Few things sum up the division of the UK around the riots like the sentencing of those involved. Some think courts are too lenient, while others gape at six month sentences for people who stole a bottle of water.

These judgments are often made on the basis of a single case, rather than any overall view. And you might think, in such a situation, that a journalist’s role would be to find out just how harsh or lenient sentencing has been – not just across the 1,600 or more people who have been arrested during the riots, but also in comparison to previous civil disturbances – or indeed, to similar crimes outside of a riot situation.

As Martin Belam argues:

“Really good data journalism will help us untangle the truth from those prejudiced assumptions. But this is data journalism that needs to stay the course, and seems like an ideal opportunity to do “long-form data journalism”. How long will these looters serve? What is the ethnic make-up and age range of those convicted? How many other criminals will get an early release because our jails are newly full of looters? How many people convicted this week will go on to re-offend?”

And yet, amazingly, we cannot reliably answer these questions – because it is still not possible to get raw data on sentencing in UK courts, not even through FOI.

In the absence of such data, The Guardian are attempting to collate data on convictions at magistrates courts (the Crown Courts have yet to get going), with over 200 cases in their spreadsheet.

It’s a laudable endeavour – but the very fact that they have to undertake it should be an embarrassment to the English and Welsh justice system.

Justice is blind – but so are we

The aphorism – from a case in the 1920s – that justice must not only be done, but “must also be seen to be done” is still not carried through into practical acts. A year ago Heather Brooke wrote about her own experiences along these lines, and the court’s desire to maintain “control” over recordings of court proceedings:

“Control” is exactly what a court shouldn’t be exerting. Once it is decided that it is open, there should be no restriction on how that open hearing is processed. She went on to say that she’d allow me to record now but I’d have to wait for a future ruling before I could “use” the recording. The next day in court the Judge announced she’d made her ruling. “Please turn your tape recorder off,” she said, looking sternly at me over her glasses. I did so.

8 months before that Will Perrin wrote about the problems of hyperlocal bloggers wishing to report on their courts.

Little has changed.

In frustration at this, a number of coders around the country have been attempting to find ways to record what happens in court. Examples include Cause List (cases being heard in the courts of England and Wales right now), InCourts Daily (simply names and times of cases being heard – it has dozens of Twitter accounts for particular regions) and the long-running BAILII, which publishes partial information on case law but this year hit funding problems (another useful resource is The Law Pages).

There is generic sentencing data on Data.gov.uk – but not at a level of detail or timeliness that would allow you to answer basic questions about ‘justice being done’ (in contrast, sentencing data for Scottish courts at the Judiciary of Scotland site, includes RSS feeds for sentencing statements and summaries of opinion, among others).

Newspapers: publish in structured formats

Meanwhile, there’s been a steady decline in court reporting across the regional press and national news agencies which has made the situation worse.

What remains – those dry court reports that fill the space between adverts in most local newspapers – could in theory be of use to those who want to ask bigger questions than “Which one of my neighbours has been in trouble?”

But it is being published online in a format which makes it far from easy for anyone to interrogate – including newspapers’ own journalists.

Take, for example, the Telegraph & Argus’s court pages: an RSS feed which says nothing more than “The following have been dealt with by Bradford magistrates” and dozens of judgments condensed into four paragraphs (there is some structure which you can extract into a table – but it could be easier).

Even a specialist service like Court News UK only appears to deal in stories, while, interestingly, the Wigan World website (which has partnered with the local paper) is a rarity in presenting court sentences in a basic table with an accompanying search facility. (If you know of any good examples of online court data, please let me know).

There’s something to be learned here: if newspapers published comprehensive sentencing data in tables, it’s more likely that users will help find the stories in them.

Meanwhile, sentencing data is increasingly (and arbitrarily) being published on Twitter by police authorities – starting with the West Midlands and Manchester – and journalists need to be able both to deal with that information, and check it.

If journalists are to do more than provide a platform for a blame game, we need to put pressure on the courts to publish as much sentencing data as possible, in as open a format as possible, and as close to real time as possible. Justice must be seen to be done.

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Conrad Quilty-Harper writes about the new crime data from the UK police force – and in the process adds another straw to the groaning camel’s back of the government’s so-called transparency agenda:

“It’s useless to residents wanting to find out what was going on at the house around the corner at 3am last night, and it’s useless to individuals who want to build mobile phone applications on top of the data (perhaps to get a chunk of that £6 billion industry open data is supposed to create).

“The site’s limitations are as follows:

• No IDs for crimes: what if I want to check whether real life crimes have made it onto the map? Sorry.
• Six crime categories: including “other crimes”, everything from drug dealing to bank robberies in one handy, impossible to understand category.
• No live data: you mean I have to wait until the end of the next month to see this month’s criminality?!
• No dates or times: funny how without dates and times I can’t tell which police manager was in charge.
• Case status: the police know how many crimes go solved or unsolved, why not tell us this?”

This is why people are so concerned about the Public Data Corporation. This is why we need to be monitoring exactly what spending data councils release, and in what format. And this is why we need to continue to press for the expansion of FOI laws. This is what we should be doing. Are we?

UPDATE: Will Perrin has FOI’d all correspondence relating to ICO advice on the crime maps. Jonathan Raper has a list of further flaws including:

• Some data such as sexual offences and murder is removed – even though it would be easy to discover and locate from other police reports.
• Data covers reported crimes rather than convictions, so some of it may turn out not to be crime.
• The levels of policing are not provided, so that two areas with the “same” crime levels may in fact have “radically different” experiences of crime and policing.

Charles Arthur notes that: “Police forces have indicated that whenever a new set of data is uploaded – probably each month – the previous set will be removed from public view, making comparisons impossible unless outside developers actively store it.”

Louise Kidney says:

“What we’ve actually got with www.police.uk is neither one nor the other. Ruth looks like a crime overlord cos of all the crimes happening in her garden and we haven’t got exact point data, but we haven’t got first part of postcode data either e.g. BB5 crimes or NW1 crimes. Instead, we’ve got this weird halfway house thing where it’s not accurate, but its inaccuracy almost renders it useless because we don’t have any idea if every force uses the same parameters when picking these points, we don’t know how they pick their points, we don’t know what we don’t know in terms of whether one house in particular is causing a considerable issue with anti-social behaviour for example, allowing me to go to my local Council and demand they do something about it.”

Adrian Short argues that “What we’re looking at here isn’t a value-neutral scientific exercise in helping people to live their daily lives a little more easily, it’s an explicitly political attempt to shape the terms of a debate around the most fundamental changes in British policing in our lifetimes.”

He adds:

“It’s derived data that’s already been classified, rounded and lumped together in various ways, with a bit of location anonymising thrown in for good measure. I haven’t had a detailed look at it yet but I would caution against trying to use it for anything serious. A whole set of decisions have already transformed the raw source data (individual crime reports) into this derived dataset and you can’t undo them. You’ll just have to work within those decisions and stay extremely conscious that everything you produce with it will be prefixed, “as far as we can tell”.

“£300K for this? There ought to be a law against it.”

UPDATE 2: One frustrated developer has launched CrimeSearch.co.uk to provide “helpful information about crime and policing in your area, without costing 300k of tax payers’ money”

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Will Perrin has spoken widely about his experiences with www.kingscrossenvironment.com, a site he set up four years ago “as a desperate measure to help with local civic activism”. In the latest in the Hyperlocal Voices series, he explains how news comes far down their list of priorities, and the importance of real world networks.

Who were the people behind the blog, and what were their backgrounds?

I set it up solo in 2006, local campaigner Stephan joined late in 2006 and Sophie shortly thereafter. The three of us write regularly – me a civil servant for most of my time on the site, Sophie an actor, Stephan a retired media executive.

We had all been active in our communities for many years on a range of issues with very different perspectives. There are four or five others who contribute occasionally and a network of 20 or more folk who send us stuff for the site.

What made you decide to set up the blog?

The site was simply a tool to help co-ordinate civic action on the ground. The site was set up in 2006 as a desperate measure to help with local civic activism.

I was totally overwhelmed with reports, documents, minutes of meetings and was generating a lot of photos of broken things on the street. The council had just created a new resident-led committee for me and the burden was going to increase. Also I kept bumping into loads of other people who were active in the community but no one knew what the others were doing. I knew that the internet was a good way of organising information but wasn’t sure how to do it.

When did you set up the blog and how did you go about it?

The first post was in July 2006. I used the blogging platform Typepad because it is simple and cheap. I’ve stuck with it because I am lazy and any time spent fetishising about the layout is time taken from dealing with local issues.

I quickly introduced Feedburner-driven email subscriptions – many people prefer email.

When I set the site up I was a Senior Civil Servant in the Cabinet Office. When you do a job like that you are supposed to be incognito. I had strong support from my immediate civil service and political management but the propriety and ethics people were never very comfortable with me publishing.

What other blogs, bloggers or websites influenced you?

None really at the time – there were hardly any active community sites with a campaigning thrust that you could find through Google. There were many static earlier-internet sites for reference but not frequently updated.

How did – and do – you see yourself in relation to a traditional news operation?

The site is about civic action, a critical part of which is information and communication. If you can’t communicate what needs to be done you can’t get it done. ‘News’ per se comes some way down the list. We often don’t cover ‘news’ say about train problems at the station because it doesn’t really affect the neighbourhood.

For the sake of comparison with traditional news, Kings Cross Environment is more granular and relevant to local people, with no commercial pressures. It would make no economic sense for a traditional news organisation to cover the issues we do.

We make no pretence to be impartial in the often bogus way news journalists do – we are pro-community. But we do try to be accurate and give balance.

We also generate a lot of original content where one of our extended network stumbles across something and it ends up on the site.

We happily coexist with the local papers, such as the Islington Gazette.

What have been the key moments in the blog’s development editorially?

The site helps us get stuff done in the community. Most community action in an area undergoing regeneration is an information game. The web helps us play that game very well, often better than the council and companies. We fought a major planning battle with Network Rail that gained £1million in local improvements through Section106, took on Cemex, one of the world’s biggest concrete companies and got them to restructure a local plant.

We help keep people informed and simplify their route to action on dozens of local planning and licensing issues from land banking to pubs to sex shops.

We also find anecdotally that by making an issue public while in correspondence with local public agencies it miraculously gets solved quicker.

In order to do that we are non-partisan, polite, fair and avoid religion.

I don’t edit posts pre-publication, people just follow a general tone. We set a firm tone on comments to avoid partisan nonsense and the comments follow this tone.

When we make mistakes and are inadvertently partisan our readers weigh in and correct us, firmly. Since the first few posts, our local councillor has commented regularly (when in and out of power) in a helpful supportive ‘I’ll get that fixed’ sort of way and occasionally other local politicians weigh in, again in a non partisan way.

What sort of traffic do you get and how has that changed over time?

I publish a report on traffic about once a year. We get up to 200 uniques and 250 odd emails readers a day. We seem to be at the top of a classic ess-curve.

My interest is in reaching people who are active locally rather than trying to grow and audience for advertising say.

We don’t run the site for comments as such – there are about 1400 comments on 1100 posts. This reflects our use of a blog platform to publish stuff, rather than interest in running a blog or forum per se.

Anything else you feel hasn’t been covered?

Sites work best if they have a concrete purpose and build upon existing real world networks. If i had run the site as a ‘news’ operation or a social media plaything then I don’t think it would have worked.

Having multiple authors with different perspectives and backgrounds has been invaluable not least to cover each others busy spells.

We were a very early adopter of YouTube in 2006. I used video a few times when it added value to tackling a local issue such as noise pollution where it is a godsend for prima facie evidence gathering. But even with the latest tools, the time and equipment overhead of making and uploading a short video clip remains too high for regular use.

We were early into Facebook too with a group ‘I love kings cross’ with over 200 members but the limitations of Facebook meant it didn’t add much value. I will revisit Facebook now the new location-based features are around.

The site has become a remarkable local archive in a way I didn’t expect at all – we are now the definitive source of information on long running local issues. This makes the community stronger and reverses the traditional monopoly on information held by the public sector. The site is archived at the British Library.

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As a lone blogger how much legal protection do you have? No more than anyone else, when it comes to libel, contempt of court law and so on, except that people are more likely to pay attention to large media organisations.

But there are many instances where bloggers have lost a lot of time and money over legal disputes. Last week, for example, journalist and blogger Dave Osler finally saw an end to a legal battle that consumed three years of his life, after he was sued for libel by the political activist Johanna Kaschke. Despite being refused the right to appeal the strike-out of the Osler case, she is still planning to appeal another High Court decision that ended her libel claim against Alex Hilton and John Gray.

If all individual bloggers worried about getting into trouble too much, we’d write much less than we do. Even big scary cases aren’t a deterrent: Dave Osler is still blogging. I was personally surprised by the results of my survey of 71 small online publishers this summer. Not that only 27 per cent had been involved in legal disputes (that was about what I expected) but that over half were satisfied with the number of legal resources available.

Personally, the grey areas of law trouble me and I don’t think there could be enough support: I’d like to see more organised structures for legal help, a sort of Citizens Advice Bureau for bloggers, if you like. Informal advice is already spreading via social networks, as lawyers increasingly use Twitter and blogs to join the conversation.

As I reported on my site Meeja Law, one hyperlocal blogger who was accused of breach of copyright asked for legal advice via Twitter: “Two separate media lawyers confirmed (for free) that I’d done nothing wrong. I also contacted [hyperlocal organisation] Talk About Local for advice, and they told me the same.”

Talk About Local has published several media law guides online (eg. this one on defamation) and the organisation’s founder William Perrin offers some frank legal advice ahead of a legal session at last weekend’s London Local Neighbourhoods Online Unconference:

…just about the best legal advice, which very few follow is to set up a 
limited company and keep the website inside that. Then you don’t lose 
your house to a nutter under defamation law….

Another concern of mine is the lack of transparency of courts data, something I’ve discussed at length here. I think bloggers should be able to access more information about cases; at the very least, the Ministry of Justice needs to consider its outmoded contempt of court law that is ill-equipped to deal with the online age.

In the coming months, I’d like to build up the conversation in this area and think about how we might approach some of these issues. If you’d like to be part of this informal online ‘working group’ please consider joining the Help Me Investigate challenge at this link (request membership here), or discussing via the OJB Facebook group.

UPDATE [Paul Bradshaw]: I’ve created a LinkedIn group as a place for people to more openly discuss how to take this forward.

Judith Townend (@jtownend on Twitter) is a PhD research student at City University London and freelance journalist.

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Following on from the previous post, another government policy up for criticism at this week’s Journalism’s Next Top Model conference was the much-mooted local TV plans.

This was a recurring theme of Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt‘s speeches while in opposition, and this week he announced that Nicholas Shott, Head of UK Investment Banking at Lazard, will “look at the potential for commercially viable local television stations within the local media landscape right across the nations and regions of the UK.”

Roger Parry - credited with much of the thinking behind Hunt’s proposals – backed the plan, seeing it as being more about local multimedia than local TV. He expected around 80 local TV stations to be made available on Freeview with a consumer-focused mix of programming (gardening, DIY, etc.) and sponsorship rather than spot advertising.

But Clare Enders (Enders Analysis) and Will Perrin (Talk About Local) were hugely sceptical of the commercial basis for a local TV market in the UK.

Enders pointed out that while local newspaper advertising was worth £2.6bn this year, £1bn of that came from classifieds – a form that doesn’t translate to TV (ITV’s previous experiments with ‘video classifieds’ was, she said, a “disaster”).

She also highlighted the vast differences between the US local TV market – where national networks support state affiliates and states have their own “separateness” – and that in the UK where, she predicted, impending budget cuts “will kill some local economies – not inspire ad growth. It will get worse.”

“[Local TV] hasn’t panned out and my goodness has it been looked at in the past couple of decades.”

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Given that Roy Greenslade has beaten me to blogging about my own event, I thought I’d better go ahead and blog about it here. I’m talking about JEEcamp of course – a conference-cum-unconference about journalism experimentation and enterprise. Put another way, if you read this blog, the sort of stuff I talk about.

It’s on May 21st at The Bond in Birmingham. Here’s what we’ve got:

• Keynote from Simon Waldman, Author, Creative Disruption, and Digital Director, Guardian Media Group. (When I started blogging this was one guy I always read – and he’s still ahead of the game.)
• Panel: What does the election result mean for publishers and startups? Confirmed so far: Tom Loosemore (ex-Ofcom, -BBC, now-Channel 4), Talk About Local’s Will Perrin and outgoing Creative Industries minister Sion Simon.
• Please nominate who you would like as the fourth panellist.
• Closing keynote: Stewart Kirkpatrick, founder of Scotland’s first online-only newspaper, Caledonian Mercury (@calmerc), which launched earlier this year.

More importantly, in between all of that are a whole bunch of fringe meetings, chats over coffee and group discussions. You decide what to talk about here. Because, really, that’s what we go to conferences for, isn’t it?

And in the spirit of the internet, there’s a low barrier to entry: tickets are only £30

For those who haven’t been before, there’s coverage of last year’s event here and here. For those who have, feel free to post a comment.

You really don’t need to use any more brainpower on this. Book a ticket by emailing Kelly.ONeil@BCU.ac.uk (invoices available!) and sign up on the Facebook page or wiki.

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I spent today at the hyperlocal C&binet event, organised by Creative Industries MP Sion Simon at the Department for Culture, Media & Sport. I’ve already blogged my thoughts leading up to event but thought I would add some more links and context.

For me, it is significant that this happened at all. Normally these sorts of events are dominated by large publishers with lobbying muscle. Yet here we had a group combining hyperlocal bloggers, successful startups like Facebook, Ground Report, Global Voices and the Huffington Post, social media figures like Nick Booth and Jon Bounds, and traditional organisations like The Guardian, BBC, RSA and Ofcom. Jeff Jarvis pitched into the mix via Skype.

As for the event itself, it began the previous afternoon with a presentation from Enders Analysis, embedded below:

The following morning saw more experiences thrown into the pot – Jeff’s CUNY business models for hyperlocal; Rachel Sterne’s experiences at Ground Report, embedded below:

US Hyperlocal News Market –

Nick Booth’s experience from Podnosh followed, then my own contribution, and The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Northcliffe all took centre stage at various points too.

Following that exchange of perspectives attendees put together 2 lists: what they thought government should or could do, and what they thought government should not do. These are listed on co-chair Will Perrin’s blog and some reproduced in their glorious fluorescence below:

You can read more about the day on that Will Perrin blog post and Hannah Waldram’s post for Podnosh.

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