The Nova Scotia government has cut the application fee for freedom of information requests to $5.00 from $25.00, effective August 14.
The fee had been the highest in Canada, matched only by Alberta.  Most jurisdictions charge $5.00 or have no fee at all. Saskatchewan municipalities charge a little more than $20.
When a member of the public [...]

A sign of the time perhaps.
Investigative Reporters and Editors is holding it’s 2010 computer-assisted reporting conference at the Arizona State University J-school next March.
The choice makes absolute sense, at a time when non-profits such as IRE are having to cut staff to keep afloat, and journalists strain to pay the high costs associated with meetings [...]

Computer-Assisted Reporting was a big part of this year’s winning Michener Award entry. The CBC and the Canadian Press teamed up to analyze Taser use by police officers across Canada, building a unique database from use-of-force reports obtained from police forces across the country. Read the press release from Rideau Hall here.
The reporters analyzed the data and [...]

The Waterloo Region Record from Ontario has won the 2008 CAJ award for computer-assisted reporting for a series on highway safety. Reporters Melinda Dalton and Tamsin McMahon combined analytic reporting and intensely human stories to win the prestigious award. The award, which comes with a $500 cash prize, was presented at the CAJ’s annual awards dinner in Vancouver [...]

Vancouver city council has voted to open up its data stores to the public, according to local news reports.
“People pay for us to collect data, so we should make it available,” Vancouver councillor Andrea Reimer was quoted as saying by Metro Vancouver after the May 21 decision. The move means the city will provide the [...]

Continuing a tradition nearly 15 years old, the CAJ will once again offer an introduction to CAR at its Vancouver annual conference. Fred Vallance-Jones from King’s will join David McKie of CBC Radio for the all-day session at Langara College. They’ll cover the basics of using Excel spreadsheets to make sense of online data, and [...]

Hamilton has joined a number of other Canadian cities in putting its restaurant inspection results online. The searchable database of inspections goes back to Jan. 1, 2009. You can search it at http://www.foodsafetyzone.ca/.
As with other such systems, the amount of information the city provides is limited. You can search by the establishment name or the area of [...]

Users of the open-source database MySQL will be watching closely now that Sun Microsystems has agreed to a friendly $7.4 billion takeover by Oracle Corp.  Oracle, of course, makes one of the big proprietary (read, expensive) database systems, and one that is a direct competitor to MySQL, which Sun itself acquired about a year ago. Already, [...]

The Canadian Assocaition of Journalists has announced the finalists for the CAJ/Marketwire Computer-Assisted Reporting Award.  The finalists include a joint entry from the CBC and the Canadian Press analyzing Taser usage, and two series on nursing home inspections, by Chinta Puxley of CP and Chad Skelton of the Vancouver Sun.

A three-judge panel of Ontario’s Court of Appeal has thrown out a 2007 decision that threatened to severely restrict access to electronic records in the province.
The Divisional Court ruled that the Toronto police had no obligation under FOI legislation to write a small computer program to extract data in an anonymous format. But the appeals [...]

Transport Canada’s public CADORS site is once again availalbe for searches.
The site allows users to search for avaition incidents reported to Transport Canada. With the crash-landing of a US Airways flight in New York, possibly caused by bird strikes, Canadian reporters are trying to find out how many such events have occurred here. CBC Winnipeg television [...]

Canadian journalists and journalism students looking for a comprehensive guide to computer-assisted reporting with a Canadian bent finally have one. Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Comprehensive Primer covers CAR from basic Web searches to social networking analysis, with lots of detail on spreadsheet and database software en-route.

King’s journalism student Kathleen Hunter is joining CARinCanada to write news stories and help gather new content.
Watch for her posts on CarinCanada in the months to come. Hunter is a third-year student in the four year program at King’s. We’d like to welcome her aboard!

Two years after an Edmonton Journal investigation revealed just how dirty some of the city’s restaurant kitchens really are, the area’s health authority is moving to post inspection reports online. The system is live now with an official start date of July 1, 2008.

Here’s a great example of building an index.
It’s not unusual for magazines and other publications to rank communities on one measure or another. MoneySense has done one of the most comprehensive rankings yet, comparing 154 communities on more than 20 factors, from the cost of housing to the percentage riding bikes to the liklihood of [...]

The nursing home story has arrived in Vancouver. Using data on more than 3,000 long-term care facilities (and others) the Vancouver Sun has provided an inside look at conditions in area homes.

Climbing the data ladder can be dangerous.That was one of the messages delivered Thursday June 5 at the annual conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors in Miami.

The potential of GIS (mapping) software to give readers value-added content on media websites was demonstrated at a panel at the Canadian Association of Journalists annual conference in Edmonton Friday. It was one of three packed CAR sessions at the Edmonton event. 

WHOIS searches on .ca domain names are about to get a whole lot less informative.
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority is slapping on new privacy restrictions. The name of the registrant, plus the contact information for sites registered to individuals will no longer be available via WHOIS. That means journalists researching who is behind a site [...]

The Nova Scotia government says it will begin to post restaurant health inspections online this summer. The announcement came in the provincial legislature in response to an opposition private members bill to make such postings mandatory.

The Edmonton Journal reports on its website that the City of Edmonton has appealed an order from the province’s information and privacy commissioner that requires it to destroy a database of information on customers of pawn shops.

Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor once again showed why he’s one of the best CAR reporters in the country with his analysis of House of Commons votes by the Liberal opposition.

CBC has lost an important federal court case about access to electronic data.
The decision endorses a position advanced by federal bureaucrats that data requested under the Access to Information Act should be withheld if there is a chance someone could be identified by linking anonymous details in the data to other information that is already [...]

The Salt Lake Tribune has just published a nice piece of work comparing response times of 11 separate police agencies. After filing public records requests to each of the agencies, Tribune computer assisted reporting editor Tony Semerad and reporter Russ Rizzo crunched through half a million police call records to compare response times across their region.

Sun Microsystems has announced the completion of its $1 billion takeover of MySQL.
You can read the official details in this February 26 news release and get the take of Sun’s CEO on his blog.

From a Jan. 9 press release from Investigative Reporters and Editors…
Investigations into cheating, the death penalty and insurance fraud receive top honors in Meyer Awards

The inaugural King’s  Summer School in Computer-Assisted Reporting wrapped up on Saturday June 28 after six days of roll-up-the-sleeves learning.
Fourteen journalists from Alberta to Newfoundland learned how to dig into data for both daily and enterprise stories. They also learned about effective writing, and how to pry data from reluctant government agencies.
The week wrapped up with a private reception. [...]