So far, we’ve announced:

• Liverpool, July 16
• Birmingham, July 23

We are also discussing and considering a number of other locations, including: Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh (or Glasgow), Leeds, Manchester, London, Belfast and Dublin. And if I have my way, one on the south coast somewhere….

If you are based in any of these places and have venue or sponsor suggestions, please get in touch: judith [at] scraperwiki.com.

For more information on Scraperwiki and what you can do with it, please have a look at Paul Bradshaw’s blog: his Online Journalism MA students recently had a play…

Calling the hypothetical app user ‘Peter’, and calling his hypothetical unwitting friend, ‘Bob’, Dave writes:

When I first saw this process, I thought it seemed a little odd. Normally, when you give out your personal details, it’s made clear how these details will be used, with a privacy policy and an opportunity to say “yes, I agree”. I couldn’t see any of this in the Conservative Party app. And in fact, it’s not Peter’s details being submitted – it’s Bob’s. Who doesn’t get a say in it at all.

So Dave has delved into the Data Protection Act and made some enquiries, to see if the Tories have slipped up. As we know from the Ashes to Ashes copyright saga, political parties sometimes need reminding of good old-fashioned law in the rush to build campaign buzz.

Dave concludes (quoted directly from his blog):

• It’s possible that personal data is being stored or processed by the Conservative Party, without them having any contact with the person whose data is being processed
• There is no verification that the data is provided with the consent of the person that data refers to
• The app doesn’t give a clear indication of what the data will be used for
• Neither the app nor its supporting web sites contain a privacy notice describing how the data may be stored and used

Now Dave’s blog is lively with commenters far more acquainted with the DPA and political canvassing procedure than me, so best to read the ongoing debate for yourself over there.

Now, it could be coincidence, but there’s been an interesting development…

The iPhone app info (The Conservative Party General Election App) has been updated with an additional disclaimer (since Dave published his post, he says). It now reads:

When using the “Call a Friend” feature, please confirm you have the consent of the friend or relative whose details you are passing onto us. The Conservative Party will inform your friend or relative how it obtained his or her details. Information obtained by the Conservative Party from this App will not be used for electronic mailing purposes.

So, what about the people who already downloaded the app? Will they see this info?

Dave also remarks, in an update to his post, “while this text mentions what the information won’t be used for, it still doesn’t say what it will be used for. Would be good to know.”

Firstly, what’s new in Davies’ report? Well, we learn that “that the officer in charge of the inquiry, assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, subsequently left the police to work for News International as a columnist.”

According to Hayman’s website, he has “a regular commentary slot writing exclusively for The Times newspaper.”

We are told by Davies that the Crown Prosecution paperwork:

“reveals that police and prosecutors adopted a deliberate strategy to ringfence the evidence which they presented in court in order to suppress the names of particularly prominent victims, including members of the royal family. The existence of this strategy has been omitted from all public statements, including evidence made to the House of Commons media select committee.”

We learn that the News of the World phone hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, had gathered over 4,000 names and just under 3,000 phone numbers of potential victims, according to the CPS docs:

In a further blow to the official version of events, the Guardian has discovered that although police and prosecutors named only eight victims in court, material seized by police from Mulcaire and the paper’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, contained 4,332 names or partial names of people in whom the two men had an interest, 2,978 numbers or partial numbers for mobile phones and 30 audio tapes which appear to contain an unspecified number of recordings of voicemail messages.

And does the UK’s media care? Nope.

“No surprise”, Charlie Whelan comments via Twitter, as an add-on to MP Tom Watson’s tweet, “Amazed that no other newspaper has picked up on the scale of this phone hacking scandal”.

(btw, Tom Watson’s tweet has had a notable click through and retweet response)

No surprise indeed, given the media’s coverage to date. Aside from the initial excitement in July 2009, particularly by the BBC, there has been very poor coverage of the entire affair.

I’ve been covering the Guardian’s revelations since last year and watched the CMS select committee hearings etc. While I expected the media response to be muted, I have been staggered at the effectiveness of the blackout. The line of the Sun’s reportage following publication of the CMS report echoed the official News International press release and tried to pass off the committee’s findings as a Labour smear job.

Yes, of course, this is a political issue, with each new story reminding us of the questions that the Tory party’s director of communications and former NOTW editor, Andy Coulson, needs to answer. And, of course, Labour MPs will flag that up.

But that aspect doesn’t make this a non-story, in fact it makes it even more important. There’s hard evidence here that we haven’t had explained. Davies’ findings should be a much bigger national story than they are.

I’ll finish with Oborne’s excellent piece in the Observer. On the blind spot, he says:

Davies’s work, however, has gained no traction at all in the rest of Fleet Street, which operates under a system of omerta so strict that it would secure a nod of approbation from the heads of the big New York crime families.

Coulson should not be allowed near Downing Street, he remarks:

It is no exaggeration to state that under the editorship of Coulson the News of the World was running what was effectively a large private intelligence service, using some of the same highly intrusive techniques as MI5. This illegal surveillance was targeted at the most famous and most powerful men and women in Britain, including footballers, politicians, members of the government, police and military. The budget stretched to hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, probably more. As deputy editor, and then editor, Coulson was routinely commissioning and editing stories to which these investigators had contributed vital information.

It’s just a shame that Oborne didn’t argue this as strongly in his Mail slot. For that publication, he writes:

The answer is that the signals are mixed. I judge that Cameron is a relatively honest politician, but there are grave doubts about the integrity of some of the men who surround him, above all his chief media adviser and the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who had to resign after his paper was found to have hacked into royal mobile phones.

I’ve accepted a three year MPhil / PhD studentship at City University London’s new Centre of Law, Justice and Journalism.

My research will be exploring legal restraints on the media: more details on that down the line.

I’m very excited about the chance to really get my teeth into media ethical and legal issues, whilst continuing all the online stuff. The plan is to set up a new blog to track media law issues, and share my own research as I go (name ideas please!). Bloggers like Charlie Beckett, Daniel Bennett and Lilian Edwards demonstrate how the gap can be bridged between media and academia - I hope to do something similar, learning as I go.

During the past year I’ve also been increasingly inspired by the bloggers writing about science, freedom of speech and legal issues in the UK (Richard Wilson, Jack of Kent, the Bad Science blogs and Index on Censorship, for example) and I’m looking forward to spending more time exploring this space.

Until June 30, I’ll be at J.co.uk, busy with my normal reporting duties and working on our next news:rewired event (June 25 - tickets on sale now).

From July 1 to September I’ll be finishing an MA dissertation (an add-on to the City Uni postgraduate diploma I did in 2007); freelancing and squeezing in a few trips. I’ll also have more time to help out with the citizen-led End Child Detention Now campaign (nearly at 5,000 signatures) - which has a very straightforward goal we’re determined to accomplish.

Another early-stage project I have on the go - along with a few others - is a UK Hacks & Hackers event at which we’ll pair up journalists, designers programmers over two days to build online news projects (provisionally in London in September; venue TBC). If you’re interested in getting involved in that, please let me know.

And I hope to stay involved in the new UK Future of News Group. I won’t be living in Brighton anymore, so our nest will be in the hands of the lovely Sarah Booker - I’ll have to make to do with the London group and the hyperlocal news projects on my new London doorstep.

I’m also on the lookout for freelance work to fit alongside my PhD - please do get in touch if you think you have anything for me, whether it be in journalism, campaigning, or research.

jt.townend [at] googlemail.com

I’m doing it for two fantastic charities (money split 50-50)

• The MS Trust, a national charity that supports people affected by multiple sclerosis

• The Kenward Trust, a Kent-based charity that provides drug and alcohol addiction support

I’d really appreciate it if you could spare a pound or two to inspire me to get round and make up for all those painful wintry morning runs… Here’s the link: http://icanhaz.com/26miles

I’ve just seen the very funny entry on Stuff White People Like, no. 27 - marathons:

If you find yourself in a situation where a white person is talking about a marathon, you must be impressed or you will lose favor with them immediately.  Running for a certain length of time on a specific day is a very important thing to a white person and should not be demeaned.

Yup, I’m one of those middle class cliches, but you can still bloody well sponsor me!!

You can find @stop_child_det on Twitter and on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=139016764791

From ECDN.org, launched last year:

End Child Detention Now is a citizens’ initiative which sprang from a successful campaign to release a Barnsley born toddler and his parents from Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre where he had been held for more than three weeks in July 2009. Ibrahim is one of the more than 2,000 asylum seeking children that are held in immigration detention centres in the United Kingdom each year.

With our votes, our voices and our determination we have the power to end child detention now.

Please join us by signing the No.10 petition, by contacting your local MP (if you are not sure who he or she is you can find out by visiting theyworkforyou.com) and urging them to sign the early day motion in the name of Chris Mullin, writing to your local newspaper, writing to the Prime Minister, Rt Hon Gordon Brown, the Home Secretary, Rt Hon Alan Johnson, and the Immigration Minister, Rt Hon Phil Woolas.

Click here for a suggested text for your letter.

To offer your support or to find out more please email us at ecdn

I was also at at the news:rewired event where Hadfield made his announcement, getting a feeling for the extent to which technology is driving innovation in news gathering and reporting, and it seems to me that it’s not CODING that journalists should be able to do, it’s PROGRAMMING and being able to think in a computational way.

Coding can play a part of this, but it might only be a tiny part. Just knowing what’s possible is a start. Using visual programming tools that minimise the need for remembering syntax is one approach which is why I use Yahoo Pipes a lot; being able to grab, manipulate, clean and visualise data is also useful, and need not require classical CODING skills: an increasing number of tools provide graphical interfaces for constructing interactive visualisations if the data is represented in a particular way.

By wiring different applications together that each, automagically, perform certain representation transforming steps, it’s possible to wire up a series of applications that act on a particular set of data, transform it,manipulate it, query it, filter it, i.e. “wire a programme together” without having to write a line of classical computer software/code. But it is programming; it is about manipulating representations in a particular sequence. That’s what people need to learn to do - start appreciating the power of algorithms and representations, and start learning how to use them as everyday information skills.

.

• Patrick Smith on hyperlocal business models
• Adam Tinworth’s comprehensive liveblogged coverage; esp. on the little crowdsourcing / citizen journalism run-in 
• Jon Slattery on Greg Hadfield’s surprise announcement; more from Robert Andrews here
• David Dunkley Gymiah’s video
• Press Gazette on Kevin Marsh
• AudioBoos at this link

PS. Apparently we were a  trending topic on Twitter during the morning; highly exciting.

The Index on Censorship and English PEN are dismayed, they said earlier today:

We believe this is a case of such high public interest that it was incumbent upon a public sector broadcaster like the BBC to have held their ground in order to test in a Court of law the truth of the BBC’s report or determine whether a vindication of Trafigura was deserved.

John Kampfner, CEO of Index on Censorship said:

“Sadly, the BBC has once again buckled in the face of authority or wealthy corporate interests. It has cut a secret deal. This is a black day for British journalism and once more strengthens our resolve to reform our unjust libel laws.”

Jonathan Heawood, Director of English PEN, said:

“Forced to choose between a responsible broadcaster and an oil company which shipped hundreds of tons of toxic waste to a developing country, English libel law has once again allowed the wrong side to claim victory. The law is an ass and needs urgent reform.”

• Index on Censorship » Libel: BBC concedes to Trafigura.

• Visit libelreform.org for more details of the ongoing campaign to change the UK’s libel laws.

Buy your ticket before it’s too late. Here’s the blurb.

Who it’s for:

We want news:rewired to be an event for working journalists, trainees, journalism students and academics to learn new multimedia, social media and online skills from those with first-hand experience.

This event will be informal – with plenty of time for questions, networking and hopefully some new partnerships.

What we hope you’ll get:

First-hand advice on using new technologies, tools and skills for online journalism, whether that’s presentation or newsgathering;

Practical case studies from those who are pioneering new techniques in journalism;

Advice on what works and what doesn’t – from video and audio, to third-party websites and using data;

A chance to meet, network and share ideas with colleagues from across the industry.

• news:rewired, 14 January 2010, City University London