisions on the region’s narrow, winding roads.
With this in mind, journalists at Bergens Tidende approached the Norwegian Public Roads Administration armed with the Freedom of Information Act, eventually getting access to a database of all road accidents in the country.
The database turned out to be a journalistic goldmine: It contained details about 11,400 traffic accidents all over the country, all neatly arranged in an Excel file. Not only did the database give the exact position of each accident, but it also included numerous details, such as how many were killed and injured, the seriousness of injuries, driving conditions, type of vehicle, type of street, speed limit, time of the day, etc.
Still, most journalists would at this point probably have been happy to take a look at the database, extract some of the relevant accidents and made a couple of news stories based on them. In Bergens Tidende, though, the journalists instead were teamed up with programmers. Within a few weeks all the traffic accidents in the country had been put on a big Google map with endless ways to search the database.
Full story on BetaTales at this link.
“Killing Roads” project from Bergens Tidende at this link (Norwegian).
Bergens Tidende multimedia journalist Lasse Lambrechts talks about “Killing Roads”:
Earlier this month, Journalism.co.uk reported that the Observer would be seeking to distinguish between the case of ‘Operation Motorman’ and the phone-hacking scandal, after ‘confusion in the media’.
Operation Motorman was an investigation launched by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2003 into the use of private investigators to obtain personal information, claiming that evidence documented “literally thousands of section 55 offences” (Data Protection Act) with more than 300 journalists identified.
At the time the Observer released a statement to say that yes, the Observer has used the services of an outside agency in the past, “and while there were strong public interest defences for most of those cases, it is possible that some of the inquiries did not sufficiently fit that criteria”. As a result editor Roger Alton said action was taken to ensure “no inquiries will be made through outside agencies unless I believe that there is a compelling public interest to do so”.
However, following recent events in the separate phone-hacking investigation and speculation surrounding this, the Observer this weekend published a piece from its readers’ editor Stephen Pritchard, reinforcing its position that there “has never been any suggestion, let alone evidence, that the Observer has undertaken, commissioned or in any way been involved,” in phone hacking.
In relation to the issues surrounding Operation Motorman, current editor John Mulholland is said to have confirmed that Alton’s previous instruction “stands today”. Pritchard also outlines the sorts of stories journalists were using the services in relation to:
Former reporters told me they were working to uncover illegal arms deals, drugs trafficking, Islamic terrorism and political intrigue; stories they believed to be in the public interest that went on to appear in the paper. They said that the names that turn up in [Steve] Whittamore‘s register were people who would be, in the main, hard to find; individuals who would not make themselves available for interview. They felt it was right that they should attempt to find those people and put allegations to them. Sometimes, they would be up against tight deadlines and would use Whittamore because he was quicker at finding phone numbers or converting numbers into subscriber addresses.
Harrow Council is considering plans to proactively publish all information that would be released under an FOI request, reports the Lawyer.
Harrow has seen a 160 per cent increase in the number of FOI requests over the past two years, and Peart believes the move would almost eliminate the cost burden of dealing with FOI requests.
It is estimated that local authorities collectively spend £34m handling requests each year.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is calling on reporters from across the globe to enter its Daniel Pearl award scheme.
The competition is open to any journalist of any nationality working in any medium, as long as the story they submit involves reporting in at least two different countries on a topic of global significance.
The ICIJ awards were renamed in 2008 in memory of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed by Pakistan militants in 2002.
Two first prizes of US$5,000 go to a US-based and non-US reporter/news team. Five additional finalists will each receive US$1,000.
Last year’s winners included a group of reporters from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, the Guardian and the BBC, who exposed oil trader Trafigura for dumping toxic waste in Côte d’Ivoire. There were 86 entries including stories covering more than 60 countries.
More information and entry forms here.
Clay Shirky, author and professor at New York University’s interactive telecommunications programme, has contributed to the Guardian’s Comment if Free with an analysis of WikiLeaks’ effect on the media and publishing environment.
WikiLeaks, as my colleague Jay Rosen points out, is a truly transnational media organisation. We have many international media organisations, of course, Havas and the BBC and al-Jazeera, but all of those are still headquartered in one country. WikiLeaks is headquartered on the web; there is no one set of national laws that can be brought to bear on it, nor is there any one national regime that can shut it down
…
WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading.
Journalist and computer scientist Jonathan Stray has posted an interesting breakdown of what he calls “computational journalism”, a kind of parent term for data journalism, visualisation, computational linguistics, communications technology, filtering, research and more.
I’d like to propose a working definition of computational journalism as the application of computer science to the problems of public information, knowledge, and belief, by practitioners who see their mission as outside of both commerce and government. This includes the journalistic mainstay of “reporting” — because information not published is information not known — but my definition is intentionally much broader than that.
Stray has put together a reading list under each sub-header (including our very own ‘How to: get to grips with data journalism‘).
Worth a read.
The Center for Public Integrity, a US non-profit investigative journalism organisation, will provide exclusive content to Newsweek and the Daily Beast as part of a new agreement announced this week.
The Center’s executive director William Buzenberg said in a statement today that the new deal is a “tremendous opportunity” for the organisation to provide its journalism to a new audience and get paid for its work.
The New York Times is considering setting up its own in-house version of WikiLeaks, according to editor Bill Keller.
Keller told Yahoo’s The Cutline blog that he is “looking at something along the lines” of Al Jazeera’s Transparency Unit, which was instrumental in the recent publication of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera and the Guardian.
“Nothing is nailed down”, according to Keller, but he has sketched out the idea behind the possible division:
A small group from computer-assisted reporting and interactive news, with advice from the investigative unit and the legal department, has been discussing options for creating a kind of EZ Pass lane for leakers.
The New York Times was one of three media partners – including the Guardian and der Spiegel – that worked with WikiLeaks on the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs.
The NYT was also one of five newspapers that had advanced access to WikiLeaks’ next release, the US embassy cables. It was subsequently revealed however that the NYT was forced to obtain its copy of the cable from the Guardian, having been cut out of the loop by WikiLeaks.
Given the difficulty Keller had in obtaining advanced access to the embassy cables, and the general risks of relying on organisations such as WikiLeaks, we may yet see many more national news organisations following suit and establishing their own sections to deal directly with leaks.
WikiLeaks is seeking up to 60 additional media partners to help speed up the publication of its massive cache of US embassy cables, the Associated Press reports.
Editor-in-chief of the whistleblowers’ site Julian Assange told the AP that he wants to reach beyond traditional media organisations such as the Guardian, the New York Times and der Spiegel, with which he has worked on previous releases.
Assange has previously expressed frustration with the slow pace of the release of the secret diplomatic cables, and said releasing country-specific files to selected local media would serve to push them out faster.
Sometimes, that could mean doing what Assange called “triangulating the politics of a country” — giving documents to a left-wing paper in a country with a right-wing government, or offering cables to conservative titles in countries with a left-leaning administration.