Last month the BBC’s Shared Data Unit held its annual Data and Investigative Journalism UK conference at the home of my MA in Data Journalism, Birmingham City University. Here are some of the highlights…
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Open Data stickers image by Jonathan Gray
I come upon examples of bad practice in publishing government data on a regular basis, but the Universal Jobmatch tool is an example so bad I just had to write about it. In fact, it’s worse than the old-fashioned data service that preceded it.
That older service was the Office for National Statistics’ labour market service NOMIS, which published data on Jobcentre vacancies and claimants until late 2012, when Jobcentre Plus was given responsibility for publishing the data using their Universal Jobmatch tool.
Despite a number of concerns, more than a year on, Universal Jobmatch‘s reports section has ignored at least half of the public data principles first drafted by the Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board in 2010, and published in 2012. Continue reading
Earlier this year I spoke at the BBC’s Data Fusion Day (you can find a liveblog of the event on Help Me Investigate) about data journalism workflows. The presentation slides are embedded below (the title is firmly tongue-in-cheek), but I thought I’d explain a bit more in a series of posts – beginning here.
Most newsrooms take a newswire of some sort – national and international news from organisations like the Press Association, Reuters, and Associated Press.
Data journalism is no exception. If you want to find stories in data, it helps to know what data is coming out, when it comes out.
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