Power to the people in holding politicians to account
Editorial teams (almost) always want to do things immediately. Ingrained habits of creating a whole newspaper in a day mean journalists are used to doing things fast — and the constant publishing deadline the internet provides has only increased the pressure.
Understanding of respective timescales between product and editorial is a classic pinch point…
But when something is important and valuable, there is usually a way to make it happen in short(er) order.
Recently Daily Mirror investigations editor Nick Sommerlad got in touch with Mary Lojkine in the Trinity Mirror Digital product team with an idea to build more momentum for his ongoing investigation into Tory MPs’ declared spending in last year’s general election campaign.
Nick set out his request clearly:
We want to host pdfs (or other suitable image formats) of the spending declarations of each MP. It will need a search function and a comment function. If we don’t have a spending declaration for the MP we want to appeal to someone to go and get it for us and email it to us.
It needed to be set up quickly: there is a year-long window after an election spending return being filed for an official investigation to be launched, and that window was rapidly closing.
The question Mary posed me and my boss Pete Picton was simple:
What are we trying to achieve?
Politics is something Mirror Online struggled with for a long time. As a small team of generalists writing for a brand known for its strong political views, tackling the nuanced world of Westminster outside the big events was difficult.
But since spring 2015, when Dan Bloom and Mikey Smith took over digital politics coverage ahead of the election, the site’s political coverage has made rapid strides.
Interactive widgets that let users check how their MP voted on key issues like bombing Syria and ESA and tax credit cuts have been a popular feature with the section’s growing audience. Nick’s election expenses interactive was a logical extension.
And this was an issue that mattered. It is something the Mirror has led the way on, although Channel 4 have also done their bit to turn up the heat on the Tories.
It fitted clearly with the Mirror’s left wing position, and Mirror Online’s politically engaged audience, which is strongly driven by social media. And this is the kind of issue readers always engage with: Has somebody in power and meant to be good actually done something bad?
Making the spending returns available online would put the power in the hands of our readers. It would be citizen journalism at scale.
And what about the widget? What was that trying to achieve?
Nick had set his requirements out clearly in his initial email. But how should it work? Does anybody really want to look through pages of .pdfs?
In a mobile-dominated internet, there are still some things we turn to desktops for.
Provided the interactive worked on a phone so readers could access the information, it didn’t matter whether people would ferret through a 30 page .pdf document on their phone — we wanted to provide the documents so people who wanted to dig could do so, however they chose to.
And there may not be many people scrutinising the documents, but that was not necessarily the point. A small number of people could have a big impact in helping drive Nick’s story forward.
How many people does it take to make a widget?
There was a clear value in the project — so the question was now how to make it happen.
Step 1: A meeting
It is tempting to try to organise everything on email, but there is no substitute for getting people into a room. And in a 7-day or shift operation it can be worth over-inviting on a project with an imminent deadline to increase the chances of somebody useful being around at a crunch point.
Attendees:
- Nick Sommerlad, Daily Mirror investigations editor — he started all this
- Mary Lojkine, head of product for nationals and web — if we want to mess around with the website, she needs to know about it
- Mikey Smith, political reporter — also smart with spreadsheets
- Pete Picton, online editorial director — the big boss who likes interesting things and can try to make sure they actually happen
- Jason Beattie, Mirror political editor — swapped Westminster for the newsroom in One Canada Square in September to head up the integrated print / digital Mirror politics team, also writer of the politics newsletter
- Sydnee Watlow, product manager and someone who Gets Stuff Done
- Claire Miller, data journalist in Trinity Mirror’s award-winning data unit
- Me, executive editor (digital) — general meddler/facilitator in editorial projects
From starting the meeting to sending out notes with a clear list of assigned to-dos was less than an hour.
Step 2: Doing it
Rival sites may have whole teams focused on constantly creating interactives, but Mirror Online does not.
What we are fortunate to have is the Data Unit, whose magic spreadsheets have powered our How My MP Voted widgets and our local election results graphics, not to mention all the strong news stories, often with added whizzy bits, that they produce for Trinity Mirror’s network of 150+ regional and national newspapers and websites.
They are well positioned to do quick, tactical things rather than the longer-term projects baked into the CMS worked on by the product team.
Claire, with the help of developer Carlos Novoa, would be the one who would make the framework to respond to Nick’s initial requirements. A constituency or postcode look up with the name of an MP returned as part of the answer had been used in previous widgets, so could be adapted relatively quickly for this project.
Nick would provide the content, supported by Mirror trainee Nicola Bartlett.
We storyboarded the four outcomes for the widget:
- no material — volunteer to help
- we’re expecting the material
- this is the material — what to look for
- this is the material — what to look for and what we’ve already found
We also needed: to get all the election expenses documents Nick had already sourced into a .pdf format and uploaded to our file hosting site; the contact details we would ask people to submit if they were volunteering to help; articles explaining how to request election expenses documents, what to look for in them and the main story to launch the initiative.
If you think journalism is glamorous, you should also know it can involve spending hours scanning in documents or inputting information into spreadsheets.
We also needed a name. Running a campaign online, which this is what it essentially was, needs an obvious engaging hashtag and a clear identity.
Two suggestions batted around in the meeting stuck: a People’s Electoral Commission and #CheckATory.
Step 3: Going live
Eight days after Nick’s request, the interactive widget went live at 6.30pm on Tuesday night.
We were quickly inundated by people volunteering to help, while others provided new information on the spending returns already available to look at online.
Will we find anything to add to the investigation? Time will tell. But we have made democratic processes more transparent to readers and put people at the heart of a big story — two key characteristics of being a tabloid newspaper website.
