Blathnaid Healy’s Blog

Guardian.co.uk is calling on its readers to use its research tools to search through some 700,000 MP expenses documents to see if there are more instances where a claim needs investigation.

It is asking people to read through the documents and when they see a possible irregularity hit the ‘investigate this’ button and the Guardian will take a closer look.

There are so many documents to review that the Guardian’s crowdsourcing move makes sense – and what a great story to use it on.

Looking forward to seeing how this project develops! And to the future twists, turns and revelations in the expenses story.

If you want to help the Guardian with its research click here

RTÉ Elections 2009

In the last few weeks quite a bit of my time has been spent coordinating the website for the 5 June elections. It was launched this week and you can visit it here.

Check out the group blog  Campaign Daily – with great contributions this week from Mark Little (who had an excellent blog on RTÉ.ie for the US elections), Miriam O’Callaghan and Cian McCormack.

Visit us at Twitter @RTE_Elections and while you’re there  follow Prime Time’s new Twitter stream @RTE_PrimeTime as well.

There’s lots of great material on the main site including an excellent guide to PR-STV by UCD’s Prof Richard Sinnott (the system of voting used in Ireland), chapters from the just published and widely discussed All Politics is Local, lots of great audio and video highlights from RTÉ’s best news and current affairs programmes and features written by young journalists covering the European Parliament elections.

It’ll be a busy couple of weeks ahead as the website keeps on growing and the elections get closer but I’m looking forward to it particularly the count weekend!

Blathnaid

P.S By the way send us in your election photos!

I am in Washington DC at the moment en route from Dublin to Denver. I have done a little work here, but mostly preparation for the week ahead in Denver.

Keep an eye out for coverage from the Democratic and Republican Party conventions from Monday on RTE.ie/news.

Looking forward to a challenging week!

From the Newspaper Society

The INM newspaper launched its redesigned website a month ago and it has seen a 29% jump week on week in page impressions – pretty impressive!

It’s a nice site, a huge improvement on the old one and much more user friendly. It does follow the INM formula pretty much to the letter though.

The first of the Huffington Post’s local news sites launched today. The Chicago site is the first step in a broader strategy to set up a network of local news aggregation sites across the US.

It will be interesting to watch this site over the coming months.

More from Jemima Kiss here

Really looking forward to seeing how this works out.

Read more about it here

Boomtown has reported that Guardian News & Media is to announce it has bought Content Next, which owns paidContent.org, later on this morning. As Kara Swisher notes this is quite the new media coup for GNM.

Yesterday it was announced the LA Times is to cut 250, the majority of these are editorial positions.

Today, AFP reported that the newspaper’s editor, Russ Stanton said the cuts reflected the paradox of the Internet revolution.

AFP reported that the Stanton memo said:

Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.

Read the full story here

Via journalism.co.uk

Hyperlocal news mapping website Everyblock has announced that it is launching in Charlotte, North Carolina and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Charlotte map will include library information, updating listings with new titles available locally and chart all local 911 calls to the police and ‘significant police events’ in the city.

The location of series crimes will charted on the Philadelphia map along with areas mentioned by the local authority’s Streets and Services agenda bodies.

Everyblock also has maps for Chicago, San Francisco and New York.

I wish this service had existed when I spent my first summer in Chicago back in 2000! I hope the current crop of J1 students heading stateside this year have found it.

And you can see it here.

As I said, thoughts on this will follow later.