A dispassionate and comprehensive analysis of lessons to be drawn for Freedom of Information from the MPs' expenses row by Martin Rosenbaum.
Lesson 7 is:
On a more journalistic note, the Telegraph has placed an enormous quantity of data and level of detail
in the public domain during this period, well in excess of what is
normal even for a very big, long-running story.....The relevance of this for FOI-based journalism is that information
requests can often extract large amounts of data, whose full
significance is not immediately apparent. In the future, we may see
more examples (although presumably on a much lesser scale) of the media
publishing quantities of material without telling their audience what
the "story" is
We may be feasting off this information for some time to come as the significance of every cheque stub and moat receipt becomes clear. And then there is the analysis which looks at claim by party, region, job or majority. For fans of computer assisted reporting there is more gold to be found.
Comments