 Thank you everyone for joining us this morning. Welcome to the second of our seminars on using FOI for advocacy and campaigning. The recording of our first seminar on getting the most from FOI is available on our YouTube channel at the moment and we will be recording this seminar as well so we can send it to you afterwards and also use clips from the recording for other training courses. Today we're here because we're going to delve into telling stories using FOI data and we're going to hear from three speakers who use FOI in their work in different ways. As usual on these seminars we'd ask you to stay on mute throughout the presentations and there will be a chance to ask questions in a Q&A after each presentation. We'll have a break after CUK have presented just for 10 minutes so you can nip to the loo and you can always pop questions in the chat as well and myself and my colleagues can answer or bring these up for you. So, with no further ado, our first presentation is from Ilya, Programme Director and Senior Legal Officer at Privacy International. Ilya is going to be talking to us about using FOI in advocacy and campaigning work. Go ahead. Thank you very, very much. The magic moment again. Can you see my screen? Yes. Oh, brilliant. Hey, hello everyone and thank you very, very much for having a PI today here. What do they know? And my side, they have been instrumental in a lot of the work I've been presenting here. They've managed to put the order in our chaos so I'm very, very glad to be here with you today. Just a brief introduction. It doesn't seem one second. Okay, there it is. For just for who Privacy International is, Privacy International is a London-based charity that works globally with partners and we research and advocate globally against government and corporate abuses of data and technology. We've been around for quite a while. I am with PI for almost six years now. I am a lawyer and I'm leading one of our strategic areas at Privacy International. And throughout our work we have been using at different stages, freedom of information requests to inform our advocacy and campaigning. And I'm just going to present a couple of these today and how it has worked for us. So in the next few minutes, I will specifically talk about how we've been using for our work. Our aim today is just to share this experience and a little bit of how we went about it quite a few times. It has been trial and error and try again. So this is a persistence. So the first part, I will just speak about FOIAs and source of information in campaigns. And then how we, on the second part, how we've used information to push for policy change and I'll bring two examples. Then I will look into what happens when they refuse to provide information and how one can turn this around. Sometimes successful, sometimes less so and then some just some final thoughts. So going first to my first example, we have been using consistently for many, many years now, freedom of information requests as a source of information that then it feeds into our campaigns. And advocacy strategies and actually it has been, we've made submitted the first set of FOIA and then we would go for a second round informed by the first one and that builds our further works. A key example we often bring is our neighborhood watch campaign together with Liberty. Liberty had started in 2016 where we've submitted freedom of information requests to many different police forces across the UK in order to and what we were looking for was investigating on how surveillance technologies has been used at local level by law enforcement and trying to identify the different technologies that has been there. We've submitted FOIA requests, as I said, and we're able to identify several different technologies that have been used by the police forces, including body worn cameras, predictive policing tools, social media intelligence as a tool, facial recognition, hacking, mobile phone extraction and others. And that's this information we received is what inspired the neighborhood watch campaign and what brought it together because we've realized that actually there was hardly any transparency with regard to the procurement and use of this technology by law enforcement. We realized that it was a massive regulatory gap, because actually the technologies were introduced before any guidance quite often was put in place and this is how we started this campaign. And a key element discussed campaign was actually to motive what we wanted was for local communities to be able to be informed about police using technologies and to be able to scrutinize that. And so we're calling for transparency and while and the ability to submit freedom information quest was what inspired our call for action, which to action which was asking everyone to write to their local police and crime commissioner asking for more information and asking for better regulation. It's been it's we've launched this campaign in 2019, but actually it has been the basis on which we actually started our next campaign that focused more on the use of the same technologies in protests. And in this campaign we were on what we wanted to do is provide a guide for protesters where they are informed about the different surveillance technologies used and provide some guidance with regard to what steps protesters can take to mitigate some of the exposure. But, and, but what was probably the biggest like out month from this round of information request was using this information and amplifying it to with regard to our advocacy and campaigning in relation to specific technologies so these were kind of looking at the broader view and and the overarching. So the first one was the use of information we received with regards to mobile phone extraction is one of our most at the technologies we have looked. And we have been working on in depth. We are referring to with mobile phone extraction to the ability of the police to use tools that can extract all the information from a mobile phone. And that can be depending on technology can be done with or without or by bypassing the past passport information. So this work is still ongoing in many ways this was from the neighborhood watch campaign, but then what we did was in 2016 we submitted for your request to 47 you gain police stations, asking them for information. And then we published a report which I will come back to it on digital stop and search and how the police can can be used because from our four year request it became clear that mobile phone extractions was something that started being regularly used in stop and search. And it's from their post the process we were all also able to see that actually there wasn't a clear legal framework around the use of mobile phone extraction tools and by the police forces. We then use this information to submit a complaint to the ICO to the data protection authority, and they actually initiated an investigation in 2020, they published a report criticizing the UK police for the way in which they were talking about taking data from people's phones, including victims of crimes, and the report called for reform and safeguards, so that people's data and privacy is not is protected from unnecessarily intrusive practices and mobile phone extraction. And this was in a setting where we do recognize at a certain point they do need to use these powers, but how and when is what we were we were considering. And then we are continuing this work with by knowing down even more to a setting which is migration. There has been several reportings from migration groups about asylum seekers reaching the UK borders to and, and seeking for asylum and the police forces were actually extracting all the data from their phones. And again, we've indeed we were called in this. There's been litigation in it and we're called as expert witnesses and we use the information we had from the FOIA request to inform these witness statements. So, we have been using the freedom formation requests to actually inform the statistical numbers. For instance, with the mobile phone extraction where from the 47 police forces we've we've were able to decide that 55% of them had admitted using such technologies. And those be from their answers with regard to the legal basis it was clear to us that they had no clue what where they were talking about. And then out of their mining 21 police forces. 17% have tried it and 28% they either failed to respond or didn't recognize so in this way we were able to so that their use was widespread. It was persisting and make the point that actually the legal framework was not there. We did a similar thing for social media monitoring we had submitted with regard to FOIA request in the past with law enforcement and social media monitoring. We are referring both to just going online and looking at someone's public profile, but then also actually covert methods that's where the police might create a fake profile. What we were interested in here is to understanding the overt. So, going into someone's Facebook profiles and it is our view that when law enforcement or other local authorities are actually systematically collecting information from from people's profiles and they save this information and they're using for decision making or this is not public this goes beyond the reasonable expectation of users and why they post this information and needs to be properly regulated. And so we've went even bigger. In October 2019 we submitted freedom formation request to every local authority in Great Whitman 251 of those and we asked them whether they had conducted whether they were using social media monitoring how they were using it and further information, it's all information is public both on our website and on my site's website and you can find it there and so from this 251 we've received 136 responses and we use this as the basis for analyzing and reaching conclusions and what was again staggering was a 62.5% of the responses said that I guess they were using social media monitoring and the first thing finding was actually exactly that. Yes, they were using it and it was they were using much more actually going to someone's social media profile and much more than covert social media monitoring. And so then our feather when we had further findings where apparently I deleted finding three I will reintroduce it. We've found that overture the second finding was that all the local authorities that responded yes that they were using it that they consider it for a game, and that if the users were not applying good private settings then it's, it's their fault. And then we further found that there was actually no guidance with regards to how this information is used or whether there was actually any cross any scrutiny over the information that we're extracting and any possibility to challenge this information. And then finally we found that they were using it for a wide, a wide array of purposes, and that could actually have a serious impact on their decision making. In similar terms, we used and sorry just to finish there, we have been bringing this into advocacy for stronger regulation and into litigation where again we have submitted experts within statements, and we are continuing this work, also bringing it to other jurisdictions. And then I think I have a few minutes left, please let me know if, if I need to stop bringing to the third part of my presentation where it's, it's more looking into turning refusal to advocacy. And these concerns particularly my name is which is in the catchers. These are, this is technology that basically fakes a mobile phone tower and tricks a mobile phone to connect first to that tower, and then to a real mobile phone tower. And in that way, actually the police can collect the imzi number of your phone, which is actually unique to each phone connect, and they can identify who was at a specific location, specific time. And they have neither confirmed nor denied that, but there are, there have been public information with regards to the extensive use of these tools in protest situations. So we send our FOIA request, we asked for this information, and we received 18 responses, and they all responded in the same manner. They can neither confirm nor deny that they held information with regard to bar request and request was asking, have you, do you have imzi casser, have you used it, have you tried it. It was the same type of information request that was a middle mobile phone extraction, but here we received a very loud no and a very consistent no. It was a completely different like outcome compared to the mobile phone extraction one. So there we were expecting we, I mean the public information was out of a bristle cable disclosure of documents that demonstrated that they were used, and that's how we were motivated to submit our own requests. And here we've used it. It was already building our strategy we were expecting them to say no. Maybe not that consistently but so the plan was to actually submit a complaint to the ICO and challenge that decision. And what we were probably not expecting was that actually ICO upheld the NC and D. And so when we appeal the ICO decision also the information rights tribunal upheld the previous decision and so denied our request to appeal. And this is where we've decided that actually it was time to stop with that process and bringing back to just advocacy and continue to follow a different approach. So we use the same information and it went to the NPCC, the mayor of London, of London office for policing and crime, and the Investigator Bios Commissions Office. And we've sent them letters saying it is there is public information that points to that every other like every other country that uses that moment I have been public about it. We don't understand the reason. And all three of them responded. We don't know. We, we, we, it's a precedent. We agree with the precedent. We are not going to, we are neither going to confirm nor deny, but still they gave some answers with regard to if they were going to use poll in the catchers. Well, this is the legal basis, the legal framework, the thing that would apply to it, which was very interesting because they didn't agree with each other. And that also showed that actually there is an inconsistently with regard to what they consider would be the legal framework that will govern that technology. And also there wasn't consistently with regard to whether they considered this generalized and indiscriminate type of surveillance because once an immediate catchers operate the police cannot target one phone they will just catch everything. And I mean, we haven't won this one, but we're going to continue and see where we get. And it's not the only one we haven't won. We had the same with whether the Home Office is meeting with companies with regard to breaking encryption safeguards, they've said no to that, but we've sent a new one and we are trying again. And also, the other thing that the example I had from was from EU institution was what was very interesting was also to see what you do with information that it's not there. For instance, we've submitted free information requests asking for information with regard to the selling of technologies to other countries and what measures they've been taking while doing that, there was no reference to risk assessments in this process. And so there was, so we took that and turned it into an advocacy and a complaint strategy. I think I'll stop here. We, I just wanted to bring also to your attention that we have a FOIA guide also with tips with regard to specific to surveillance technologies and lessons learned. I think my, our favorite is when we were called back sessions for submitting a second round of FOIA request for mobile phone extraction. So this is something to keep in mind. And I'll stop here, looking forward to hearing what the others have to bring and also to your questions. Thank you very, very much. Thank you so much, Ilya. And if anyone has any questions feel free to raise your hand or drop anything into the chat. If you want one of them my society folks to raise the question for you instead. And so we've probably got about five or 10 minutes for questions before we move on to Isaac's presentation. If you raise your hand we'll be able to unmute you. What was the third? Yeah, what was that third finding? I will read it, but it was what I said about the lack of actually any audit or guidance with regard to how the, how they were scrutinizing this information. And I mean, it's exactly about the fact that then they were using this information as a matter of fact to take to make key decisions for people's lifehood. So, but I will add it and reshare it with you promise. And I have a question, which was just about when you get rejections at any level so whether it's originally from the public body that you're asking whether it's from the ICO or even at that tribunal level. Is there a way to make that rejection into the story? Yes. So, I mean, it really depends on what you want to do with it with the INSEC catchers we've been trying to do that but it kind of is used also against us in a way that this has become the precedent now so it's something that we're also considering every step of the way, whether and to what extent we want to push further when we receive a refusal. And there we've received refusals where we've decided not to challenge it in a way because we didn't want to have a more public like a set decision on the matter. And we've tried to resubmit it by sending a different type set of questions. But I think yes absolutely. It can turn into a story, especially when there is also other public information with regards to, I mean, I'm going to use names the catchers again as an example because it comes back to mind. They're exactly, they neither conform nor denied but that didn't prevent us for actually keep pushing that and bringing it to other fora as well. And to explain why we've decided not to move forward with next steps. I'm a lawyer so of course my brain is going to be on the lawyer side of the advocacy points but then our campaigning team would be also then using that to further demonstrate together with other information on how there's been a wide use and then also to bring that refusal to maybe the subsequent requests as well. Amazing. Thank you so much. Maya has a question here she's asked one of your top tips as format matters could you say any more about the format or best pointers for the. So, in our experience, the authorities initial instinct could be to find a way to give you the least information possible. So the way the question and the way they most likely are going to do that is by using the way you formatted the question we formatted the question to actually minimize the amount of information they would be sharing. So, it's quite often very useful to have a yes or no question, it might seem like a waste of a question but actually that takes a moment to answer and then you have that key piece of information. Another thing we've noticed is sometimes it's very useful not only to ask about like explicit question where they need to feed the information but also to ask for documents. And then it might take less time for them to answer but then the documents will contain much more information if they're willing to share. And then I had a third thing in mind and then also quite often one thing they will bring back is suggesting that the request is too broad and we need to narrow it down. And that could be part of the way we like it can be part of the strategy to lock them into having to respond to the information requests by asking you to narrow it down and then you narrow it down further. And then they will have to respond to that. Amazing. There was another question from Alex but I think that might have already been answered Alex are you happy with the answer that you've had in the chat or would you like me to ask it. I think I'm happy thank you. Okay, perfect. In that case, I think I'm going to pass over to Isaac. Isaac is here from its UK he is the partnerships director at UK and he is going to be talking about finding the data in stories, finding stories in data sorry the data in stories getting my words all mixed up today. Yeah finding the stories in data and talking about their school cards work. The classic unmute myself before I start speaking zoom trick. And yeah, thanks Jen for having us and really appreciate I also saw earlier that in the chat someone said you had some of the best slides ever. I probably don't have some of the best slides ever so to energize it was a tough act to follow. Yeah, finding the stories in data and climates UK and just want to say a big shout out to my society. What do they know is like such an amazing tool to use and so easy as well and we used it. I explained how we used it but yeah just wanted to start with that because it's really important to think the the platform and shoulders of the people you're standing on effectively to do the work that you can so yeah it's really important. So yeah just a little bit about who climates UK are and what we do we found it about just about five years ago now. We first collated data and information on the climate emergency decorations that councils of UK local authorities declared and then worked with my society to create the climate action plan explorer. And so that detailed all the action plans that they then declared better then sorry created. We then worked to create the council plan scorecards which we published in January 2022 and that was the first ever UK wide assessment of all council climate plans. And then we obviously started marking and then published the climate council climate action scorecard which was the first UK wide assessment of all local UK local authorities climate action. So we started that market in January 2023 we published it in October 2023 in kind of our mission which is at the bottom is equipping the council climate movement with the information and guidance needed for structural change and and supporting local campaigns to push for more climate action. That's so that's just a really brief overview of who we are. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about our kind of our work with freedom of information and requests. So as part of the council climate action scorecards we actually sent around 4000 FOS to UK local authorities. And so the idea of being vexatious is something. Yeah, that can be a little borderline. We sent that those those freedom of information request based on the information that we think we weren't able to get. You know we compile data on staffing levels for climate change we asked about how many climate staff they have or how many staff they have that's implementing their climate plan. We asked about whether they have planning ecologists to implement biodiversity net gain or BNG is the acronyms. We asked about the average EPC ratings of council homes and their enforcement of energy efficiency under the means law the minimum energy efficiency standard they have in local authorities. And then we also asked about things like carbon let's see training of councillors and their management and the council's lobbying of the national government as well so we actually were asking them whether they had lobbies. The UK or then devolved government for further funding around or further funding or powers around climate. So we were looking for lots of data in across every part of the local authorities function and asking but asking really specific questions kind of to do that. So something that India pointed out that it's really important that if you're specific then you're going to get the correct answer back so we were asking for a broad range of data but we're asking for it in really specific ways. And what I'm going to do this a bit back to front so what was quite exciting was we had an exclusive with the financial times as part of this work which was really really cool. And we were actually on page two in the print version which was also really cool as well but we had this online article which you can see here so our work asking around the average EPC ratings for social housing or council homes across the UK. That was what we managed to get an exclusive with the financial times with and we're a very small organisation and we've managed to punch above our weight a little bit in terms of the press we've been able to get and garner and so for us that's like really exciting. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about how we actually managed to achieve that and how we thought about it and managed to do it from ourselves. It's not out of the realms of possibility for anyone here or on any of their campaigns be able to do it because there's nothing that's particularly special that we were able to do in that climate UK we just kind of followed some what we thought were logical steps to be able to get this so yeah. And so that was the end result I'm going to talk a little bit about what we what we did so just before that we actually pitched three stories to the journalists at the FT so obviously the most important thing is to get contact with some kind of journalist at a national newspaper. That's like the most obvious thing to do and then we pitched them three stories. And what why did what we did in writing those stories is to kind of pitch them the backgrounds for each of those stories but also a headline so they could kind of imagine the piece so that they would be able to understand the framing of the piece as well and it also gives you some input into what the framing of the piece might be like. And so, for example, biodiversity net gain implementation will be a postcode lottery so that's like you know one of the big government flagship policies I'll talk a little bit about how we why we picked these stories and why we chose these. Residents in council homes may be paying more for their bills obviously focusing around like the energy efficiency angle and the cost of living crisis. And then yeah councils lobby the UK government for further powers for climate action so these are we picked because we had such a broad range of data and different data sets we we've actually pitched three stories so don't be afraid to go you know we've got all of these data sets here's like some of the key stories that we have it gives the journalists a choice to be like okay actually this one I think is going to be the best for us or the most relevant for us so don't be afraid to pitch multiple stories at the same time or. Potential stories. And we found this this may be really obvious but we found the story by analyzing our data and looking at trends. Obviously we had you know we were sending freedom information requests across to. And receiving thousands of responses and then we looked at all of those through major press and we just analyze the trends you know many councils did not have pan and ecologists to enforce biodiversity net gain. There was a huge disparity in the average EPC ratings of council homes so one council had only 2% of its council homes at EPC sear above which is roughly a good energy efficiency standard. Some councils had over 97% or 99% of council homes EPC sear above so that was the kind of trends that we're able to see that there was a huge disparity in the way. And people in different areas of the country that lived in council housing hadn't levels of energy efficiency and we obviously that was the key story that got published. But we also worked on things you know around the fact that biodiversity net game was going to be implemented in a kind of haphazard way because councils didn't have the necessary staff and requirements to implement that big national staff and policy. So obviously we just analyzed our data and looked at it. And that's like one of the first key things as well. Probably pretty obvious why we pitched these stories though is because of their relevance to what was happening at the national in the national landscape in the news at the time. So that's like the key thing to think about from a journalist perspective from what we thought was that these stories that we picked from our data sets were at that moment about to be either a flagship national government policy was about to be become statutory. In November it obviously got pushed to February this year. So we thought like data we had on the fact that the implementation of that flagship policy was going to be haphazard was really relevant at the time. So something that might peak a journey this interest to be like OK I can write a story like this. Obviously one of the most obvious ones was the cost of living crisis and the fact that people that live in social housing or council homes may be therefore paying more in bills because of the lack you know or energy efficiency standards. That's also like massively relevant at the time. So we thought that's why we picked those like headline those two stories in particular of the three because of all the stories we potentially had was because it was really relevant to the news. From the day and and that's probably why there was no interest in some ways in the council's lobby government for further powers is just because that kind of ask has been made before. You know the data we had on biodiversity net gain and the fact that we there's stuff around EPC range of council homes that never been compiled before. And obviously the relevancy with the key national policies or key issues at the time. You know that data hadn't been compiled so it was kind of new it was fresh. It could be viewed as exciting if you're in that this kind of world and really important as well because you know from social justice angles or from nature. Implementation of nature policies that councils lobbying the government for further powers of climate action when we looking back actually when I was preparing this presentation. I was like yeah of course a journalist isn't going to be interested in that particular story because they always ask for more further powers for some kind of funding or climate action. And you can see even from the LG this is an LGA press release at the bottom. You know that's exactly what they ask it pretty much every given opportunity. So the fact that they had asked it for climate wasn't particularly relevant or interesting at the time. So it wasn't surprising that that that you know it wasn't picked as a story. Just to further like pick like go into the relevancy and why that was like just such a big thing is we obviously combine the trends of relevancy when we pitch the story. So the trend in the data was councils not having plan ecologists to enforce biodiversity net gain that relevancy as I'm already mentioned was biodiversity net gain was about to come to mandatory. It was a flagship policy of the government. Therefore we kind of created this story around or get pitched a headline of you know biodiversity net gain implementation will be a postcode lottery. That was the kind of like headline of thought we thought would make it become interesting to a journalist. The trend in the data and the average EPC range as I've mentioned there was huge disparity in the average EPC range of social housing council homes. There was a national policy on this government target for social housing to be carbonized by 2030 now 2035 really funny. We already had the story in exclusive confirmed. Rishi Sunak managed to make the change to from 2030 to 2035 about three days before which probably pushed our story onto page. So in that sense we were we were helped by the government being really terrible. Obviously we didn't want that to happen. But it kind of added an extra flavor to the piece and there was the FT was like yeah this is like really like relevant and current at the moment even though they were already committed to publishing it and going to publish it. Obviously like when I put news and life there's that whole pressure around Bill skyrocket skyrocketing and that relevancy and just social social awareness of the issues around energy efficiency as well. And higher awareness in general from the media energy efficiency is not traditionally a sexy topic. But because of campaigns like Incilate Britain and other campaigns that have been going on around and the fact that you know the cost of living crisis that journalists were much more ready to print stories around energy efficiency. Because they thought it was an important topic at that time. So kind of all of those things like kind of helped us. And so that's why we initially pitched that headline around you know residents maybe paying more for their council bills. We obviously when we pitched those headlines also gave background information so that the journalist could be like OK I understand like what you're trying to get here with the story because what they went forward for was councils are missing targets or the government's missing targets based around energy efficiency as well. So that's kind of we combine that train of data looked at what was relevant and then pitch that story and headlines to the to the journalist. What you think may be interesting may not interest a journalist. I was really keen to go by diversity net gain. I thought this was a really incredible story that we'd like unearthed not not interested at all. No interest in it wasn't particularly didn't even like to talk about. Oh yeah this could be useful. Maybe we'd print something else on this like just disregarded it completely. And that was a slight slightly painful for myself because I thought this was like a super interesting story and going to be super relevant. And you know I was really keen. So what you think may be interesting may as I said may not interest a journalist. The other key thing is how you're framing a story may not be the framing that a journalist wants to take or thinks is important either. So it's important not to be too. What's that word like it's important not to be. It's important to give the journalist basically the freedom of how they want to frame and pitch the story. It's not up to you and like you shouldn't be upset or anything if a journalist chooses a different framing or wants to emphasize something else in their story. The important thing is is that you kind of influence that framing maybe at the start the influence the understanding and able to give a clear basis for the journalist to be able to write their story. So they understand the data and what the data is saying and then you let them you know kind of frame the story how they wish to frame it at the in their newspaper. So yeah and I hope that's really clear and in what I've talked about. So basically you know we looked at the trends in the data just to sum up we looked at the trends in the data and to kind of think about what stories could be. We then pitched those trends but to journalists based on what we thought was most relevant at the time given the interest in the news cycle or the government policies etc. And we pitched multiple stories so that journalist had the journalist had a chance to pick which one they thought would be best. And then yeah we managed to secure that exclusive in the FT. Yeah that's my presentation and hopefully that was useful for everyone. Happy to take questions. I will move away from this slide because it really pains me still I've been across over it so I'll go back to the nice slide of the like. Thanks. Thanks so much Isaac we have had a few questions in the chat already so Allison has asked did you make reference to the environmental information regulations when you're making your requests. Yes we put we in our request for FOIs I think we put you know this may be treated as a EIR or as an FOI so we said and then kind of the councillors respond and be like yeah we're treating it as an EIR. I think when we spoke to Gareth maybe you can step in and say whether I'm completely wrong with this is that it doesn't massively make a difference to us if it's treated as one or the other. So we would just like you may want to treat this as an EIR or we're referring it as an FOI or EIR and then the council was just like yeah we're taking it in this way and etc so for us it wasn't a major concern how they treat it. Yeah I mean that's the too long didn't read what they know has the ability to do both but we kind of default to FOI because nine times out of 10 it'll get you the same information but there are we are looking into like how we put the specific benefits of EIR for some things. Yeah, cool. Mith asked a question I know you could probably unmute yourself but I'm already talking so I will say it for you. Mith asked how did you identify which journalist to pitch to? Was it someone who previously written similar stories? Yeah that's a great question. A slight secret is we actually pitched this to another paper originally and they said no. So don't tell the FTV. But we're in boundaries so you are able to pitch marble stories you know you give a deadline to a journalist and say if you want this story we're going to this is your deadline to respond by and if you say no or like don't respond then we will pitch it to another paper. We pitched based on where we thought we wanted to go given the like reputation of the paper to be honest. So we just tried our luck we weren't particularly we didn't do much research on what the journal said written before to be honest we targeted a certain paper because we wanted to get in that paper and because we thought it would help give us the biggest boost in terms of the story. But that would be a really really great tip if there's a journalist who knows particularly interested in certain areas absolutely pitched that journalist first because they're more likely to want to write about it and they're more likely to write a really good balance in depth story as well. And I know there's journalists on the corner don't mean it's in any rude way but a person who's writing on climate or any topic like may not know your will well will definitely not know your data as much as you do and may not even know much about the particular topic you're talking about. And so if you do know of a journalist or have done some research to find journalists that are particularly interested in your area yet and pitch to those first. If you're going a bit more generic like we did because we wanted to get in a certain paper, then you have to make sure that obviously you're just really clear in what your data is about because there isn't going to be the level of understanding, particularly about local authorities and their powers and stuff from National journalists or some national just will be really good at not to not to tar or the same brush but a lot of national just don't seem as as with the with the country don't really seem to understand what local authorities can do around climate stuff so and that was a key thing for us to make sure we did as well. Yeah wouldn't it be great if the government were like clearer on what. Yeah, exactly. Or sometimes even local authorities were clear on what they thought they could do. Yeah, that would also be super useful. I never mind. Chris has asked if you team up with a newspaper with a payable how else do you ensure as many people as possible can see the story online. For example, the financial time asks you to pay to see the content. Yeah, it's a really good question. So as well as having the exclusive in the financial times that gives you the ability to for them to print the story first and for that to come out first. We also sent out a general press release and it was covered by like other local press or and sector press as well so we had this as our exclusive but then we made sure that we did a general press release. That other papers could pick up on it. You just have to make sure that you send out that general press release after the the initial article has been published and given you don't want to ruin the exclusive basically. Awesome. Thank you so much. We haven't got any other questions at the moment unless anyone wants to put their hand up. If not, we will take an eight minute break and come back at 11 o'clock for Rosie's presentation. Okay, thanks so much. Thank you so much, Isaac. We are coming back. So our final speaker is Rosie Taylor. Rosie is a freelance journalist who has very kindly agreed to come and talk to us about the media lifecycle and she works with a range of different newspapers and I'm sure she's going to tell us all about what she does. I know she uses FY in her work. So over to Rosie. Thank you so much. Hi, thanks very much for having me. I'm just going to try and get up my slides which is always the hairy bit. There we go. Can you see? Right. Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for having me and it's a real pleasure to follow on from those two excellent thoughts. I think Isaac's done a fantastic job of sharing how you can successfully pitch a news story to journalists. Hopefully I'm going to be able to give you a little bit more insight into that from the other side from a journalist perspective. I'm going to talk about the media lifecycle. We're going to focus on two key aspects of that targeting and timing. That's not letting me. So just before we start a little bit about me, Jen, give me a lovely introduction then, but I'm a journalist. I specialize in health and consumer affairs, which is a really broad umbrella covering all sorts of subjects. And I do use FY in my work. I write across all the national newspapers and I write news and features and outside of my journalism, I do work with organizations to help them improve their media coverage. And one of the reasons that I'm really well placed to do that is that I am a freelancer. So that means every day I receive pictures with ideas, some of them are database, some of them from FYs, from PRs and organizations and individual But I also have to pitch. So I pitch to editors on all the national papers. They'll all be exactly the same editors that you are pitching to and trying to get your story in the front of so I'm hoping to be able to share a few kind of inside tips as to how to get those editors to say yes, when you have your fantastic FBI data and you've got a story to pitch. So what makes an editor to say yes. So before I go into the details, I just wanted to make a few caveats. So the first is that normally when I talk on this topic, I do a session that's about an hour and a half, we have about 20 minutes, so I'm going to kind of whiz through this is kind of scratching the surface but hopefully it will give you sort of a basic understanding of how the process works. The other point I want to make is that I am a print journalist by background, I increasingly write online publications as well. That's kind of the way of the world at the moment, but yeah, and so a lot of what I have to say here does actually apply to broadcast media as well and would be relevant. But just to sort of say that you know this is my background. So I'm talking about the kind of written word media rather than broadcast. Okay, so you've got your amazing FY data, you pulled out some really good. You've done some data analysis you pulled out some facts and figures that you think are interesting. How are you going to get that into a national newspaper. So there are five key things to think about. The first one and I cannot stress enough how important this is is relevance. Your story needs to be relevant to that journalists readers and every single publication will have its own readership. They all have slightly different audiences. They all have unique interests and things that concern them. So anything that you can do to make your story relevant to that readership is fantastic. So you need to think about what interests those readers, what might be worrying them and make your story relatable on a human level. So just going back to Isaac's talk, it was really interesting that he mentioned the cost of living crisis, which is great because that is relatable to all of us. You know, that's something we can put ourselves into we affects everyone on everyday basis. So, and it's also timely, which is the second point we'll talk about in a sec. And but I also thought it was really interesting that Isaac mentioned that he pitched it as a resident. I think he said something that residents in council homes are paying more for their bills. Which is obviously looking at from the perspective of social housing residents. I would argue that most FT readers are not social housing residents, but they are people who are, you know, you've got investors, managers, CEOs of major organizations. And they're really interested in government policy and how it affects them, maybe how it affects properties that they own businesses that they run. So what was really interesting, I thought, was that although Isaac pitched that as a sort of focusing from the residents perspective, the FT journalists actually turned into like councils missing targets. So you can see how like they recognize that there was a story in there that was relevant to their readers, but they tweaked the angle slightly to sort of make it really specific to their readership. Whereas if you know that same story was covered, perhaps in the mirror, they might much more go for that like social housing angle, you're paying more for your bills. So it's just something to bear in mind because that is actually a really good way of getting data published in a wide variety of publications. You can take that same data and just sort of tweak the perspective that you're coming from to make sure it's relevant to different readerships. So the second point is, does it have a hook? So ideally you would find something timely or in the news right now to sort of attach your story to. So obviously the cost of living crisis is the good one. Topics that are being talked about loads. So I use menopause as a really good example of that is sort of like in the like it's right now. You can, and editors do say yes to stories that don't have any kind of music, if they're uniquely interesting enough on their own and there's no reason that they have to run at any particular time. We call that an evergreen story and editors do like to have those sort of to file away for a rainy day when something falls through and they need a story at the last minute. So I would say that especially if you have a campaign or kind of like policy to push it's always better to find a reason of like a way of answering the question why now and then your pitch make sure that you're really clear like why now why is this important why should readers care about it right now. So the third point that is really easily overlooked I think is ease how easy are you making it for that editor or that journalist to say yes. And basically what this comes down to is that publications are increasingly understaffed and turn this increasingly overworked and they just simply do not have time to do the work that is required to build up a story. In a lot of cases so I get all sorts of pictures all the time that kind of like quite good. There's quite a good story in there but I know it will require a lot of work me to put it together and I just never get around to doing it. So the more of a complete package that you can provide to the journalist the better so basically you've got your data and that's a really good starting point. If you can analyze that and pull out the top lines and fantastic but it's also super helpful if you can kind of like attach relevant data sets so they've got it all there. So you can make sure that you've lined up experts ready to talk about it. You've got case study to sort of bring out that human side of things show a real life example of someone that's affected. You've got that lined up and ready to go if you make sure they've got pictures ready to go. All of that really really helps a journalist say yes. My tip would be to make sure like you look at the publications that you're targeting and look out what the finished article looks like. See what's on the page, because that is what the journalist will need in order to finish the story. So if you're aiming at kind of like a feature section or Sunday paper or something and they always use a picture of a case study you know that you're probably going to need a case study to get that through. Thinking ahead and trying to make things as easy as possible is really, really important and that's certainly what I do when I'm pitching stories myself to edit. So the fourth point is targeting and we'll go into this in detail now in the rest of the talk. But the key is to make sure that you're sending your pitch to the right journalist on the right section of the publication and Isaac did touch on this a little bit. And one sort of really obvious way that you can do that is is to actually read the publication which astonishingly few people do. So make sure you buy the paper when you look at the website, you look at the kind of stories that they're writing and you look who is covering certain topics. And timing. Sorry. Hi, it's Gemma from my society. Just to let you know your mics rustling a little bit. I was so sorry. It might be my scarf. Let me take it off. Yeah, try that. Is that better? It is. So sorry. Okay, thank you. Really. So just, yeah. And the fifth point is timing and I'm going to go to that into that in more detail now. So we're going to talk about targeting and timing. So I get a lot of people say stuff like, oh, I want to see this in the Guardian or I want to see this in the mail, which is great. It's good to have an aspiration where you want your story to be published. But it's also really important to realize that those publications are actually kind of made up of lots and lots of different sections that all operate differently. And there's kind of no such thing as the Guardian or the mail. So just to give you an example. Say you had a health related news or health related story and you wanted to get into the mail. And just as an aside, I would say like never write off a publication. Just because it doesn't perhaps completely echo your views or your politics, you know, as much as it's lovely to get stuff. You know, we all like to have our views reflected back at us. Actually, you know, we all know that if you're trying to bring about change, which I'm sure a lot of you are, actually we need to get stories in front of change makers and we need to make sure that we're changing the opinions of people who think differently from us. And so I think it was really great that, you know, Isaac's example that he got it in front into the FT, like, yes, the FT is behind a paywall. Yes, there's a sort of niche group of people that read that paper, but they are influential. They are change makers. So don't rule out a publication just because, you know, they may not be that sympathetic to say social housing residents. It could still bring about change. So anyway, going back to targeting publication. We have a health news story. We want to pitch it at the mail. And these are some of the ways it could appear. So it could appear in a daily paper as a news story. It could appear in the health features section, which runs once a week on a Tuesday called good health, which is separate from the features section, which runs every day and the female features section which runs twice a week, which also causes health. It could run in the mail on Sunday, which is a separate newspaper that only runs on the Sunday. They have their own separate health features section. They also have news pages which feature health stories. Or it could appear in mail online and they have a health section as well. The reason I point this out is that every single one of these sections has a different editor and different journalists working for it. Every section has slightly different interests, slightly different people that kind of like targeting, and also runs on a slightly different timescale. So it is really important when you look for a publication to sort of know the publication and to have an idea of where you're targeting, what you want your story to look like on the page. Do you want it to be a big feature double page spread? Do you mind if it's, you know, a few paragraphs in the news as long as it's on page two? You know, have an idea of where you want that coverage to be, what you want it to look like, and then you can target appropriately. And here's just a few other things to bear in mind when you're thinking of where you want to target. So obviously, I can obvious question to ask yourself is national or local, although it is like worth bearing in mind now that a lot of local publications are owned by like mega groups that own like hundreds of newspapers around the country. So and they tend to syndicate coffee between each other. So you may find that actually aiming for local press gets you kind of kind of national coverage because it appears in all the local papers. When you're trying to target publications, you also need to think about how they run and whether they're. So for example, are you targeting a daily paper or a Sunday paper? And if so, is that run as a seven day operation or separately? So for example, the Times and the Sunday Times, they run as two separate papers. They have separate editorial teams. They're essentially in competition with each other so you can't pitch the Times and the Sunday Times at the same time, they would be very annoyed. Whereas the telegraph is a seven day operation reporters work across the week. So you could actually offer something to someone that the telegraph and say, look, you can run this over the weekend any day, you know, Saturday, Sunday, whatever works for you. And it's the same with online and the physical paper. Some organizations have like a combined team. So for example, the Sun is trying to do that. And other places is really separate still. So the mail paper and mail online still have completely separate editorial teams. They are supposed to talk to each other, but they kind of don't. And this is the case with a lot of the sections, even within newspapers as well. So again, you know, going back to what I was saying just then about all the different sections within the mail, those editors don't really talk to each other. They don't communicate. Newspapers are basically not very well managed organizations and people tend to work in silos. What this means from your perspective is that just because you've had a no from one section of the paper does not mean you have to write off that whole publication. Like you can pitch to a different section once you've had a no don't pitch multiple sections simultaneously because that can cause chaos if they will say yes. But you know, if the Sunday has said no, you can pitch the daily like it's absolutely fine if health features have said no, you can try another feature section like it's fine. So yeah, just bear that in mind. Okay, so I'm going to talk about timing your pitch. So the most like when you are sending out a pitch, basically what you need to do to work out when you should send out is essentially work backwards. So there may be a reason you want it to appear at a certain time, perhaps you are launching a campaign, you have an event, maybe there's a debate in Parliament or some legislation, new legislation launching. You know, if you have a reason that something needs to run on a particular day, you need to work backwards from that day and make sure that you're pitching in plenty of time. And don't forget to allow time for the story to be written. I think this is really important. You know, if you're launching an event tomorrow, and you send me a picture four o'clock this afternoon, even if it's like a really great pitch, there's not very much I can do at that point, you know, you've got to give the journalist time to work on and write the story. One thing that I would just quickly say is about using awareness days as a, as a news hook. So online focus publications, they quite like awareness days because they tend to follow what's trending on social media and awareness days quite often trend. Traditional print media tends to hate awareness days. Basically, there are just so many of them they don't view an awareness days and as newsworthy in its own right. And the other issue is that we tend to get pitched loads of similar stories around an awareness day so you don't even want to know what my inbox looks right now with International Women's Day coming up next month. You know, and it just actually, you know, you're almost better off pitching on any other time of the year apart from the awareness day. So it really depends on the publication that you're aiming for and how important is to you that the awareness day is an integral part of that coverage. If it's not, then I would probably pitch it. So when you're offering your story to Janice, there are two ways of doing it. One is all round and one is an exclusive and I'm going to explain both of those now. So why should you pitch all round? I'm just going to stick all of this up so that I know what I'm talking about. Right. So pitching all rounds makes basically means you're sending your story to multiple outlets at the same time with the aim of getting as wide coverage as possible is essentially passing your net really, really wide and hoping to catch a lot of this. So my recommendation, if you're planning on doing this is to always put an embargo on your press release. That sort of helps you ensure uniform timing and control the release of the story, but kind of more importantly from a Janice perspective. If you don't put an embargo on a release that has quite obviously been sent out widely, it kind of lives and dies immediately. So my recommendation for that is if I get your release at four o'clock this afternoon, I haven't got time to write anything up at that point. It's not going to push, it's not a big enough breaking news story to push existing stories out of the paper. I'm just going to leave it. And as far as I'm concerned, well, it was all round. Everyone else has already seen it. So that's it. It's gone. Whereas if you send the release to me at four o'clock this afternoon, but it's embargo for next week. I'll sort of file that way and go, okay, great, this story is coming out next week, something for me to work on over the next few days. So it's just really important to bear that in mind. If you're putting an embargo on the story, you literally cannot make it too clear. It can be in the subject line, in the email, on top of the press release in big red capital letters, that is all absolutely fine. Journalists are super busy and they're always skim reading. So the clearer you can make it the better. In terms of what time you embargo is running for. So also I just realized I haven't completely explained what embargo is. So embargo is a date and time that limits, it's like a limit on publication. So newspapers or online publications or broadcast media cannot publish before that time. And I think some people worry about embargoes that they will be broken, but I would say in my experience, that just doesn't happen. Very, very occasionally it might happen because of basically cock up, excuse the language rather than conspiracy. Like very occasionally like someone just makes a genuine mistake. But there's no kind of appetite among journalists to break embargoes. It's not in our interest because we know that generally we get blacklisted if we do. So you are like predominantly, you know, I can't think of an example where you wouldn't be safe putting embargo on your story. In terms of the timing, yeah, there is no such thing as perfect time. It really depends where you want your story to appear. So the sort of general convention is midnight for print. So that means that the story might go on their websites at midnight, we call it 001, the one minute past midnight. And then that means it appears in the following day's papers. Obviously for broadcast, it's normally embargoed in time for the bulletins. And for online only publications, they really like embargoes in the middle of the day because I like to refresh their content in the middle of the day. The middle of the day embargo is an absolute nightmare for print. So it really depends where you're focusing on. And one thing to like really bear in mind is that an embargo is when the story will be published. So if you are putting embargo on a story, make sure that you're available in the run up to that embargo, lifting not just after it's lifted. And that means your experts in your case studies and anyone else that's sort of integral to the story is available as well. So for example, I deal with a lot of stories that embargo to 001 on Monday, which basically means they're written on Sunday and they appear in Monday's newspapers. They, you know, if you are embargoing something for that date, be aware that it will be written on Sunday at the very least there might be some last minute questions. So you do need to have someone available. And again, just make sure you're pitching in plenty of time to allow for writing. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute if I have time. So this is just a quick example of something that I put out using the system all around under embargo. So it was a research into women's health care and how the UK compares with other countries around the world. And what I did was contact the relevant editors at so they were all health news editors at national publications on the Friday beforehand. The story was embargoed Monday for Tuesday, so 001 Tuesday. I put out the full copy on Monday under that embargo. I answered questions, provided case studies, extra data, whatever it is they needed. And then when the embargo lifted on at midnight on the one minute past midnight on the Tuesday morning, this is what appeared in the following days papers. So we've got coverage page leads in five national newspapers. So embargoes do work. It is, you know, putting stuff out all around can be a really good way of getting widespread coverage. What I would say is, is always a gamble. So I did exactly the same thing with a with a different story quite recently for Christmas. You know, use exactly the same method and what happened on the Monday when I was getting ready to put my copy out under embargo ready for the Tuesday was that Richie Sinek decided your massive cabinet reshuffle. Thanks Richie. And basically that was it. The papers were completely full of that and my story barely got picked up. So that is something to bear in mind if you are sending story out widely on a, you know, time for embargo, the embargo is fixed. There's, you know, there's nothing you can do about it. If something massive happens in the news to wipe out the news pages. That's it. You kind of had your chance. So that is why it can be useful to offer an exclusive instead. So just to explain about exclusives. Exclusives as Isaac really explained really well just now is where you work with one publication and you focus on getting quality coverage in that publication. You can still embargo an exclusive. You can still say to that journalist really can't run until this time or it has to run on the stage because it's when we're launching our campaign or event. You can arrange a joint exclusive. So I did one recently that was a joint print and broadcast. And we embarked it for 10 p.m. so it could run on news night and be in the following days papers. But you just need to be really transparent if that's the case. And I think as Isaac mentioned, you know, if you offer an exclusive to one publication, they say no, that's absolutely fine. Take it to another one and keep taking it to another one until someone says yes. There's a freelancer idea all the time. You just pretend that you offered it to them first every time. And yeah, it's fine. And the other thing is that offering something exclusive doesn't prevent you from then also putting it out widely. So yeah, as soon as it's published, and this is really, really important. As soon as it's published, and that paper or that publication has had that exclusive, you can send it out widely to all the other press and see whether anybody else follows up. What I would say is that if you are offering an exclusive, just be really, really clear in your pitch that is what you are offering. Explain that you're offering to that journalist at that publication. This is a really good chance for you to explain why it's relevant to them, why it's relevant to their readers, and why it's timely. And again, pitch in advance to allow plenty of time. I would say probably allow more time for an exclusive first of all, because you need, there's quite a lot of tuning and throwing. Like if you get one paper thinking about it for a few days, then coming back and saying no, and you have to pitch it to someone else that can take quite a lot of time. But also, you know, the joy of an exclusive is you kind of get to work more closely with the journalist on it. So it might be that they look at your data and say, well, actually, can you have more on this? Or could we have a case study that's relevant to this? You know, and if you've got the more time you've got to build it up, the better. So I'm aware that I'm sort of short on time. Yeah, so just wanted to share. So this is something that I put out exclusively. I was offered it as a story that came from, I'm not sure if it's a wide data, but it came from a data analysis. I was offered, I was pitched the story, I took it exclusively, and then I pitched it exclusively to the observer, which, yeah, this is something that we do as freelancers. So that ran. And then as soon as that had been published in the observer, I've also sent it out widely and then got some coverage in three other national papers. So yeah, I'm just going to whiz very quickly through timing, because I know I keep mentioning pitching plenty of time. So what is plenty of time? So just to explain a little bit about how papers work. Very obviously weekly papers work on a weekly cycle. I've just realized I've written su call there. So excuse me, excuse that terrible typo. So obviously like the Sunday papers, they publish on Sunday, all the stuff off on Monday, so never pitch on a Monday unless you want to get into their bad books. Tuesday morning is when they pull their ideas, most of the paper will be written by Thursday. So I would say if you're trying to pitch to Sunday or any other kind of weekly paper, pitch a few weeks ahead. It's quite hard to pitch within the week for that Sunday because a lot of it is done in advance. So yeah, give yourself a few weeks. Daily papers, although they can turn stuff around really, really quickly on a daily basis, it tends to be the big breaking news stories that they cover in that way. The kind of stories that you're going to be pitching, FY based stories, exclusive. You know, you need to give them a bit more time. They do work to rough weekly cycles. So Saturday is the biggest paper of the week. They've got more space as they tend to run exclusive, but they also really like lighter stories then. So if you've got an FY, but you've got a really great human interest case study, then that could be a good day to aim for. Monday's paper is the smallest paper of the week, but it's also the most serious. So they tend to run drier, day to driven stories on a Monday. So that could be also a good day to aim for if you have an FY story. The other thing to bear in mind is that most daily papers will have a skeleton staffing on Sundays. So actually it could be really great for your story at that point. So what I would suggest is if you have a strong FY story, you pitch it at least a few days. Beforehand, maybe the Wednesday of that week or maybe the previous week and say, look, you can have this story. Here is all the data here are experts here as a case study. It's embargoed for Monday morning. And that means that it will be put together. It will be finished off by the staff on Sunday and appear in Monday's paper and they'll be very grateful for that. I'm sure. And is exactly the same with all the sections of the paper. A lot of them run on a weekly basis, even if they're within daily papers. They all have their own press deadlines. It can be very hard to sort of predict when they are so the best bet is again just file to pitch them a couple of weeks ahead of when you need it to run. I've just I realized bombarded you with a load of quite complicated information about timing. Don't my advice we just don't get to hung up on timing. It isn't the be able and end all much more importantly is making sure that you have a strong story that is relevant to that paper's readership. And so the same thing again, it must resonate with that publications target audience that you've pitched it to the right journalists on the right section, and that you've given them everything they need to make it easy to write. If you can take those boxes then timing is something that journalists will just work with and to be perfectly honest, if the best story in the world lands on my desk at five o'clock tonight, I probably will still make it work, but it would have to be the best story in the world. So try try not to send things for the last minute, but yeah, you know, timing, timing can help, but don't get too worried about like writing down all of these times and that I've just reword off here. That was a sort of very, very quick overview of just a couple of aspects of pitching to journalists, if you want to know more. I am hosting a couple of webinars next month. And they're normally 50 quid each but to try and make it more accessible to charities and small organizations I'm doing them for 15 pound a head. So there's one on how to pitch stories but we go into like the tricks to pitching in much more detail. And then there's another one on generating story ideas which is sort of how to come up with ideas based on your campaigns or your policy or your organization that might get national press coverage. I think Jen's going to send a link out to that afterwards. And that's it. So yeah, feel free to hit me with any questions. Thank you so much Rosie. Yes, we have a whole host of questions that have gone past in the chat so let me just start from the top. Okay so myth asked to start with, is it better to pitch to a freelancer like yourself or direct to a newspaper. Not a question I might be able to answer without being biased, but it's I would say that the benefits of pitching well there are multiple benefits of pitching to a freelancer. One is that we have the freedom to pitch to multiple different publications. So we see, you know if you come to me with an idea. I sort of know my editors and different publications and I could see. I sort of know instinctively which one it would be best for and I can try them and if they say no I can try someone else and it's quite easy for me to do that because it's something I do every day. Another reason that is worth pitching to freelancers is there is this awful thing in the media industry called payment on publication, which means I am only ever paid for the work that I do once it has been published no matter how much work I've done on it. So I have a real vested interest in making sure if I see your story and I think it's good. And I've worked on it and making sure it gets published because there's absolutely no point in me doing the work if it doesn't. So that's the difference from a staff journalist who has lots and lots of different things to do every day. They're dealing with the kind of daily churned editors request and they might really like your story but there's nothing incentivising them to make sure it appears. So I'd say those are two benefits from using freelancers but having said that obviously staff journalists potentially have more weight. It can be easier for them to get stuff in. But yeah they are very very busy. I mean basically what I do often is act as the middleman for someone that you know they want something in the telegraph and they know that telegraph editors just never get back to them, but they get back to me because they work with me so yeah. I'm not doing a very good job of saying you shouldn't always go with a freelancer but yeah there are news agencies as well that do a similar thing act as a sort of go between. Thank you that is awesome. Gemma has asked how is best to pitch is it calling or emailing and it's kind of linked to something Jake has said below which is like we're finding people don't pick up the phone so how do you actually make those emails eye catching. Yes, I mean, so I have like a whole webinar on this. Answering the kind of very quickly. I would say that since the pandemic. Don't ever phone there's just no point phoning I have editors who I know on like a personal level I've been to their weddings and I still don't call them with pictures there's just no point they're too busy. The two short staff they've got too much to do they don't have time to chat about stories. And I also personally get really annoyed when people call me for the same reasons. So yeah, email, people are like obsessively attached to their email so they will see an email it's just that they get so many of them. I guess what really catches my eye in a pitch is when it obviously is tailored to me so when it's offered as an exclusive is really clear from the subject heading or like the first couple of lines of the email that like this is. It doesn't email for me this is not a generic email that has gone out to everybody, or just says hey, I think this would be great for your readers. You know it's something that's like oh hi Rosie I saw you've been writing about this and I've got a story that's along similar lines. You know, I wanted to offer you it to you exclusively do you think that the telegraph all the times would be interested in that I know you write for them a lot you know something like that that just shows like this is personal. I kind of try and take the time to reply to those emails because I can see that there's been like an effort going into personalizing it. That makes a lot of sense. And Chris has asked as a non journalist for you guys like how, how much longer does it take you to do an all rounder compared to an exclusive like to pitch that because it looks like you get five articles for the same amount of work if you do the all round. It's actually the same amount of effort. In terms of for you doing the writing so like me doing the writing. Yeah so if someone was coming to you with a pitch and they were saying like, I don't want this be like an exclusive I want it to be an all round like is that for you the same amount of work. So like no it's probably. I feel like that example is a very good example like a lot of all around stuff is like three paragraphs. Yeah, it's the same. I mean, you write one story you just send it out all around. I feel like I'm not quite understanding the question. I guess it's more about like understanding from your point of view, like do you do you think about you you're thinking about you want an exclusive because that means that you kind of you can definitely get it into a paper. You know that it's exclusive to you so no one else is going to be writing about it. But for campaigners like us, we might think an all rounder is better because more coverage is better. So like from your point of view if we're saying oh we're going to do this as an all rounder. Is that like more work for you less attractive than an exclusive I guess maybe. I can only cover stuff that's exclusive because my editors will never pay me for copy that they've already gotten their inbox. So you can send an all round to like. So when I have put stories out myself as around I've been given that story exclusively. It's just I've then made the decision that it will probably maximize coverage. So it's an all rounder like I said it's always a gamble with an exclusive you will get it in one publication. And then you might get follow up, which would be great. You don't always with an all rounder, you're gambling on papers saying yes that day. It's like both ways are a gamble but at least with an exclusive you know that it's going to be in one publication. Yeah so so as a freelancer and sorry perhaps I didn't mean that clear like I. I still have to be given the say the FY data exclusively and then I would make the decision as to where I publish like whether I publish that all round or exclusive. If you want to just send it directly to newspapers and you put it all around that's absolutely fine but that will be considered as like part of the day's churn essentially like. So if you're putting out an FY about housing and there are other three other housing stories that day. It may or may not make depending on which is considered the best housing story. In terms of the actual work involved. You know the kind of quick turnaround stuff tends to be the stuff that's not delved into as deeply but yeah. Could I just jump from the campaign perspective of what we like so we always do it both in the sense that we offer the exclusive but knowing that we're going to send like an all round press release after that is published because. But basically what we found with exclusives is that it's far less like to be covered by a big another national paper. So if it's you know it was in the FT you know the independence not going to cover our exclusive because it's already in the FT and they probably like seen it etc. But it doesn't mean that local press and or sector press won't pick it up which is still really valuable for us. So that's what happened with the FT article. We basically sent out a similar line on the fact that councils weren't this disparity between councils with energy fishing requirements but it was picked up by like the building press by like the local government press like the local government chronicle. But our headline was there was in the financial times and that so we always if we have an exclusive we're always prepared to also send out as a big like all round press release because we think it's valuable to get that extra push. Even though we know it's unlikely other national papers are going to cover the same story and I hope that was useful. Yeah I totally agree that there's a really good strategy and I would also say it doesn't don't necessarily rule out as a national papers because papers can be really funny and it's really hard to know which way they're going to go. But sometimes they all panic and think oh my god we missed something we must follow it. Why haven't we got this thing that's in the times and then they all panic and do the same story which I kind of tend to exploit quite a lot there kind of fear of missing out. But and then sometimes they get really sniffing and they're like oh I'm not interested in this. And it kind of depends on the publication so like for example the Guardian never follows anyone else they just don't see the principle of not doing that. The sun in the mirror won't follow each other you know there's various kind of like little kind of feuds they have but but actually quite often, especially if you get something really, you know, not to denigrate your story which is fantastic on page two but maybe if it been on the front page of the FT you might have had some follow up in the Times and Telegraph like they tend to follow each other's front pages so yeah. There's definitely opportunities to follow up like an exclusive doesn't kill the story. Awesome. And Gemma has asked a question that might be a little bit more involved and so if we don't have time to answer it now that is probably okay and we can maybe follow up afterwards. Gemma has asked when you say case studies can you give some examples when it comes to data or FY stories like what would be a case study there. Yes, so I mean I think even when you're, you know, you're dealing in data what you're ultimately dealing with is what how normal people's lives are affected. So, you know, going back to Isaac's story about residents paying more, you know, this big disparity in council housing, you know, it's very obvious that you could get a case study of someone who lives in social housing who's having to pay a lot for their bills, or that their house is really energy and efficient, you know, is putting a human face on the data like. Yeah, in short. Oh, thank you. So Jake has asked some journalistic editors seem to be fine with WhatsApp would you recommend using WhatsApp to avoid that cold messaging or cold birds to avoid that cold calling, or is cold messaging bad to basically I personally would be really annoyed some what's happening. I think it depends on the individual editor. I think the thing is that some people are like, oh yeah DM me on Twitter and some people like don't mind being what's happening stuff but actually like, you don't know. Unless you have a pre existing relationship with that journalist and they've said yeah just feel free to what I mean then great, like I know the political journalist constantly what's up stories to each other and people constantly what's up in them secret tips and stuff and they love it. But I think just because you don't know and there's a chance that you could rub people up the wrong way. Just email is just by far the safest medium. Obviously like sometimes with the people I have a pre existing relationship with if I haven't replied to them. Their email they might text me or send me a WhatsApp and say by the way I emailed you. That's fine, but I wouldn't, wouldn't cold, cold approach through any other medium really other than email. Thank you. I'm not entirely sure I understand the question so I'm going to read it out, but Ronald you might need to jump in if I haven't completely got what you mean. So Ronald asked, can you please provide some more detail on the various funding models for in depth journalism projects, especially those where the bulk of research analysis and groundwork is outsourced or conducted by external entities rather than the journalist or their affiliated publications. I guess the question is probably about like how big investigations happen and get funded. There's basically most major investigations are sort of done and funded in house so they generally are something that's kind of brainstormed internally the maybe the you know the editors have a particular interest in a subject for whatever reason. And they sort of agree to, you know, most of the national papers have their own investigations units or teams, or like, they sort of like give a certain generous of time to look into something with investigations that I've done as a freelancer. Again, it tends to be quite collaborative. You need to have a newspaper on side. If nothing else you generally quite often think they're legal team on side. And then you might be working with other organizations who help you. I did a quick big investigation recently into menopause supplements, not being what they claim to be. And I was kind of advised by an external party but I had to sort of get a newspaper on board and supporting me and paying because they take time so you know they need. A newspaper on board to sort of fund it essentially, pay for your time and any kind of like equipment and stuff that you need. So, yeah, I don't think there's any sort of simple answers to the question basically there's no sort of one way of doing it there are other bodies like the Bureau for investigative journalism. There are various sort of, especially I think in the states are a kind of government grants available for investigative projects, some universities fund investigative projects but yeah, I think there's no one size fits all it really depends on what the project is.