Who pays the piper? Keep tabs on political donations

In anticipation of this week’s London Mayoral elections, I’ve been playing with the Electoral Commission’s Register of Political Donations database. Not that I expect to find any major scoops in an hour’s pottering about, nor that it’s a particularly new resources, but because its one of only a handful of databases available to UK journalists seeking to hold the political classes in check.

 

In America they are far luckier, with stronger FOI laws and a long and (fairly) distinguished history of disclosure, across all legislatures.  Journalists there have many databases and online resources available to them, and it’s little wonder that Computer Assisted Reporting has played a major role in the winning of  several Pulitzer Prizes over the past 20-odd years.

Google falling apart at the seams: so where next?

Last week I posted something about what library catalogues can learn from commercial search engines, as the academic community struggles with getting academic information out to a generation of students used to using Google to answer all their problems.

Yet today I read a fascinating article about the future of search, suggesting in fact that its the commercial search engines who fall down in areas where the public library sector does well.

Tories to map crime

Martin Stabe has flagged up an article from Tory HQ outlining their proposals to launch uniform crime mapping across all UK police authorities, should they win the next election.

There are already examples of crime mapping in the UK. One of the comments on the article in question points to West Yorkshire Police’s site, while the Manchester Evening News has used mapping to explore the gravity of Manchester’s gun crime problem.

Thoughts on Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press

I watched Stephen Fry’s documentary about the Gutenberg Press on Channel 4 last night, and was taken with a couple of issues he raised.

The first was his parting shot, where he spoke of imagining a world without mobile phones or cars, but said he found it impossible to conceive of life as we know it without the printed word.

Busted: brave bobbies break blowhard berks…

Hard-pressed journalists on slow news days aren’t the only profession making the most of Facebook to keep them in work.  Scotland Yard are developing their very own User Generated Content hub. Though in their case, the ‘use’ in question pertains more to drugs, guns and violence.