According to the latest Ipsos MORI poll on trust in people, only 1 in 5 people think journalists tell the truth. They’re still more trustworthy than politicians generally and government ministers! Phew.

But telling the truth and being trustworthy are not the same thing. There’s not believing what they say and then there’s knowing that what they say is wrong and doing something about it. Which is why we have the Press Complaints Commission.

Here at ScraperWiki we also have a group of developers that don’t just complain when sites don’t work, they do something about it. That’s what Ben Campbell did for the Press Complaints Commission. He scraped the PCC to produce this site (pictured above) for the Media Standards Trust.

‘Trying to work out basic stuff, like which newspapers are the most complained about, is virtually impossible on the existing PCC site. So we scraped the data to make it easier (oh, and it’s the Daily Mail)’
– Martin Moore (Media Standards Trust)

Just as a news story can be presented in myriad of ways so too can data. Some representations are more useful than others. Many have different purposes,  a different audience. Others are so buried behind web forms and coding, they can’t reveal a story unless liberated.

Scraping creates a data wire service. And our developers are showing how even creating a simple league table (with realtime updates) can tell a completely different story.

Press Complaints Commission – you’ve been ScraperWikied!