Tagged: york press
Going up, going down: The end of the of the football season in newspaper front pages
Nobody covers a football club quite like the local newspaper. The highs and the lows, the frustrations and the delights (with the sports desk normally being blamed for the former by readers, but rarely thanked for the latter). So it’s no surprise that when the not-quite-life-and-death matters of promotion and relegation are dealt with, the football normally passes from the back page to the front page.
With the last play off in the bag (well done Crewe), here’s a round-up of how regional papers covered the success, or otherwise, of their teams
Premier League
Champions: Manchester City
Title: Manchester Evening News
Manchester Evening News
Premier League
18th place (relegated): Bolton
Title: Bolton News
Praying for a miracle before the game … The Bolton News
and after…
… and after relegation was confirmed
Premier League
19th place (relegated): Blackburn
Title: Lancashire Telegraph
The Lancashire Telegraph
Premier League
20th place (relegated): Wolves
Titles: Birmingham Mail and the Wolverhampton Express and Star
The Black Country edition of the Birmingham Mail
And the Express and Star
Councillors under fire for using the FOI Act too much
Councils are becoming increasingly vocal about the cost of dealing with Freedom of Information requests. Wolverhampton City Council, for example, reminds people about the cost of dealing with requests when sending replies out.
I can’t imagine the city council sends out letters with the binmen telling them how much it costs to empty the bins, or dispatches memos to parents complaining about how much it costs to provide teachers in schools. So why pick on the FOI Act? Anyone would think it’s because councillors, once they become the ruling party, and senior officers don’t like having to be held to account.
To that end, an interesting spat is developing in York, where Labour has had a pop at the Lib Dems for submitting too many FOI requests. Labour claim the Lib Dems start from a position of expecting the council to be unhelpful in requests for information, according to the York Press.
A tree-mendous newspaper bill?
Shared by colleague Steve Nicholls, a web editor at the Birmingham Post and Mail, is this rather amusing bill from the York Press:
As Steve observes, were the arrests carried out by special branch? I tried to come up with something wittier, but most of my examples were a little wooden.
FOI Friday: Speaking clocks, hospital parking fines, gagging orders and snooping on council staff
1. Court cases dropped for ‘not being in the public interest’
Some fascinating numbers reported in the London Evening Standard as a result of an FOI request to the Crown Prosecution Service, which was asked to reveal how many prosecutions in London were dropped ‘because they were no longer in the public interest’ – often on cost grounds. More than 20,000 cases were dropped in London, a rise on previous years, with critics saying costs are increasingly a factor. One which could run and run elsewhere?
2. Another case of the cost of the obese
FOI requests asking hospitals about what they’ve spent on equipment to deal with obese people are nothing new – but asking the ambulance service could bring in some interesting results, as this story on the Daily Post in North Wales proves.
Here’s a new take on the parking tickets FOI. We’ve all done FOIs about the how much hospitals make from parking charges, but how many parking tickets do they issue? In Aberdeen, it’s around 2000 fines a year. A nice sideline if ever there was one?
FOI Friday: Overdue books, bedding plants, baby scans and trading standards
1. The most overdue books in town
The devil, they say, is in the detail. And the Accrington Observer got plenty of detail back from its FOI request into overdue books at Accrington Library. Not only did they find out the number of books which are overdue, and the total amount owing in fines, but they also got details of the most overdue book at each library in the area. The most overdue book in the borough is a book called Balloon, which should have been returned in 2004. That means £300 of fines are attached to that book – although the cap on fees is just £6.
Here’s one which will probably have critics of FOI claiming its proof of people abusing the act, but to me it’s just another example of councils being held to account. The Evening Chronicle in Newcastle used FOI to find out how much councils were spending on bedding plants. The total is around £500,000. It’s a good example of FOI being used to prompt a debate. On one hand, nice flower beds could be seen as a luxury councils can’t afford, but on the other, they’ll be the things people complain about if axed.
3. The cost of that first baby photo
Accusations flying of ‘stealth taxes’ on expectant mums in Birmingham after an FOI request revealed that the city’s main birthing hospital is making more than £50,000 a year from selling pictures of pregnency scans to happy (and I would imagine, some not so happy) parents-to-be. The £6-a-photo charge is much higher than at other hospitals.
FOI Friday: Maternity complaints, metal thefts, paying to access phone records and money from recycling,
Complaints about maternity wards (Sunday Sun)
A BABY was cut across the face as it was delivered by a routine Caesarean section procedure at a North hospital, the Sunday Sun reported after using FOI to get hold of details of complaints made about maternity units in the region.
It was one of almost 200 formal complaints to NHS trusts about maternity units, services and care experienced by soon-to-be parents and new mums.
There are tens of thousands of births in the North each year, and so the number of complaints is low. But unions last night called on the Government to ensure there was enough cover on maternity wards.
The cost of checking mobile phone records (Stoke Sentinel)
With phone hacking rarely out of the news at the moment, here’s a different relationship involving mobile phones which may cause surprise: The amount police forces have to pay mobile phone companies for access to records when carrying out investigations.
Figures released under a Freedom of Information request show that the amounts paid to telephone companies so Staffordshire Police can get their hands on text messages and call records have spiralled since 2007.
The information shows the force spent £238,803 in the financial year 2007/8. The following year the bill went up by £50,000 to £288,928.
Then in 2009/10, the force paid out £330,869.
FOI Friday: Dog poop, online browsing, police response times and racism in schools
1. What public sector workers look at online
I think it’s safe to say this one could run, and run, and run. A freedom of information request to the Department for Transport revealed the top 1,000 most visited websites from Department for Transport computers. Some amusing surprises in there.
2. Alternative therapies in schools
According to a freedom of information request reported in the Birmingham Mail, schools in the city have spent £1.5million on alternative therapies for staff and pupils, including massages. The firms paid the cash was called Herriots and Millward.
3. Data Protection Act breaches in police forces
The Manchester Evening News this week revealed that a memory stick containing details of drugs informants had been stolen in a burglarly from a police officer’s house. Greater Manchester Police was so keen for the public’s help in cracking this case that it didn’t even mention it for over a week. Coincidentally, an FOI request from the Cambridge News demonstrates the value of using FOI to ask police forces for the number of Data Protection Act breaches. 12 staff were caught breaking DPA rules, including one person putting information on Facebook. If ever you’ve done the ‘lost and stolen data’ FOI, it might be worth broadening it out in future to include any DPA breaches.
FOI Friday: Second jobs for firemen, missing art, teens on drugs and CCTV in schools
1. Second jobs for firemenWe’ve seen FOI requests asking for the second jobs for policemen, but the Manchester Evening News this week reported on the second jobs held by firemen in Greater Manchester, of which there appear to be quite a number:
As well as trades such as plasterers or joiners, some are working as butchers, florists, and herdsmen. One fireman was a ‘semi-pro football player’, while one of his colleagues worked as a TV extra. Another firefighter gave his job title as the ‘proprietor of a bouncy castle business’.
A good example of widening out an FOI request to get interesting results comes from the Croydon Advertiser, which asked the council for details of attacks on all staff – as opposed to, say, just teachers. The figures which came back weren’t that high, but the details of the attacks led to a good story, not least the one about a traffic warden almost run over after issuing a ticket.
Writing negative stories about the armed forces is always interesting territory for any newspaper, but the Western Mail’s FOI-based story which revealed the number of cases of drug abuse among Welsh army regiments was certainly interesting reading.
FOI FRIDAY: 10 things we’ve learnt this week thanks to the Freedom of Information Act
From an increase in food poisoning due to the recession to the councillors who haven’t let the credit crunch reduce their appetite for free food, there’s been a very mixed bag of revelations thanks to FOI this week…
1. The health impact of the recession
The recession has been blamed for many things and, it would appear, you can add rocketing food poisoning cases to the list too. That’s what the Birmingham Mail discovered when it asked the city council for numbers of food poisoning cases in the city, along with the reports from all establishments which got the lowest possible score on its 0-5 scoring system.
2. How many speeding fines per speed camera?
Sticking in the West Midlands, the Wolverhampton Express and Star used FOI to report on how many speeding fines ‘safety’ cameras were issuing. The paper had doped to get the number of fines for each speed camera by location, but this part of the request was refused on the grounds it could lead to vandal attacks on those cameras. This seems a rather flimsy excuse, but at least they released the number of fines issued by the top 10 performing cameras, and which borough they were in. A challenge of the use of the Section 31 exemption (for grounds of law enforcement) might be interesting – is there a public interest reason for knowing how many fines each camera issues, and would this ensure that people slowed down?
3. Domestic violence and the World Cup
The Halifax Courier demonstrated well how to use the Freedom Of Information Act for both a topical story and one which requires quite specific data. It asked for the number of domestic attacks which took place in the area during the World Cup compared to the previous year. The police supplied the info – attacks 6% up.
Like this:
FOI Friday: 10 things we’ve learnt this week thanks to the Freedom of Information Act
A victory in the battle for reports about council investigations
We start this week with a victory for a local paper. The Harrow Observer had tried to get its hands on a report produced by Harrow Council into the theft of £1,500 from the Town Hall. The council refused to release it under FOI and the paper took its fight to the Information Commissioner, who backed the paper. The report, published in the paper this week, gives some interesting background to the case – but there’s still no sign of a conviction.
And a victory in the battle for speed camera information
I’ve mentioned on this blog a few times before that ‘safety camera partnerships’ often refuse requests for details of how many speeding tickets issued by individual cameras. Sometimes they cite the reason that it will impede criminal investigations. However, the Information Commissioner has now insisted that information be released in the case of a campaign group in Devon. With one camera netting more than £1million, on a road which had only serious accident, it’s no wonder they wanted to keep it quiet.
Outstanding police arrest warrants
Perhaps topical given the fugitive who has been on the run in the North East this week, but the Western Mail reports than more than 900 people are on the run from the police. ‘On the run’ is defined as those who have outstanding police warrants against them, and 161 are suspected of the most serious offences going.
