Tagged: Channel 4

When data goes bad

Bad data on sex trafficking: flow chart
Image by Lauren York on the Data Journalism Blog

Data is so central to the decision-making that shapes our countries, jobs and even personal lives that an increasing amount of data journalism involves scrutinising the problems with the very data itself. Here’s an illustrative list of when bad data becomes the story – and the lessons they can teach data journalists:

Deaths in police custody unrecorded

This investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism demonstrates an important question to ask about data: who decides what gets recorded?

In this case, the BIJ identified “a number of cases not included in the official tally of 16 ‘restraint-related’ deaths in the decade to 2009 … Some cases were not included because the person has not been officially arrested or detained.” Continue reading →

The ethics of using CCTV footage – A Very Dangerous Doctor

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYjUUOZ5R6s&has_verified=1#t=4m25s]

A Very Dangerous Doctor is a Channel 4 documentary about David Southall, the controversial doctor who was struck off after “abusing his position” in accusing a mother of killing her son.

The documentary includes CCTV footage of parents smothering their children, filmed covertly as part of Southall’s research into cot deaths. The footage is incredibly distressing – the Independent rightly describe it as “among the most shocking to be shown on TV”. Many tweeted that they were switching off the 100-minute broadcast – barely five minutes in – as a result.

The documentary is an excellent piece of work, and worth watching in full – but the CCTV footage raises an old ethical issue in a new context: is it justified?

There is a wealth of literature on the ethics of war reporting: whether distressing images should be shown, and the arguments for and against.

The spread of CCTV and mobile phone footage, its accessibility and its release by police authorities and availability on YouTube, raises similar questions – whether it is footage of a woman throwing her baby on the floor, race attacks, or the death of a protestor.

What are the questions to ask when you are given such footage? What are the ethical issues to balance? And what about this specific example (the footage begins around 04’25)? I’d love to know what you think.

Quicker, smaller, more transparent: What Knight should do next? #JCARN

This month’s Carnival of Journalism is about “driving innovation” – in the wake of the end of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge five year run, among other things. Here’s my take:

Driving innovation needs to be quick

Any innovative idea needs to be able to deploy and iterate quickly – and any scheme to fund innovation needs to support that.

Having been through the Knight News Challenge three times, and reached the final shortlist twice, I was struck each time by how much changed in the online world between the initial submission and final award: If an internet year is worth 4.7 normal years, this process was taking over 3 ‘years’ in internet time. So much changed during that period that by the time I had reached the second or third stage, I wanted to re-write the whole thing.

In contrast, when I entered Channel 4′s 4iP fund (far from perfect, but certainly faster), the time from application to approval was swift. This allowed us to spend a few months working with the funders in addressing the issues the project raised (in Help Me Investigate’s case, largely legal ones) and still being able to start work before the Knight awards had even been shortlisted.

Why the difference? Perhaps because of the next point. Continue reading →

All the news that’s fit to scrape

Channel 4/Scraperwiki collaboration

There have been quite a few scraping-related stories that I’ve been meaning to blog about – so many I’ve decided to write a round up instead. It demonstrates just the increasing role that scraping is playing in journalism – and the possibilities for those who don’t know them:

Scraping company information

Chris Taggart explains how he built a database of corporations which will be particularly useful to journalists and anyone looking at public spending:

“Let’s have a look at one we did earlier: the Isle of Man (there’s also one for Gibraltar, Ireland, and in the US, the District of Columbia) … In the space of a couple of hours not only have we liberated the data, but both the code and the data are there for anyone else to use too, as well as being imported in OpenCorporates.”

OpenCorporates are also offering a bounty for programmers who can scrape company information from other jurisdictions.

Scraperwiki on the front page of The Guardian…

The Scraperwiki blog gives the story behind a front page investigation by James Ball on lobbyist influence in the UK Parliament: Continue reading →

Should you ‘brand’ a hashtag?

Faisal Islam: Sure that all the brilliant BBC reporters realise that #BBCBudget goes against the entire point of SOCIAL media. It will be abandoned.

Two experiments by news organisations with Twitter hashtags during today’s UK budget have raised an issue around ‘branding’ and how appropriate it is to social media.

The BBC, it seems, is encouraging users to adopt the #BBCBudget hashtag to flag their tweets as part of the ‘national conversation’. Channel 4′s Faisal Islam, above, feels it’s a waste of 3 characters.

But Channel 4 itself is trying something not too dissimilar: #C4cuts aims to crowdsource details of UK spending cuts. Ed Fraser, online editor for Channel 4 News, is quoted by Journalism.co.uk as saying the channel wants to “harness the power of social media and the wisdom of the crowd”. Continue reading →

Sri Lanka war crimes and the future of international journalism

Here’s a quick thought about a problem of international reporting: sources. Your viewers and readers are in your country, while your sources are largely not (there are exceptions such as CNN or the BBC, but humour me).

In order to make contact with the people and evidence who can help answer your questions, you have to rely far more on your personal network than, for example, a home affairs or education correspondent.

But the globalisation of modern news – and the ability of people to search on the internet for information related to their own experiences – has changed this. Now, if you report on an issue in another country, people in that country can see what you’ve written and contact you with further information.

In a nutshell this reflects the way that journalism has moved from a ‘push’ medium limited by transmission and distribution infrastructure, to a ‘pull’ (search) and ‘pass’ (social media) one.

Three particularly strong examples of this: Channel 4′s ongoing reporting on the civil war in Sri Lanka and evidence of war crimes. Video footage that was obtained as part of that journalism was, eventually, seen by someone who recognised one of the bodies. (A particularly good lesson for budding journalists is how photos of those bodies were dated using EXIF data, and correlated with documentary evidence from the Sri Lankan MOD - material that don’t lend themselves to broadcast, but can be put online)

Second, Paul Lewis’ investigation into the death of a man being deported to Angola. One of the passengers on the plane where he died was a US citizen who works in Angola. He contacted Lewis after coming across a tweet calling for witnesses.

Third, Paul Lewis again, and the death of Ian Tomlinson at G20 protests. This was again provided by a US citizen who happened to be in the UK at the time and came across the story after he returned home.

Curiously, of course, these two latter stories are not examples of international journalism in terms of their subject – but they do highlight how the web can make international newsgathering part of home affairs stories too.

Investigate your local election campaign expenses

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YeYn--rnIY]

Last week Channel 4 and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism “raised questions” over the election campaign expenses of Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, specifically the practice of claiming partial expenses on the grounds that ‘not all material was used’.

The response from Goldsmith and the Conservative Party seemed to argue that this was standard practice. “The examples raised could be seen in the returns of other candidates.” (see video above)

So I decided to obtain the expenses receipts for two of the most closely-fought campaigns in Birmingham, and put them online, with the invitation for others to take a look to see if that is indeed true.

And now the receipts for the election campaigns of Gisela Stuart (Lab) and Deirdre Allen (Con) for Edgbaston can be found at EdgbastonElectionExpenses.posterous.com

Here’s the plan:

But that’s only part of the story. I want to help repeat this in other cities and towns. And it’s quite simple: start your own investigation into your own local election candidates. by following the instructions here.

Remember, finding nothing is still a finding, as it challenges Goldsmith’s story.

Daily Show archive blocked for UK: Channel Four display several layers of stupid

UK fans of America’s leading satirical TV show got a shock today when they discovered they could no longer view the show on its website.

The website has forums where overseas fans of the show have been venting their rage at the block. Not just UK viewers but those from Ireland who can no longer watch the show on the UK licensee Channel Four’s website yet also remain blocked from watching it on the show’s website, apparently because C4 hasn’t bothered to tell the Daily Show’s channel, Comedy Central, that it’s blocked the Irish. People in the rest of Europe have no such problems.

There’s no statement from either Channel Four or the show about this out-of-the-blue block but it appears from past Daily Show statements on their forum that they only do the blocking on the request of a country’s license holder. Incidentally, I was able to leave a comment on their website and I see that the show’s producers do respond to comment. Channel Four offers no such option, there is no comment space offered for the show and they have no forum or similar space for viewers to talk back to them.

What is particularly sad/appalling about Channel Four’s actions is that all online video from the extensive Daily Show online archive is now being blocked for UK – yet Channel Four is only showing the past week’s shows online! Do they even have rights to episodes from before they started showing the Daily Show, because I can’t watch clips from 2000.

What is so stupid about this (and it has multiple layers of stupid) is that I have been posting clips on my blog which promotes the show Channel Four have rights to! Now none of those embedded clips work and so the show gets no (free) promotion from me or the many others who embed clips.

When the Daily Show’s sister program The Colbert Report was being shown on a UK cable channel you couldn’t watch clips on their website – but you could watch clips embedded on other websites. This makes complete sense as if you liked what you saw it promoted the cable channel’s show and made it far more likely that you’d bother to subscribe to it. It also makes it appear that C4′s block request included blocking embedded clips.

At the same time that one bit of C4 takes this completely stupid action another makes clips from C4 news freely available, even ad free!

Here’s another stupidity. I have watched clips from US shows which have served up country specific ads. On sites like HuffPost I get UK ads. So if you can recognise I’m from the UK you can monetise it to the benefit of the UK license holder. Hardly rocket science.

What C4 are doing is tragic for the Daily Show itself as it is going to lose a significant chunk of its UK audience. All – one would assume – in the name of driving viewers back to watching the show on More4 ON TV!

I hope that the show’s resident Brit, the hugely popular John Oliver, learns about it and tells Channel Four to stop behaving like idiots.

Of course people can watch Daily Show clips if they know how to get around the block by hiding their computer’s ip address. This means C4 lose out on any hope of ad revenue. I won’t even bother linking to how because a simple Google (or a look on the Daily Show’s forums where they allow comments explaining how) will tell you what to do. So not only are C4 idiots but they think the rest of us UK fans of the show are too.

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Why fantasy football may hold the key to the future of news

This season, after years of loyalty to the BBC/Channel 4 fantasy football competition, I’ve switched to The Guardian’s. Their game takes advantage of the reams of player data now available to newspapers – not just goals scored, clean sheets and assists, but also clearances, interceptions, tackles, shots on target, and so on, making for a very different challenge indeed.

The move mirrors that made by The Telegraph a year ago when they introduced a Flash element to their match reports that allowed you to look at an incredible range of match statistics. As I wrote at the time: it’s like having your own ProZone.

What’s all this got to do with the future of news? This: data. It’s one of the few advantages that news organisations have, and they should be doing more with it. What the Guardian fantasy football and the Telegraph demonstrate is the flexibility of that data.

And if we can do it in sport, why aren’t we doing it more elsewhere? Schools tables, pollution records, crime data, geotagged information, and election results are just a few that spring to mind – can you add some more?

For a good example of a particularly creative use of data (again with a sport twist), see Channel 4′s alternative Olympics medals table, which matches medals results against various other country stats, such as human rights record.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to join my fantasy football friends’ league, search for Game 39 – or just post a comment below…

More database-related posts


Cartoons online – what are news organisations doing? (guest post)

In a guest post for the OJB, The Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation give an overview of how news organisations are treating cartoons online.

Cartoons have long been an essential part of British newspapers, so why do so many of those publications fail to do justice to drawn content on their websites?

The digital display of the web is a visual medium and cartoons and illustrations thrive on it. Yet many newsprint employers have not been quick to develop the advantages that drawn imagery offers as a digital communication tool and as existing sticky content for their sites and products. Continue reading →