Media Standards Trust launches new 'unofficial' PCC database

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Industry group the Media Standards Trust has launched a database of complaints against the UK press to help journalists and readers better track industry regulation.

The "unofficial" press complaints site, which is currently in alpha, is an alternative to the Press Complaints Commission's (PCC) website . It uses data from the PCC's website and offers information on complaints investigated by the commission since 1996, which can be searched by publication name, complainant or other factors.

To create the site, the MST began its own database of complaints on the PCC's site before using data mining site ScraperWiki to scrape the commission's website for information. Making the information machine readable was key and the data has had to be tagged to make the new site searchable and easy to filter, Martin Moore, director of the MST, told Journalism.co.uk.

"The site is partly for people who want to keep the press accountable, but more importantly it's for claimants themselves and publications. If you're a news outlet and interested in issues about privacy, for example, and want to see cases in the past that the PCC has dealt with, it's quite hard to do that with the current site," said Moore.

"If you're trying to make decisions about stuff for a particular story hopefully it's much more helpful to look through the information in this way. It's sort of a league table approach - being able to compare across publications and decisions - which is, in a way, the point of regulation."

Information on the press complaints site can also be filtered by 'issues', which correspond to clauses in the Editors' Code of Practice upheld by the PCC. The site also highlights some high profile cases and hopes to offer more of these overviews. These show the coverage of such complaints elsewhere in the media and links to relevant material online to add context to the case, Moore said.

"We want it to be transparent and get reactions and feedback, so that's why we've launched it in alpha. It is meant to be as constructive as possible: on the current PCC site, because everything is not machine readable, you have to go back through old reports and compare stuff. Trying to track things is pretty impossible unless you put them all into an Excel spreadsheet," explained Moore.

"We hope this can feed into the rebuilding of their own [the PCC's] site. We'd be happy for our site's structure to be used and for them to learn from the mistakes that we've made and not repeat them in making something more transparent and usable."