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 […]
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 is yet?
Maybe not. What the Independent have done is confuse the UK’s deficit with our debt. Sounds like splitting hairs, but it’s not.
Let’s demonstrate using my personal finances, which are in almost as parlous a state as those of our great nation.
As a recent graduate, I have around £20,000 debt, repayments for which whoosh out of my bank account on direct debit. Thanks to overspending on beer, office snacks and (ahem) gym memberships, I spend around £50-a-month more than I earn, after I’ve paid all my bills.
To get back on an even keel, I don’t need to pay off my £20,000 debt: all I need to do is get a £600-a-year pay raise (which works out at £50-a-month), or spend £50 less.
So cancelling my gym membership, saving myself £20 each month, leaves me with just £30-a-month to find. It means I’ve tackled about half of my monthly shortfall.
It doesn’t mean I’ve saved £20, and have £19,980 to go. In fact, I haven’t paid back any of my debt. The regular repayments from my bank account will (eventually) sort that out. I just need to stop going further into debt each month.
The government is in exactly the same position. Provided debt isn’t ridiculous, and we’re making our repayments, we’re fine. The UK’s debt is just shy of £900bn. The cuts announced on Monday do nothing to address it.
The UK’s deficit (the gap between the government’s income and spending) is around £157bn. Most economists think around £48bn of this is temporary, due solely to the recession. That means around £109bn of cuts need to be found. So, in fairness to the Indie, the £6bn still remains a small fraction of the whole. There’s much worse to come.
In other words, a national broadsheet newspaper made the debt problem look around eight times worse than it is, doubtless worrying (or at the very least) confusing its readers. And it used the whole of its front page to do so.
It’ll be interesting to see how they deal with it. An error of such magnitude against a corporation would doubtless result in lawsuits. That obviously won’t happen in this case, but the Indie does owe its readers an apology, and a prominent correction.
I’m a sucker for a nice infographic (okay, a nice bit of chartporn). But data is important. As more and more is released and done with it, it’s crucial journalists learn to treat it properly - and that’ll only come when it’s treated with the same respect (and fear) that surrounds misspelling someone’s name.
That’s still a long, long way off.
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:
Let me know what you think. The systems being mooted in the UK would result in something between this visualisation and the status quo - a pure list system isn’t under consideration, so consider this as for illustrative purposes only.
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 programmers offering their expertise.
So what the heck? Let’s give it a go.
We’re going to try to learn Ruby. This is because it’s meant to be fairly learn-able (we’ll see…), but also because it’s handy for all the kind of web apps journos might want: quick and messy data-driven projects, scraping, searches, and the like.
So, the plan is to find a pub with wifi (and beer), bring laptops, a few tutorials, and make a start. If it goes well, we’ll try to do it once a month or so and learn some stuff. If we’re lucky, someone might even do a 10-15 minute introduction (any volunteers?).
We’re suggesting meeting at 7pm on Wednesday 31st March. The (unconfirmed) venue is The Regent, a mere stone’s throw from Angel station. Bring your own laptop!
Hopefully, it’ll all be great. For anyone feeling keen, here’s a nice basic guide to installing Ruby and here’s a crazy-and-offbeat introduction/guide to it.
I’d love to get an idea of numbers so if you fancy coming along, please chuck me an email (james@jamesrb.co.uk) or send me an @ message on twitter (this is me).
Provided we find a free venue (which is looking good), it’ll be free of charge. Win.
Hope to see some of you there!
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 being buried behind what otherwise looks like nothing more than sneering at an earnest new rival.
Anyone is entitled to publish a paper full of crap, just like anyone‘s entitled to mock it. The problem with The London Weekly isn’t that the product is dire – it’s instead the gaping chasm between its hype and its reality.
Over-trained cynics suggested the product was a hoax. The reality looks grimmer: it’s a real operation making some wild claims which look increasingly fantastic the longer they stay under the spotlight.
To those who’d believe the hype, The London Weekly is a slick operation backed by five private equity investors to the tune of £10.5m. It’s hired a 50-strong editorial team, works out of Camden-based offices, and has undertaken market research on its target audience for the benefit of prospective advertisers.
The apparent reality is a ramshackle publication run out of a small room in Hackney, produced remotely by nine or ten relatively-unknown freelancers.
Many of its claimed staff are non-existent, much of its content is copied-and-pasted, and nothing involved seems to be registered at Companies House.
It’s a copy/paste world
Much of the London Weekly’s content is copied from other sources – and so is its market research.
Freelance photographer Jonathan Warren has produced an excellent Flickr gallery showing just how much of the latest issue of the paper is directly copied and pasted from other sources.
Copying and pasting from press releases is lousy journalism but legally perfectly acceptable. Lifting content from other publications, without attribution and for commercial gain, is a different proposition. That’s certainly been the case with some of the commercial content, but may not be the case on the editorial side - much of the directly ‘lifted’ material noticed by Warren is from agency Bangshowbiz, with whom TLW may well have a commercial relationship.
But copyright owners trying to get in touch are going to have problems. Neither The London Weekly nor Global Publishing Group are registered in any form at Companies House. Even finding the company’s Hackney headquarters takes digging. Anyone wishing to sue for libel would have similar problems.
No-one at the publication has responded to any questioning on the legal status of the company, but anyone who may want to chase up copyright or attribution issues will have great difficulties finding the legal entity that publishes the paper.
Some point out the Global Publishing Group claims to be a partnership, which would not need to be registered. It would be atonishingly unusual, but possible, for anyone to invest in a newspaper (exposed to libel and other legal issues) without limiting their liability, either through a ltd company or a limited-liability partnership. Both of those steps require registration at Companies House.
Advertisers risk a similar quandary. The TLW site says the paper is read by “250,000 young adults aged 15-44 in the central belt per week. This equates to a readership of over 1.5 million readers (excluding online per month)”
This paragraph is lifted directly from an advertising pack for the Metro – in Scotland (PDF) (which explains references to the “central belt”). Anyone advertiser taking such a claim at face value might find themselves short-changed: numerous rivals, PR experts and bloggers commented on how difficult The London Weekly was to find, throwing doubt on the quoted 250,000 print run.
Once again, the paper refused to comment on any of these issues, and has not disclosed its printer. Its circulation claims are unaudited.
Why transparency matters
Rightly or wrongly, few of us are likely to shed tears for advertisers who fall victim to over-eager hyping. But they’re not the only people whose judgement may have been thrown by what can – even on the most generous possible interpretation – be described as plagiarised over-hyping.
The people who’ve really been jerked about are prospective employees, and perhaps even those who got hired. In the wake of the widespread coverage of the new freesheet when it was first announced last year, laid-off sales staff from the London Lite, Metro, London Paper and other publications sent CVs.
After signing NDAs (which as they refer to non-registered entities would likely be unenforceable), some were offered sales jobs: based entirely on commission.
One such individual was offered the role of “advertising director” having never so much as spoken to anyone on the title. He was expected to work with no basic pay, but instead would receive 35% commission on advertising sold. Unsurprisingly, he decided to decline the offer.
However, others may have been more desperate. The question is whether TLW’s hype – and much of the media’s willingness to re-print it with little to no checking – influenced some into making a different decision. It is one thing to work commission-only for a company with £10.5m cash behind it, another to work for a new start-up. People may be willing to work for either, but deserve an informed choice.
Editorial staff faced a similar dilemma. TLW’s masthead was lifted directly from Entertainment Weekly (names were then changed). Some staff named appeared not to exist: the editor-in-chief shared a name with Mother Theresa, the web designer returned no results on google, and the Guardian found others named in connection with the mag said they’d had no involvement for months, and never received payment.
One prospective intern recounted being interviewed in a dingy corridor, asked to work during term-time for no expenses, and told she’d need to use her own laptop. She (sensibly) declined the generous offer.
The likely backer?
The London Weekly is almost certainly the latest project of the Invincible Group, which is either a huge PR and media conglomerate with offices on Wall Street, or a similarly unregistered operation which operates from the same single room in Hackney.
In addition to sharing an address, Invincible and TLW also share several staff - one of whom referred on-air to TLW as Invincible’s new newspaper. Characteristically, to date, no-one at TLW or Invincible has commented formally on any connection.
Invincible has run several awards ceremonies for years: charging guests to play at events, nominees to visit them, and sponsors to advertise there. Founder Jordan Kensington has been quoted in several national papers, and even appeared on the BBC. The Londown Weekly, needless to say, is already planning its own awards. Sound familiar?
Invincible throws up even more questions than The London Weekly - and has some strangely-similar mysteries. These are linked in full at the bottom of this post, but mysteries include an investors relations page copied-and-pasted from Ryan Air; £5m investment from an unregistered company and an online radio station with a claims to have 1.2 million listeners but which in reality has only 12 ‘followers’ and fewer than 4,000 pageviews since 2008 - a figure which suggests fewer than six listeners tuned in each day.
No Invincible company appears to be registered at Companies House. No-one from the group has responded to any request for comment, whether made directly by email or in previous blog posts.
A cautionary tale
The London Weekly’s grammar is atrocious, its headlines are hilarious, and its design is a mess. Were its commercial foundations clear, its legal status public, and its ownership cleared up, these would be of no concern – though many would undoubtedly have some fun sniping.
But until the paper publicly tackles the many substantive concerns around its existence, advertisers and prospective employees alike might be advised to tread very, very carefully. If nothing else, asking for an explanation of why its circulation figures seem to relate to a Central Scottish region seems reasonable, no?
The other cautionary tale from the whole sorry saga is for those who trust the media. One ex-London Lite staffer said he had checked out The London Weekly through googling it, and seeing it covered in the journalism and PR trade press, was happy to accept it at face value.
Many media publications subsequently did some quality digging, though others are still churning out terrible fare. Some included sceptical notes in their very first posts (though often didn’t immediately dig deeper). But such publications owe their readers more – especially those who went on to sneer at TLW’s re-printing of press releases after themselves accepting much of the paper’s hype.
Barring any spectacular developments, this will be my final post on The London Weekly: there are bigger and nastier fish out there much more deserving of frying. Though I’ll continue following the great work being done at Help Me Investigate, for me the real story of The London Weekly has been a simple tale on the power of hype.
In other words, fake it ‘til you make it – it’s easier than you think.
The full list of questions sent to The London Weekly last week can be found here. Any response will be published here in full.
If you’ve got any info, either get in touch with me at james@jamesrb.co.uk or go to Help Me Investigate here.
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 title was a hoax was up for grabs.
Those not up-to-date on the title can catch up with my two previous posts (here and here), Help Me Investigate’s frankly brilliant efforts and Media Guardian’s excellent liveblog from Friday.
But digging and speculation will only get us so far. We have found many, many questions, old and new. Now, it feels like time to get some answers, and only the Invincible Group or The London Weekly – or someone close to them – can provide them.
Below is the full text of an email sent to the editorial and commercial teams of the newspaper, and to its parent Invincible. It contains many questions, some fairly difficult. Virtually all need answers if The London Weekly wants to win any credibility with its sceptics – which by now almost certainly includes potential advertisers – and shake off its highly questionable corporate status.
If you know the answer to any question, or have anything else worth asking, either drop me an email (james@jamesrb.co.uk) or use the comments thread below.
If you’re also keen to get answers - or have extra questions of your own - please feel free to RT, repost or add more in the comments.
Re: The London Weekly and the Invincible Group
To whom it may concern,
The launch last week of your new freesheet, The London Weekly, generally met with less-than-favourable reactions. Some thought the product was poor, many thought it stood no chance, and what must be a worrying number of people suspected a hoax. Others had still graver misgivings.
It’s not exactly the PR any new start-up would hope for. So in the interests of putting an end to the speculation, and giving The London Weekly and its owners a chance to clear the record, I’ve gathered together all the major questions regarding the title.
There are quite a few. Scores of people, including myself; Judith Townend of journalism.co.uk; the users of helpmeinvestegate.com; Media Guardian and Twitter users @Coneee, @Kjalee, @VickyJo, @MartinStabe and @PaulMcNally found a string of inconsistencies and puzzling items.
I’ve grouped them together below, and edited them down. All should be straightforward questions for any startup, and answers would serve to reassure readers, potential advertisers, journalists and bloggers as to the viability of the paper. If nothing else, on one or two points, it could serve as a chance to clear the slate.
I will be publishing this letter in full on jamesrb.co.uk. I will publish any response received either by email or on that blog, in full – and promote it on twitter. I will also be encouraging anyone who knows anything about the project to provide answers. For ease, I have numbered the questions, and separated them into subject areas.
Ownership
Commercial
Editorial
Invincible
…And finally
I look forward to your answers to these points – largely so I can then get on with my life – and to hopefully laying my hands on a copy of the paper.
Best,
James Ball
Jamesrb.co.uk
@Jamesrbuk (Twitter)
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 and find out what’s going on - ideally before Friday.
Highlights from the assorted investigations so far include:
-Global Publishing Group is headed by one Agnes A. Theresa - better known as Mother Theresa of Calcutta.
-Until I wrote this post, searching for Arol Figueroldo resulted in a googlewhack, making him perhaps the world’s only web professional with absolutely no presence whatsoever on the net
-The staff that j.co.uk and guardian.co.uk managed to track down appear to be freelance. One said he had not heard from anyone involved in TLW for months, and had never received any payment.
But perhaps more significantly - if less entertaining - further evidence emerged around the link between Invincible Radio and The London Weekly first uncovered weeks ago by Guardian commentors.
Angus Auden, one of the most prolific posters on thelondonweekly.co.uk, doubles as a DJ for Invincible Radio. A company which agreed a promotion with The London Weekly was given an address in London, and shared this with Judith Townend.
Here’s the location in question:
Unit 107,
203 Mare Studios,
London,
E8 3QE
Shockingly, this address also happens to be the headquarters of Invincible Radio, which is lniked very closely to Invinciblemag.com, and also the grandly-named Invincible Group.
Invincible shares many traits with The London Weekly: big talk, broken links, mismatched dates and empty space where Companies House listings should be. However, if the connection is more than coincidental, the name behind The London Weekly may have emerged.
It is worth noting that this link could be circumstantial – if Angus Auden is an Invincible DJ who did some freelance work for TLW, he may have used this office address as a location when trying to get promoters for thelondonweekly.co.uk.
The alternative is that the two ventures are linked.
Firstly, the above address is genuine office space, owned by Workspace Group and available on monthly lease. Unit 307 is currently for lease at circa £800/month.
As is rapidly becoming familiar, there are no existing or dissolved companies registered at UK Companies House bearing the name “Invincible Group”, “Invincible Media Group”, “Invincible Magazine” or “Invincible Radio”. This is despite a claim on the company’s site that Invincible was founded in London in 1999.
Invincible Ltd is a real, dormant company. It was founded in 2003, based in Surrey. It doesn’t seem to be related to the group.
Invinciblegroup.com (grandiosely) has an Investor Relations page. This is just plain text, with no links to any financial statements. Some statements appear to be garbage – I have no idea to what “Latest Passenger figures” would even refer if the link did work.
The page mentions listings on the Irish stock exchange and Nasdaq. I have been unable to find either.
The sites don’t appear to be particularly successful. Invincibleradio.com operates from an online streaming service, and has just 12 followers.
Invinciblemag.com claims to be the no. 1 bi-monthly urban music magazine. Its forums are populated entirely with spam. While it has a string of news posts over the last week or so, there is nothing in ‘Fashion News’ between September 2009 and late Jan 2010.
Similarly, there is no ‘Music News’ between November 2009 and Jan 2010. This is a pattern repeated throughout the site. Many sections have no content since 2006. The ‘subscribe’ and ‘about us’ links on the site are dead.
Another group site, http://www.britishmusicweek.com/ claims to have over 200,000 users and a partnership with British Airways. It has 0 groups, 0 discussions and 3 wall posts.
“Serial entrepeneur” Jordan Kensington is named as the founder of Invincible - and surprise surprise is something of an enigma. His wikipedia profile was created and maintained by a user named Bilingual87. This user has only edited his page and Invincible’s on the site. His profile has only existed since April 2009, despite Invincible’s claim to have existed since 1999.
Invincible Media Group’s wiki page was created on the same day (24 April 2009), by the same user. The group is referred to as a “holding company” – but is not listed on Companies House. Nor are the other companies referred to on the page.
One thing, however, does check out: the Urban Music Awards are real, and Kensington is involved. This guardian story relates to violence at the awards in 2004 – however, generally speaking they have attracted very little coverage. A google news archive search results in suprisingly few hits.
Happily, Kensington can be found on twitter.
The next task – the one that leaps out – is for someone to track down Jordan Kensington and see if he has any involvement with The London Weekly. And if so, why he’s kept his involvement such a secret.
Over to you.
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 attracted attention: its launch was covered in Media Guardian, Press Gazette, Brand Republic, and The Independent.
But commenters on almost all the sites, were skeptical to say the least. After spending a few minutes in more-or-less idle discussion of the venture with @martinstabe and @paulmcnally, it was easy to see why.
There’s nothing to suggest The London Weekly is anything other than what it seems - but the site throws up plenty of questions.
Updates have been sporadic, based largely on press release material - with all the front page content written by two users, and comments from Guardian readers on the design have been uncomplimentary at best. For a company claiming £10.5m investment, it’s certainly basic.
But there’s more. The staff page throws up questions. Despite listing over 50 staff, there are no contact numbers and just one email address.
The “chief of reporters” is listed in the library department. Many of the staff throw up virtually no results on google (“Leah Fogerty” is a good example). Others do have some journalistic presence.
Curiously, no-one I asked this evening saw any form of advertisement for these jobs on any of the popular forums. Given there’s hardly a surfeit of journalistic jobs at present, that’s a bit on an unusual situation. How was the team hired? Where are they based?
They’re certainly not based at the address given on the website’s whois record. That gives a registered address of 2 Old Brompton Rd. Google Street View shows this is a FedEx PO Box site.
Even that’s not the biggest question mark The London Weekly throws up. The next one’s a doozy: London Weekly claims to be owned by a five-strong partnership called Global Publishing Group. There’s no record of this company on UK Companies House, either as a limited company or a limited liability partnership.
Odd.
The highest google match for Global Publishing Group is gpg.com. This site has been registered for 15 years to one Anoosh Hosseini, resident in California. The state’s register of businesses has no records of a company bearing that name. Given London Weekly says GPG was founded in 2008, my summation would be that gpg.com is entirely unrelated, leaving a mystery: who on earth actually owns TLW?
Despite covering the site themselves, journalism.co.uk did some substantive digging. Reporter Judith Townend did notice that The London Weekly Limited was incorporated on 17 December 2009.
Unfortunately, if anything, this only serves to muddy the waters even further. The London Weekly Ltd appears to operate thelondonweekly.net, a site which (somewhat oddly given the company’s incorporation date) says it has operated since 2005. The site is registered, once again, to a PO box.
The sole director of TLW Ltd is Oleg Kozerod, based from a residential address in Urmston. Kozerod has a Wikipedia page claiming he is a “well-known journalist, history researcher and Doctor of Historical Sciences…and co-owner of The London Weekly (2007)”.
This wikipedia page was first created just days ago, on 23 January, by a user named “Marina bauer”. This user has never made any other contributions to the site.
Search results for Kozerod on Google Scholar are astonishingly scarce, despite his apparent status as a well-published academic.
Whether The London Weekly Ltd is a strange sideshow or (as Judith townend wondered) somehow related to the Global Publishing Group enigma is for now immaterial - there’s certainly no decent answers now.
Instead, we appear to have a situation in which two national papers and several trade websites received a press release from an unknown group claiming to have raised millions of pounds, recruited dozens of staff, and collected the apparatus to publish a London freesheet within weeks (a venture at which both News International and Associated failed).
The outlets then appear to have taken all these claims - to greater or lesser degrees - on trust.
And whether The London Weekly turns out to be all that it claims to be or not, that’s bad journalism.
At a time when journalists are constantly having to state and prove the case for professional reporting, the outlets nearest that front line were utterly beaten by their readers - many of whom found some of these key details within minutes of the news posts.
Others found even more details, and even speculated whether TLW was some elaborate SEO ploy.
Media hacks know better than any of us how vehement the arguments around the future of news are getting. They know how much trouble the industry is in. It’s why more than anyone else, they need to show what reporters can offer than unpaid enthusiasts can’t.
On this occasion, I’m far from sure they did.
As to The London Weekly, personally, I’ll be surprised if I see a copy come Friday. But in an ideal world, someone will have found out whether I will or not well before then.
Finding the questions was easy. Answering them might prove a bit trickier. There’s time to pull this one out of the bag yet - here’s hoping.
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 afflicted by the same issues. We shouldn’t.
The next UK general election is unlikely to be hit by an onset of fraud, though woefully inadequate postal voting controls make it at least a possibility.
The reality is that generally, expense claims aside, the UK’s political parties are generally honest. Our problem is an electoral system that is out of date, unrepresentative, and plain unfair. And it’s not voters for smaller parties that have the big problem. It’s the Conservatives.
The most recent October polls give the Conservative party a 10 to 17 percentage point poll lead over Labour. But thanks to the unusual distribution of voters in the UK (Conservatives remain concentrated in the south-east of the country) and outdated constituency borders, that might not lead to the landslide you’d think.
Prof Steve Fisher of Oxford University calculates that if the Liberal Democrats and other smaller parties were to retain the vote share they took in 2005, the Conservatives could secure a 10-point poll lead over Labour and still not secure a majority.
In fact, if the Conservatives polled anywhere between 1 and 10 points higher than Labour, they would be unlikely secure a majority in the Commons. Even if the Liberal Democrats only polled at their current level of 18% (in 2005 they hit 22%), the Conservative party would need a lead of more than 9 points in the polls to form the next government without the aid of a coalition.
Given polls tighten in the run-up to almost any election, it’s far from inconceivable that Cameron’s party could secure a virtual landslide in the popular vote and still fail to form the next government – a situation that makes George Bush narrowly securing the Presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote look virtually entirely sensible.
By contrast, if Labour managed to even match the Conservative vote share, they’d have a small majority in Parliament, and form the next government. The outcome of the next election might be decided by the voters, but the voting system reflects their demands very poorly.
In 2005 Labour received 27,000 votes for each Westminster seat it secured. For each Conservative seat, they received over 44,000. For smaller parties, it was much worse: 115,000 people voted Liberal Democrat for each MP elected, while more than 600,000 people voted for UKIP without a single MP gaining a seat.
Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats respectively received 35%, 32% and 22% of our votes in 2005. Thanks to our warped electoral system, this turned into 55%, 31% and 10% of seats in Westminster. If the role of democracy is to represent the will of the people, the UK’s voting system is doing a terrible job.
The UK might be the mother of Parliaments, and has a fairly-solid claim to be the world’s oldest democracy. That’s no reason for complacency. Indeed, it should be the opposite.
Many people support the constituency system for selecting MPs, to keep links between communities and parliamentarians strong. But we should not assume, without a genuine national debate, that an electoral system which distorts the will of the voters is a price worth paying for this link. Regional top-ups, such as those used for the Scottish Parliament or Welsh Assembly.
UK voters are among the luckiest in the world. Unlike Afghani voters, we will be able to go to the ballot box without fear. We can be confident their votes will be counted. We can be sure their vote is free.
Under this system, we can’t be sure it’s fair. It’s time to rethink it.
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 - naturally - there’s a problem.
Take the photo selected for the first mailout to party members from general secretary Ray Collins:
The photo’s of the recently St Helens Hospital in Merseyside. The hospital was built as part of a £338m redevelopment of acute hospitals in the area. So far, so good.
The problem is, that £338m wasn’t investment. It was debt. St Helens Hospital was bought on the never-never, as part of the Government’s PFI scheme.
The repayments for the St Helens redevelopment, over the next 30 years, will total a huge £1.65bn. Repayments only started last year - at £30m a year. By the time of the next election, less than £65m will have been paid off, leaving future governments with over £1.5bn still to pay off.
And that’s just one of over 100 NHS PFI projects.
Yes, we have the shiny new hospital now. But it’s the next government - and the one after that, and the one after that (and so on for seven to eight government terms) that get the privelage of paying for it.
Is that really what Labour want to highlight as one of the triumphs of its time in office?
Update: See the data behind this story - and investigate your local hospital PFI - here.
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 of tickets issued in the last year. I posted a few (rambling) thoughts on the figures on the site, while this guy did a rather more thorough job. With graphs. The Birmingham Post then ran the story in full - and to its credit, cited HMI thoroughly.
All great stuff. And now the site’s out of beta, users are no longer restricted to asking questiond about Birmingham, which must come as a relief to users outside the West Midlands.
The only problem is, I’m worried it might just leave me jobless. Which would be, as they say, a bit of a bugger.
Data is slowly, painstakingly, starting to catch on in UK journalism. Computer Assisted Reporting, as data journalism is clunkily and unhelpfully dubbed, is huge in the US, with almost every paper having a CAR editor and many having full CAR teams. In the UK, the situation’s different - outside the web team and tech desk, even reporters able to do a bit of excel analysis are few and far between.
The Centre of Investigative Journalism has been spearheading a move to change that. Each year it flies over US CAR experts to train up UK journos, who are also being encouraged to start training up their newsrooms, and current journalism students in using data to produce stories (not mashups, not cool data, not spreadsheets, though all are nice - the emphasis is on stories).
Thanks to their efforts, and some damn good work priming the pump from some early freelance adopters - including (yet again) Heather Brooke - a bit of a market is starting to emerge. Stories based on FOI and data analysis will sell, just. Slowly it’s becoming possible to practise this newer brand of investigative journalism. With a bit of momentum, it could yet hit the newsrooms proper, as compared to chequebook journalism, this is cheap as chips.
And here’s where Help Me Investigate, despite its brilliance, gives me chills. Some of the best data journalism is incredibly complex, fraught with legal issues, and inordinately time-consuming. Some downright middling data journalism comes close. This article on police compensation was a CAR story.
The most complex bit of data-analysis in that story was simply working out rates per 100,000. But gathering FOI data from 43 police forces, in different formats, getting them into one sheet, cleaning the data, and working out reliable population estimates was both lengthy and dull. Then the real work started: contacting each force before publication to give chance to respond - then dealing with each force coming up with a string of excuses and (much lower) revised numbers. This relatively straightforward story ended up taking well over 50 man hours.
Most don’t. But if papers can get stories that look and feel like “investigations” from sites like HMI very cheaply - even free - the rationale for hiring data journalists or buying in their stories gets weaker, especially given the newsroom climate of constant cost-cutting.
Projects like the Birmingham car parking tickets investigation are great targets for collaberation, work everyone should be glad is being done, and perfectly suited to sites like HMI. The more complex stuff is likely less so. It would be a crying shame if a scheme like HMI led to less of this work being done.
There is an alternative school of thought that leads to a virtuous circle - data journalists can work with HMI on some investigations and keep a steady stream of compartively straightforward stories flowing. The journalists most eager to help out on the site will have the inside track to publish, and in turn will also have more of their own time to work on the complex stuff that takes full-time workers.
If CAR were more established in the UK, and newsroom culture wasn’t what it is, I’d tend immediately towards this latter happy option. But at present, the majority of the UK’s data journos do their stories as freelancers - and losing this sort of low-hanging fruit both hits income (and given the “news mix”) makes the pitching battle harder.
It would be a crying shame if the brilliantly intentioned - and rather nicely executed - social journalism project that is HMI actually ended up stifling a fledgling journalistic field. Maybe I’m far too negative. But it does seem the risk is there.
With thanks to the twittered contributions and back-and-forth from:
@paulbradshaw and @podnosh - two of the site’s founders
and @rasga and @coneee
Thoughts gratefully received…
