News organisations across the country will today be running stories based on a report by Big Brother Watch into the amount spent on CCTV surveillance by local authorities (PDF). The treatment of this report is a lesson in how journalists approach figures, and why context is more important than raw figures. BBC Radio WM, for example, led this morning on
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The Birmingham Mail has been trying its hand at data journalism with school admissions data. It’s a good place to start - the topic attracts a lot of interest (and so justifies the investment of time) while people tend to be interested in more than just who finishes top and bottom of the tables (justifying the choice of medium). The results are
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View Birmingham’s parking ticket hotspots in a larger map Today the Birmingham Post publishes the first story to come out of the crowdsourcing platform I’ve been creating - Help Me Investigate. It’s about parking ticket hotspots in Birmingham*. UPDATE: The Birmingham Mail have also published a report, from which the map above comes. The site has only been public for a
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Why it pays to respond to your comments
This story was originally published at Poynter. Republished here for archiving purposes. Newspapers take a lot of flak when they or mis-attribute or fail to acknowledge the work of bloggers and members of the public in reporting a story, so it was refreshing to see my two local newspapers quickly respond to amend online reports following a number of corrective comments. But
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online journalism • Tags: birmingham mail, Birmingham Post, comments, poynter, steve nicholls, tom scotney • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post