Media

Journalists should FoI and Cross-reference. Miriam Cotton interviews Gavin Sheridan of TheStory.ie Miriam Cotton (MC): What did you do before you started The Story? Gavin Sheridan (GS): In 2002 I started Gavinsblog.com. That’s in semi-retirement though it is still up there. I was just 21 then and at the time there were only about a dozen blogs in Ireland. The Iraq war was imminent, 9/11 had happened and the blog was a place where you could start writing about whatever you wanted. MC: When and how did the idea for TheStory.ie come to you? GS: I started to become involved in local government stuff after I graduated in 2008 from UCC. My New Year resolution in January 2009 was to build an Irish version of ‘TheyWorkForYou.com’ which was a British parliamentary transparency website. After I graduated I started working on this in my spare time. I found out that a man called John Handlaar was already trying to build something similar in Ireland. By April 2009 we had the first version of KildareStreet.com which is the Irish version of ‘They Work For You’. From my involvement in all of this I had become very interested in open government. I went to some conferences in London in summer 2009 and again I met some very interesting people. Heather Brooke did the original Freedon of Information request (FOI) for MP’s expenses. This was all very interesting to me – there was no FOI culture in Ireland. A few people had done some FOIs – Damien Mulley had done some on broadband and the Department of Communications. Journalists were using them but relatively infrequently. I realised that the culture that existed in the UK where citizens were putting in FOIs about, for example, why a building down the road had been sold for one pound, just didn’t exist here. So the first thinking I did when I got back to Ireland was to look at what FOIs were being done and the most interesting one I found was Ken Foxe’s one about John O’Donoghue. I FOI’d his FOI – not because I wanted to steal his story but because I wanted to see the receipts. It was a really good story that was going into The Sunday Tribune every weekend. But it wasn’t being talked about in the dailies or on the radio. The Department of Culture, Sport and Tourism sent them to me and I put them on-line through my scanner and started publishing the details of each trip. That gave the story an extra push. TheStory.ie hadn’t started at this stage so I put them on my own blog [GavinsBlog]. I also went to the Politics.ie website and gave them the details. I had met Mark Coughlan (Co-founder of TheStory.ie) at a Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis earlier that year and we’d been talking a good bit about this concept. We started ‘The Story’ in August 2009, just when the story about the expenses of John O’Donoghue, Ceann Comhairle, was taking off. Instead of submitting FOIs for individual things, we thought why not FOI for everything! What is fundamental to getting everything under an FOI is to submit requests for databases. If the government has gone to the trouble of more efficiently holding information then we can write more efficient FOIs to more efficiently get that efficiently-held information! The process of exporting a database is quite easy and a large amount of information can be got. We were thinking that if they’ve got an expenses database, we don’t just want to know about John O’Donoghue we want to know everything – within reason. How do one set of expenses relate to others? We were about transparency and advocacy – transparency first, journalism second. Most journalists would not know how to control a big spreadsheet of data and that was something we had to teach ourselves. A friend of mine who was working on the BBC’s Panorama taught me a lot of basic computer-assisted reporting like what you do with a spreadsheet once you get it, how you analyse it and graphically represent it. We learned about all the tools that are freely available for mapping information – the basics of Excel and Google Fusion Table. Cleaning spreadsheets is very important for instance. We then set out a policy whereby we began to look for precedent. We decided that if we were refused a database we wouldn’t just say ‘well, that’s that then’. We decided to appeal any decision which we believed was worth the €225 to appeal it – things that would have the effect of broadening the scope of the FOI Act as much as we could. Ken Foxe’s FOIs were an example of how documents are important because within them was information relating to the database that was used to record the information. We saw that they were using a thing called Oracle. The whole exercise took three months. There was an initial request testing to see how they would reply, then a second request asking for the entire database. That was refused under three FOI Act exemptions so we appealed that and finally we appealed to the Information Commissioner in January 2010. We eventually got the database. It named the civil servants, how much they claimed and more or less what it was for, but with some redactions applied because you have to work around S.10 of the FOI Act which is to do with volume. If you’re asking for a lot of information they can argue that it’s too voluminous. There is a certain amount of bartering. I was being as reasonable as possible and it was possible to have some negotiation. The day after we had reached an agreement with the Information Commissioner and with the Department of Arts, Sports & Tourism and we had published it, we went to other departments saying there was no reason why these other requests should be refused. Ultimately the databases that we have now published account for nearly half

Village’s technology team answer all your questions and make up a lot of stuff too What does it all mean? Answer: Mutualisation We live in the post-media age. Writing is on life-support; the media are dead. Nobody reads, they only blog. In ten years, there will be no newspapers: all news will be transmitted by iPad tablets. We just don’t know how they’re going to make money from these websites. But it is interesting to note that Rupert Murdoch has introduced a paywall on his newspapers and speculation is that hits are down something between ten and ninety per cent. Mobile phones mean that the message is the medium and you can never leave home. Facebook means that there is no need to say hello to anyone. Steve Jobs, who recently recovered from cancer, announces at the monthly iConferences where he addresses the industry, that having a Face is no longer enough. Search Engine Optimisation means only fools think. There is no such thing as an audience now, we all participate in and make the news. Shops have all been replaced and we only have Amazon. But Amazon has been bought by eBay because the book is dead. Reality has gone: only Youtube really is. The only – above all how will it affect advertisers – beauty now is technology. Apple is the new Warhol. You can train an iPhone 4 mG to have sex with you and then real-time text about it, a total game-changer. Android is Google’s smartphone platform. Above all, there may not be as many newspapers, but there will be plenty of journalism. It will have assumed a new form in which, to use Jay Rosen’s unmatchable phrase, “the people formerly known as the audience” will play a key role in the gathering and transmission of news events. They will surely do this on a local or hyperlocal, basis. Their work will appear largely online, on sites that are unlikely to be connected to the major publishing chains that have ruled the news roost in the US and Britain for so long. Call it the new news hierarchy. And only a teenager PC or Mac (?) can do it from his attic. 400 apps a second or we all die. The Irish Times diversified into jobs.ie and its New Media section app is now cyber-hacking but lost ten million Euro last year. So: where will the Smartphone end and what difference does it make to you? Nokia’s new Blackberry is actually smaller than a piece of fruit and ten mega pixels. Is your business registered on Foursquare? If not, it really should be now. Investigative journalism will always cost money; and opinion versus solid old-fashioned news values. You, the consumer, choose. The Wall Street Journal’s is the way to go. Journalism is long live so long live dead. Or whatever. A similar change will be wrought at the national level. – Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and Amazon, Mark Little will never go back to Prime Time for Tweet. There will be fewer print titles, though online audiences previously attracted by the strength of a brand name will ensure its survival. But there will be many fewer journalists in full-time employment. It does not mean the elimination of professional journalism, i.e. people paid to carry out daily journalistic work in order to hold truth to power to speak account, which is the prime task of our trade. Simple economic reality will ensure that news outlets – whether they are publishing brands that exist today or small start-ups – will not host large staffs on the old newspaper model. So What Are the Implications for the Print Media? Professional news “hubs” will work in concert with, for want of a better term, amateur journalists. Call it participation (iPhone) or collaboration or, to borrow a term coined by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian , mutualisation. It is how news gathering is already developing and, in 10 years that will have become the norm. Time years twenty in around be still all will we if knows who. We must all have a website – defensively. And it won’t matter that much, since journalists have already been replaced by machines that write inane articles about the implications of technology for the written word.

A sheltered internet technology created by an Irishman has opened an anonymous world to Chinese dissidents and child pornographers alike.