The London Weekly is quickly turning into a much-loved in-joke for the capital’s journalists. Hacks and commenters alike are delighting in pointing out grammatical errors, terrible headlines and typographical car-crashes.
But the real story of The London Weekly – or at least what we know of it so far – is much less funny, and risks […]

The London Weekly finally hit the streets last Friday, and the lucky few who got their hands on it weren’t impressed.
The release of the typo-filled chip-wrapping served only to fuel a wave of mystery around the launch: who was actually writing the paper, who’s funding it, why do no companies exist – even whether the […]

Yesterday’s post on the deepending mystery that is The London Weekly triggered a heck of a lot more twitter interested than expected, and spurred some solid extra posts from both journalism.co.uk and Media Guardian.
Better yet, Judith Townend has established a crowdsourced investigation into TLW on the excellent Help Me Investigate for anyone interested to try […]

This Friday supposedly heralds the launch of a new London freesheet, The London Weekly. Each Friday and Saturday, the ambitious new venture will distribute 250,000 copies to eager Londoners.
Coming just weeks after the closure of The London Paper and London Lite, the publication - which says it has a 50-strong editorial staff - has certainly […]

Yesterday, Hamid Karzai was officially declared Afghan president for a second term after an election marred by widespread vote rigging and fraud.
Those of us lucky to live in a stable and developed democracy like the UK will rest easy that our election – which is now no more than six months away – won’t be […]

Labour has a neat piece of crowdsourcing going on at the moment, under the banner of “Change we See”.
Party supporters are being asked to send photos of new hospitals, schools and sure start centres to help remind the public what Labour investment has achieved. It’s a nice idea, and it never hurts to be positive.
But […]

Below are my thoughts on another recent Help Me Investigate project - this time looking at Birmingham Council’s use of the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which allows covert surveillance powers for investigating misdemeanours.
Figures released in response to this FOI request by Paul Bradshaw reveal - I believe, at first glance - that Birmingham […]

Help Me Investigate is - quite simply - fantastic. It’s a site designed to help people collaberate on investigations, usually based around questions. An early question was “on which Birmingham streets are the most parking tickets issued?”. And it’s been answered in style.
Heather Brooke used Freedom of Information to get hold of the full record […]

Gathered the below information for the excellent - and newly out of beta - helpmeinvestigate.com . Unfortunately, a gremlin in the system stopped this post appearing over there. So it’s here.
Right, here’s a round up of what’s out there through FOI so far - this is a frequently-FOI’d topic. Here’s what’re released - and what […]

Nigel Farrage and his UK Independence Party are keen to spout how 75% of the UK’s laws are made in the European Parliament (dubious itself - guesstimates vary from 9% to 85%).
So it’s odd, then, that they put in so little effort in the EU parliament. On Thursday, Farrage told the BBC Question Time audience […]