James you are right that we need many ways to get good public information to the public. I’m not against print or other forms of traditional media. I think government of varying form should use them.

It is thought the digital tools that make both publishing and data mashing considerably easier, that’s really why I mention them.

The point I’m making here is that rather than trying to stop council’s publishing more we need to let them get on with it regardless of what the papers say, but make sure we have robust standards for that growth in publishing. Again, for me this brings us back to transparency being at the core of those standards.

My view would be that councils should be as free to publish as any other organisations. But they’re not an alternative to good local journalism, and there are issues about the amount of taxpayers’ money that goes into PR.

The issue used to be that council publications were unfair competition to local papers, and if local papers died, there’d be a municipal monopoly. But newspaper recruitment advertising is dying anyway, so that won’t be the issue much longer – newspapers have to find a different financial model.

I suspect good, inquiring local papers will be a bit of a niche product in future. But I can see a burgeoning of local online journalism that will help to hold councils to account – though it’s likely to be partisan stuff done by people with a cause or an axe to grind.

Local newspapers are in crisis and need to reinvent themselves very soon. Some council papers may hasten local newspapers to their grave, but banning them won’t deal with the chronic sickness.

To “high quality and easily re-usable” I’d also like to examine how we can reach large numbers of the UK population with simple and intuitive means of accessing this information.

It’s very easy to get seduced with the increasing number of opportunities made available via social media tools, data feeds and aggregators, and on-demand distribution platforms but how many people living in the UK would even understand this sentence? Certainly a large proportion of my friends and family wouldn’t understand what I was talking about.

So, yes, free the data, transparency is vital, but please don’t underestimate the challenge of making it easily available to everyone who pays their council tax.

At the moment public trust in both the public bodies and the papers is threatened by a sense of “not beliving anything you’re told” – forcing papers to interpet information (where they would be better served by showing context) or councils to backtrack along the road to openness helps no-one.