Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.

Can you tell what it […]

The UK’s not considering introducing a “pure” proportional representation system – where number of votes translates entirely into number of seats – but comparing the status quo with what a ‘fair’ electoral system yileds interesting results.
It’s visualised below.
Highlights include:

92 extra seats for the lib dems
The BNP pick up 12 seats, UKIP get 20
Labour and the […]

Twitter makes some strange things possible. Earlier today, I sent a message to Joanna Geary having heard rumours she, like me, was attempting to learn some basic (in my case, very basic) coding.
Within a few minutes, coding over a beer was suggested. Within five more, we had a dozen potential takers. And a good few […]

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 […]