The University of East Anglia broke the law but nothing can be done as the complaint was made outwith the six month limit. According to The Times today ‘The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.’
The Edinburgh Reporter
January 24 2010In Edinburgh we have wonderful buildings and monuments. The city is a World Heritage Site due to the high quality of architecture and the detailed planning used in developing the New Town area. One of the ways that the city retains this status is the rigorous planning process. This is a function of the City Council and one of the ways you can keep tabs on what is happening in your area is to visit the City Council planning portal. Of course your days may not allow you sufficient free time to indulge in such frivolous time wasting and that is where us journalists should fill the gaps. The illustration is a copy of two planning applications made this week which are for two pubs applying for permission to renovate their interiors and exteriors. In total there were 17 applications during the week ending 18th January 2010 for proposed changes to buildings in the City Centre area.
Click to enlarge the image
In the field of journalism we are often told that it is local news which is failing most quickly, and it seems that there is little place in the few remaining local newspapers for news as mundane as this. During part of my recent journalism qualification, one of the nuggets of wisdom passed down which remains with me is that news is something which makes someone stop and say ‘WOW!’ But what makes you stop in your tracks might well be something which is happening in your neighbourhood rather than the declarations of a national politician for example.
In England the government have decided that planning applications still have to be advertised in the local and regional press, which The Guardian estimate will protect about £15m of advertising for local newspapers, in itself good news. But in Scotland the planning legislation is slightly different. The Town & Country Planning Scotland Act 1997 allows for either an advertising notice to be placed in the newspaper or on the land which is affected by the planning application.
Notwithstanding the lack of any publicity in the local press, in Edinburgh at least, the council manage to publish the list of applications on their website which allows any interested party to keep up with the planning news, if they check it regularly. If you are a neighbouring proprietor you should receive neighbour notification of a planning application, but there is a real danger of missing an important development only a few doors away from your house or office unless the local news of ancient newspapers is revived in some way.
If it is no longer viable to print local newspapers on a weekly basis then perhaps this might be another useful job for the Internet?
Heartening news of improved FOI in Illinois
January 24 2010The US State of Illinois has just beefed up its Freedom of Information legislation. Since January 1st 2010 the government and a variety of other public bodies is subject to improved regulations all aimed at increasing the transparency in government, including the way public funds are spent.
The Plainfield News tested out the response by sending many dozens of requests to local administrations asking a wide variety of FOIA questions. One of the very best responses they got was from the town of Joliet which answered by email a short 16 minutes after the request had been sent. Part of the revisal to the existing law allows both requests and answers by email.
Encouraging news indeed to those who advocate improvements to FOI regimes worldwide.
Testing Times in Dundalk
January 21 2010I have just realised that I am sitting outside the Driving Test Centre in Dundalk. I didn’t mean to. I am here because of other reasons entirely. I can drive. In fact I drove here today. But, upon finding that they have free wifi in the hotel (yes I am in a hotel) I sat down in the corridor on this lovely leather sofa and have spent the last couple of hours polishing that article that I can’t get quotes for, checking my new techhie ‘thing’, Tweetdeck, (if you haven’t got it get it – it is fabulous!) every ten minutes or so, surfing the net, sending emails, and thinking about the articles I have in my head and which are bursting out to get themselves on paper.
Then I realised that I had seen that lady going along the corridor with the burly grey haired man about half an hour or more ago, and there she is coming back again. They disappear into an office. Then she comes back out of the office with a slowly developing smile on her face. The same thing with the dark-haired young man who could not really keep his joy to himself. He had obviously passed. I felt the same way when I passed my test (upon sitting it for the second time admittedly)
I knew they had pubs at the back of grocers’ shops here in Ireland. I have seen the shops which rather curiously sell fish on one side and beef on the other. But now, I have been in a hotel which masquerades as a driving test centre. Only in Ireland……
How to add filmstar to my CV
January 21 2010With all the technology that is around us it is easy to forget that when I started at school aged five we did still use little black slates for some of the work, we did have coloured sticks to help us learn to count and I have more than glanced in the direction of an abacus. Nowadays all you have to do is scan and send your recent graduation photo to your 22 year old son and suddenly you are starring in a short feature film on the internet…..Watch this!
Counting on public accountability
January 18 2010Sir Fred Goodwin, erstwhile head of Royal Bank of Scotland and now public enemy number 1, has got a new job, The Scotsman reports today. The trouble is, that since he already has a sizeable pension fund from his days with RBS, there are those who think he should not really do anything except go and hide in a distant, far-off land. So, it should be no surprise to learn that there are some politicians (glass houses, pots and kettles come to mind) who believe that RMJM, the architectural firm which is now employing Sir Fred, should no longer be considered for public contracts.
Given that one of RMJM’s most recent contracts was to oversee the building of The Scottish Parliament, it is rather difficult to see that this would pose any problem, even before Fred the Shred’s appointment. The eventual spend on Holyrood was around £450million – about 10 times the initial estimate.
Of course, having set that precedent, other public contracts such as The Edinburgh Tram Project and the staging of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014 are already over-budget, something that it seems we now rather take for granted in Scotland. Unless of course questions are asked of those responsible for these budgets? Perhaps it is time to make councils and governments accountable for every last penny of taxpayers’ money, before it is too late and there is none left. After all, the taxpayer has already bailed out the Royal Bank, but who will bail out the taxpayer when the public coffers are empty?
FOI in Scotland
January 17 2010Once again Scotland leads the way in Freedom of Information spheres. The Information Commissioner has reduced the period of closure for government papers from 30 to 15 years. Some of the documents were released on International Right to Know Day in September 2009 and more have now been released. The National Archives of Scotland have announced today that another 4,000 files are now available for public scrutiny.
The final files to 1994 will be released later this year.
Women’s Views on News
January 16 2010One of the other outlets which I contribute to is Women’s Views on News. Here is the press release which we put out recently. Add the site to your favourites or sign up for an email update.
Fed up with the bias towards men in the news? So are we. Which is why we (a group of freelance women journalists) have just set up a not-for-profit online news service providing stories about women, by women – www.womensviewsonnews.org. We want to change the way the world sees women in the news.
The site will source up to date news on all the major national and international stories of the day in much the same way as any newspaper or online news service, but from the perspective of women. It will also include feature articles and opinion pieces, but the focus will always be news.
So why women? Well, there are dozens of women’s magazines covering a broad range of interests, but none of them provide news and current affairs from a woman’s perspective in any meaningful way. There are, therefore, thousands of stories that should be told, but just aren’t.
Indeed, according to a recent survey, four out of every five people featured in news stories worldwide were men, and just ten percent of all news stories focused specifically on women.
There are a number of reasons for that, but one of them is the dominance of men on news desks. As news editors, they are the ones with the power to decide which stories are newsworthy and, crucially, which are not.
Whatever the reason, the end result is that the views of women are ignored. That sends out a message to women – that their opinions are just not as important as those of men. Or that they do not have the same validity. This site will redress that imbalance.
We are now looking for women who are interested in writing for the blog (although we can’t afford to pay – sorry), so if you have any news stories for publication, just go to www.womensviewsonnews.org to get in touch.
We are also looking for people to support our blog by reading it as often as possible and by telling as many other potential readers and writers about it as well.
The World’s Media Hasten to Haiti
January 15 2010Following the devastation caused by the earthquake earlier this week in Haiti, the world’s media are hitching lifts on aid planes to reach the island. Once there they are using whatever means they can to get the story out to the world. The New York Times has an article on this and in particular highlights the way that even the professionals have been using all manner of social media including Twitter to tell the story. It also has some wonderful photos from GeoEye showing the devastation of some of the buildings there.
Sleepy?
January 14 2010The goddess of the online world in the US, Arianna Huffington, famously described as the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus, has gone to sleep. Actually she is trying out an experiment to sleep for a minimum of 8 hours each night – and she has just ‘fallen off the wagon’ as she describes in her latest article on The Huffington Post.
How much sleep do you get? Do you need more? What about the power naps, the disco naps, the catnaps? Do they make you feel better or worse?
Notes on a conference….
January 14 2010I have just noticed a Tweet from Kevin Marsh that he put his conference notes up on his blog. Here is the link!
And he is just sitting across the room there……
Blogging and the BBC
January 14 2010See today’s Press Gazette for a report on what Kevin Marsh, editor of the Today programme at the time of Gilligan said this morning at the news:rewired conference.
Audio Slideshows
January 14 2010So why did I do a whole course in Journalism and nobody mentioned this to me before? It is perfect!
Adam Westbrook himself a graduate of City University London has just enlightened the audience at News:Rewired about the way to use these in multimedia journalism… He showed us a very powerful example of the use of still photos and good audio combined.
Jobs for later today:- Look at the New York Times for more examples and how to do it. Think about buying SoundSlides……the software needed to produce an audio slideshow.
Blogging and Jogging
January 11 2010Yes I have broken some of my New Year Resolutions already, but they are still worth making aren’t they? At least it makes you think a little about your life and take stock. The usual ones about losing weight and getting fit are already on my agenda, have been there since about ten years ago, but are broken intermittently when real life gets in the way. Other than that I have not blogged as much as I had intended since 1 January 2010, although I am trying hard today to put that to rights! Other people are trying hard to keep to theirs.
There are those poor wee souls, the newest gym bunnies at the gym now. They will probably last another two weeks or so, before giving in to the attractions of eating, drinking and making merry, and generally being anywhere other than in an enclosed space populated by torture devices. You can recognise the breed pretty easily. They are dressed in the latest gear, keep checking their ’sounds’ on their Ipods attached to their arms, and are wearing pristine white trainers that have never seen the light of day except to walk the few hundred yards from the changing room to the gym. They have a variety of techniques, all bad, particularly it seems on the rowing machine where the chain which connects to the mechanism should be kept taut, and the action should be smooth. There they are though these novices, rowing away at ninety miles an hour and the chain slapping all over the place. They seem to travel in packs when they are female. There were three at our gym on Saturday morning, all in their make-up and calling less than sweetly to each other from one piece of equipment or another. No they won’t last the pace either and soon it will be back to relative peace and quiet on my regularly irregular visits.
So back to the blogging. Look out for Women’s Views on News and also Suite 101, which are two of my newest showcases.
Oh and Happy New Year!
Globespan grounded
December 17 2009It’s snowing! At least, here in central Edinburgh it is snowing that horrid slushy, wet stuff that doesn’t even cover the pavements, but makes you feel wet and cold just looking at it. So if the weather is not going to brighten us up, then the business news in Scotland today will do little to help as it is especially gloomy, with news that our very own Flyglobespan has gone into administration. According to the BBC there is some concern over the fact that credit card payments did not actually reach the company’s bank over the last few weeks, so it is not really surprising that the company has got into financial difficulties, even though it made an operating profit over the last financial year. Douglas Fraser tells us that E-Clear the credit card company had not paid monies over to the low budget airline. The question is then why did the people running the company not do something about that? There are about 4,500 passengers stranded abroad and thousands more who are due to fly with the company over the coming weeks who will not necessarily get refunds and who may want to know why their money did not actually reach the company itself, and I am sure the employees may want answers to some questions too.
The (very public) Eye of the Tiger
December 14 2009Why does it matter that people in the public eye should behave themselves, even if some of us don’t? Well there is the point that they are usually earning money from our pockets in some shape or form. Thus the shenanigans of various politicians is of interest to us even when it does not involve some expenses claim or other, and we feel entitled to be outraged if they do something disreputable or tawdry.
So if you have been to an Open Golf championship and have stood only yards from the tee where Tiger stood ready to propel another 300 plus yard drive down the fairway, then you may feel you have a claim to his public or professional life. But where his personal life has now spilled over into the rough of the public eye, then that may also give you the right to determine whether he is now public villain number one or still the adored sportsman that he was, and possibly could still be.
It is no secret that he is one of the most talented golfers of the last few decades, and if it were not for him then others would have had much more success. Difficult to know if that success would also have encompassed someone like Colin Montgomerie for whom outright superstardom still seems elusive, but Tiger’s absence would have meant a completely different set of golf heroes.
So his proposal to stay away from golf for an indefinite period will also have some considerable effect on the future of the professional game. His presence alone is thought to have accounted for many people’s attendance at major tournaments who might not otherwise have thought of stomping around on a golf course. There are many other players who can drive a ball as far and who have a decent short game, but the difference is, or was, that Tiger seemed somehow superhuman and otherwordly. Now he is just another weak-willed man caught with his trousers down, indeed apparently caught so often one wonders why he bothered putting them on.
There is a personal tragedy being played out here in the public eye. The papers and other media have devoted many column inches to him and his family. The Telegraph reports that he has not been seen in public since his accident outside his home. His wife is reported to have bought a secluded house in Sweden which she is apparently going to escape to. At least one of the paramours is claiming that they will be together in the future. His mother-in-law has been taken to hospital by ambulance.
So where does that leave poor old Tiger? At least two of his sponsors have edged away from him already, although one cannot help but think that this will be the very least of his problems since he has apparently made so much from the professional game over the years.
It seems that it leaves him trying very hard to protect what is left of his reputation as a clean-living, hard-playing professional golfer and devoted husband and father. Even PR guru Max Clifford agrees with his current course of action to step back from the professional tee for a while to let the roar of the crowd die down. Whether or not he is able to stage a comeback at any time in the future will remain to be seen, and is at least in part down to his public who may decide that they don’t actually want him back.
Tomato sauce with that?
December 13 2009Silvio Berlusconi has finally been attacked in a manner so direct that even he cannot ignore it. Someone in Milan has thought enough about him to give him a bloody nose according to the BBC. This after he told a political rally that although his critics paint him as a monster he is actually good looking. So perhaps this is a rage built upon old-fashioned jealousy then?
The Washington Post tell us that the 73 year-old premier has been taken to hospital after being punched and knocked off his feet. They also report that the attacker has been arrested. It is difficult to understand how someone could be so incensed to launch an assault on the media mogul that they would want to endanger their own liberty, although easy to find something to dislike about him, since he courts publicity for its own sake. Oh and then there is the womanising. As Tiger and David know this always attracts a little media attention.
Rushin’ off to the defamation courts….
November 30 2009The Press Gazette tells the story today of the Russian billionairess who is suing for libel on the basis of a report in The Sunday Times claiming that she is buying London’s largest home. The claim is that the article has damaged her reputation and standing, which is of course the prerequisite to any defamation action.
We will have to wait and see if the UK courts, so often the chosen forum for such proceedings, allow the action to proceed, but it is hard to know which part of being a billionairess and thus being able to afford to buy a house with 25 bedrooms damages your reputation…..
Susan Boyle – dreaming on…
November 30 2009Susan Boyle has done it again. Just when you thought you had heard the last of her, here she is breaking all records for a debut album and looking gorgeous at the same time. Proof, if you need it, that real talent shines through.
The Daily Express has a nice piece on her with a good photo – time perhaps for some of the other papers to stop using the old photos at her audition for Britain’s Got Talent?
