In the second seminar of our Using Freedom of Information for Campaigning and Advocacy series, we learned how to use information from FOI requests to create stories and further your cause.
First, we heard the experience of two different campaign groups — Privacy International and Climate Emergency UK — in getting their stories into the public eye; this was followed by tips from freelance journalist Rosie Taylor about pitching to newspapers.
You can watch the whole video over on YouTube, or read the summary below.
Privacy International
Ilia Siatitsa
Privacy international is a UK-based organisation, working with partners around the world to research and advocate against governmental and corporate abuses of data and technology.
They’ve used FOI requests as a source of information that feeds into campaigns and advocacy for many years. Sometimes they use a preliminary round of FOI requests to help inform a subsequent, more focused one.
Their Neighbourhood Watched campaign, which investigated the use of new surveillance technologies by the UK police, is a good example (we’ve written about it before here). Privacy International submitted fact-finding FOI requests to many police forces across the UK, asking which technologies were being used at a local level for law enforcement.
The responses enabled them to identify several different types of tech, and that there was a massive regulatory gap around this area of law enforcement, with new, invasive technologies having been introduced before any guidance was put in place.
The information they obtained via FOI has inspired a number of different actions within a wider, multi-year campaign. Privacy International first rallied their supporters to write to their local Police and Crime Commissioner to ask for more information and better regulation.
They later launched a similar campaign around police technologies being used at protests, producing a guide to inform people attending marches, so they knew what tech was being deployed by police, and how to mitigate some of the exposure.
They also made follow-up FOI requests around the specific technologies that their first round had identified. In this second round of FOI requests, Privacy International found that the responses were all coming back as refusals, using very similar or identical language and stating that the authorities could not confirm or deny that the information was held.
Privacy International attempted to challenge these refusals via the ICO, but they were upheld; a subsequent appeal at the Information Rights Tribunal also upheld the decision and denied a request to appeal. Undaunted by this setback, Privacy International have moved back to advocacy, sending letters to police oversight bodies to point out that every other country that has introduced these technologies to their police forces has been more transparent about them. In 2020 they published a report criticising the way the police were using mobile phone extraction (where the contents of your phone are copied, no password required), calling for reform and safeguards.
So, while Privacy International haven’t yet won the battle, they continue to fight — and this is a good example of how FOI can form the basis of a multi-year campaign with many outputs, audiences and facets.
Here are Ilia’s top tips for submitting requests — also make sure you see our previous seminar, Getting the most from FOI, for lots more advice.
Questions from the audience:
Q: Can you make a rejection into the story?
A: You can, but it depends how you want to play it: you might decide that you don’t want the refusal decision to be out in public, setting a precedent for how authorities reply to responses. Privacy International are also trying a new approach, sending a different set of questions to see if that gets them better results.
Q: One of your tips is “format matters”: any further advice here?
A: Authorities might try to give the least information possible, using the way you’ve formatted your question to minimise what they share, so look carefully at how you’ve worded your request before sending it, and consider how it might be responded to with this mindset.
It can be very useful to use a yes/no question: this only takes the authority moments to answer.
Or, rather than asking for stats, try asking for the documents that those stats can be found within. Responding to this type of request takes less time for the authority, but their response will contain more information.
Authorities often come back and say that your request needs to be narrowed down, so that can be a strategy too: start with a broad request which you’ll be happy to whittle down, knowing that you actually want the narrower information.
Climate Emergency UK
Isaac Beevor
Climate Emergency UK (CE UK) was founded around five years ago, with the aim of collating data and information on UK councils’ climate emergency declarations. Since then they’ve worked with mySociety to create CAPE, which collates all UK councils’ Climate Action Plans, and the Council Climate Action Scorecards, which first assessed all the plans, and subsequently councils’ actual climate action.
Isaac explained that in order to gather data for the latest iteration of the Scorecards, they’d sent around 4,000 FOI requests to UK local authorities: these were all asking for data which couldn’t be obtained by other means.
These requests, which were worded very specifically, allowed CE UK to compile data on:
- Councils’ staffing levels for climate and implementing Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG);
- The average energy efficiency (EPC) ratings of council homes and the enforcement of the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES);
- Whether councillors and management were receiving carbon literacy training;
- Whether the councils were lobbying their devolved national government, or the UK government, for further powers or funding.
As well as giving vital information that fed into the Scorecards project, the request about EPC ratings resulted in an exclusive [paywalled] on page two of the Financial Times.
Isaac shared how CE UK went about achieving this coverage, noting that any organisation could do the same: they are a small and relatively new charity, but followed some logical steps to pitch their story, and it paid off.
First of all, they identified three potential stories, analysing the data they’d received and looked for trends within it to see what stood out the most. They wrote the headline for each, to make it easy for a journalist to imagine the piece and the way the data could be framed.
CE UK also considered the stories’ relevance to what was in the news at the time. The cost of living crisis was very much in the zeitgeist, and that tied in well with their data around low energy efficiency standards in council housing.
They identified which newspaper they wanted to target, and found a suitable journalist to approach, and then simply emailed them with both the headlines and the detail to back them up. Isaac advises that it is reasonable to pitch a few potential stories at one time, especially if you have such rich data that you can pull several angles out of it.
Finally, Isaac advises that having given your framing to the journalist, you must allow them the freedom to emphasise whichever parts of the story they want to, based on your clear explanation of the data and what it is saying.
Questions from the audience:
Q: Did CE UK use EIR (Environmental Information Regulations) requests?
A: The requests were sent with a note that the authorities should feel free to treat them as either EIR or FOI requests. In these cases, the responses would be much the same so the distinction wasn’t a great concern for CE UK.
Q: How can one identify the right journalist to approach?
A: CE UK were guided by where they wanted the story to go, based on the reputation of the paper. Ideally you can then identify a journalist who has an interest in your subject matter. Clearly they won’t know your data as well as you do, so make sure they understand the context — be really clear in explaining what your data is about. And it’s fine to pitch to more than one journalist: give them a deadline to respond by and if they don’t, move on to another.
Q: If the paper has a paywall how do you ensure as many people as possible see the story?
A: As well as the FT exclusive, which gave that paper the ability to print first, CE UK later sent a press release round to more general and sector press. This was also picked up by many.
Rosie Taylor, freelance journalist
Rosie specialises in health and consumer affairs, writing news and features across all national press, and she often uses FOI in work. She also works with organisations to improve their media coverage.
Rosie began by listing five key things to consider when pitching a story to the newspapers:
- Relevance Your story needs to be relevant to that publication’s readers. All publications have slightly different audiences with unique interests and concerns.
- Timeliness Can you hook into topics that are being talked a lot at the moment in the news? Make sure the journalist knows ‘why now?’.
- Ease How easy are you making it for the editor to say yes? Overworked journalists don’t have time to build up a story, so ideally you should provide a complete package. If you’re giving them data, it’s all the better if you can give them the top line but also attach the datasets. Line up experts, provide case studies and pictures — it all really helps. Look at what a finished article looks like on the page: that is everything you’re going to need.
- Targeting Make sure you’re sending your pitch to the right journalist in the right section of the right publication. Read the publication yourself and look at the stories; become familiar with which journalists are covering certain topics.
- Timing Pitch plenty of time ahead of when you want the story to be published, to allow time for the journalist to write it.
When considering which news outlet you are targeting, you need to look at your ultimate aim: for example, the Financial Times is read by changemakers, so it fits the needs of many campaign or advocacy groups well. Perhaps you just want more people to know about your organisation, in which case a mass readership publication would suit you better.
We tend to think of each newspaper as a single entity but in fact they can contain different sections, each with their own editor and journalists, and slightly different interests, audiences and timescales.
It pays to know which section you are targeting, and what you want it to look like on the page. Will the story be a few paragraphs or are you hoping for a double page spread?
You might pitch your story to local papers rather than a national. In fact, many of these are syndicated across the whole country, so you can still effectively attain national coverage that way.
If you are pitching to a daily newspaper with a Sunday edition: is it a seven-day operation, or are they two separate papers? For example, you shouldn’t pitch the Times and the Sunday Times simultaneously, as they run autonomously, while the Telegraph just runs seven days a week.
Similarly, some papers have a different team producing online content, like the Daily Mail newspaper and Mail Online.
Don’t feel that you have to write off a whole publication just because you’ve had a ‘no’ from one section – if the Sunday paper says no, you can still pitch the dailies; if the Health section says ‘no’, you can try another section.
There are two ways of pitching: ‘all round’, which goes to several papers at once, or as an exclusive.
All-rounds
If you are sending your story to multiple outlets at the same time, always put an embargo on the press release (a date and time after which it can be published). This ensures that you have control over the moment of release, and journalists welcome it as it gives them the time to write the story up.
Make your embargo clear: you can put it in big red capital letters, add it to the email title, et cetera. The general convention for print is an embargo of 00:01 (one minute past midnight) for the story to appear in the following day’s papers.
Online outlets really like embargos in the middle of the day (but that timing is a nightmare for print, so pick one). For broadcast, you can time the embargo to their news bulletins.
Make sure you’re available in the run-up to the embargo, including having your experts or case studies at hand, in case there are any extra questions. If you have embargoed the story for a Monday release, that means being available on the Sunday.
An all-round is always a gamble, because it can be scuppered by a bigger news story arising; with an exclusive you can discuss timing with your journalist and they might have the flexibility to put it out at a later date if that is still appropriate.
Exclusives
With an exclusive, you can work with one publication and focus on getting quality coverage. You can still set an embargo if the timing is important to you; you can also do a joint exclusive for print and broadcast, so long as you are transparent with all parties.
As Isaac mentioned, if one paper declines your story, take it to another — you can pretend you’re still offering it to them first!
Be very clear that you’re offering your story as an exclusive. Explain why it is relevant to them, their readers, and is timely. You should do this further ahead of time than with an all-round, especially bearing in mind that you may have to pitch to more than one outlet; also, they might want to examine your data and go into the story more deeply.
As soon as your exclusive story has been published, you can send to all the other press and see if any of them pick it up — so an exclusive doesn’t tie your story to a single paper for good.
Timing
While Rosie says one shouldn’t be too hung up on timing — it is much more important to have a strong story — it does help to know the cycles to which newspapers work.
Sunday papers have a day off on a Monday; pool ideas on Tuesdays and most of the content has been written by the Thursday. Pitch a few weeks ahead.
Daily papers work to rough weekly cycles. They have more space on Saturdays, when they like lighter stories with good human interest; while the Monday edition is smaller but also the most serious – a good time for dryer, data-driven stories.
On Sundays, daily papers tend to have a skeleton staff, so they might be grateful of a fully-worked story. Pitch on the Wednesday of the previous week, with an embargo for Monday morning, and your story will be worked on by the Sunday staff who will be glad to have something easy to include.
Supplements and weekly sections within daily papers all have their own cycles, so just pitch a couple of weeks ahead of when you need to run.
Questions from the audience
Q: Is it better to pitch to a freelancer like Rosie, or directly to a paper?
A: There are plusses to both, but Rosie says there are several benefits to pitching to a freelancer: they can pitch to multiple publications, know all the editors and know instinctively which would be the best fit. Plus they have an incentive to get your story published, because they are paid on publication.
On the other hand, staff journalists have more weight with the papers, so it’s easier for them to get stories in.
Q: Is it best to phone or email?
A: Don’t ever phone. The journalist will see your email – but they do get a lot, so you need to make sure it is eye-catching. If you are offering an exclusive, make it very clear that this is a personal email intended for its recipient, not a generic one.
Q: What sort of case studies could we be providing?
A: Even if your story is just based on data, there will still be a human impact in the story. For example, looking at the energy standards story, you could find someone who lives in an energy inefficient home or who hasn’t got money for their bills.
Q: How do big investigations get funded?
A: Most are funded in-house, and developed internally. You might find yourself working with the newspaper’s own team. Complex stories take time, so you need a newspaper on board to pay for your time and any equipment you need. Sometimes, organisations like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism apply for grants to help them with in-depth stories.
