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Journalists have raised concerns that a commercial platform being used to display local government spending figures will make it harder for local reporters to do their jobs.

Last week on his blog , Chris Taggart from OpenlyLocal criticised the use of SpotlightOnSpend , a commercial site being used by councils across the country to publish their spending data.

He claimed that this goes against the government's draft open data guidelines and gives SpotlightOnSpend access to data on a "privileged basis".

Taggart claims the data on the site is not machine-readable, is summarised to exclude some of the raw data and is not allowed to be re-used commercially.

He also found that once councils had handed their data over, it was no longer available through their own sites. We reported on the advantages for journalists of the government's open data initiative , announced by David Cameron last month. Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian Datablog and Datastore, said the move would create an "amazing resource".

But he told Journalism.co.uk the use of SpotlightOnSpend would make it very difficult for journalists to analyse the data for readers.

"There are going to be a lot of local authorities panicking right now, they've got to get this stuff out and as quickly as possible," he told Journalism.co.uk. "My main concern is that they do what local authorities (with a few exceptions) alway do - outsource the stuff. So, we might end up with data that's difficult to download, inaccessible to use and stuffed with daft terms and conditions which actually make it harder to investigate what's going on."

"This has clear implications for local reporters - they have a key role in helping to analyse the data for their readers and if it's not easily available then it's really going to make their jobs harder," he added.

According to a report by Information Age , Luke Spikes, chief executive of the company behind the SpotlightOnSpend, said the website will now make raw data available.

But Paul Bradshaw, who also wrote a post on the topic on his Online Journalism Blog, told Journalism.co.uk that journalists must continue to monitor the situation.

"As councils and other public bodies are told to release their data for public scrutiny we (journalists) should be watching how they do that. This is a key moment for journalism: how information (data) is released to the public and the standards and practices that are established now will affect our profession for a long time. We need to make sure that those practices are best practices that allow as many people as possible to interrogate the 'raw'

data in as many ways as possible. Allowing any organisation to have a privileged position in processing this data for the rest of us is something we have to avoid - the more eyes that are allowed to look at the raw data, the healthier for democracy, and ultimately for journalism."

The government's Transparency Board responded to Taggart to say they will rectify the problems raised.

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Written by
Rachel Bartlett

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