TFGL2021 - S1 - Ep6 - Care For The Trees

Welcome to this episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast.

Joining host Bex, we have TFGL's Greg Ashton and Sam Milsom.

Our special guest is Katy Preen. Katy is a reporter for The Meteor, an independent media co-operative for Manchester.

Transcript

Bex: Friends and enemies. Welcome to a new episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast. Snow is falling outside of my window and it's making me very happy. Will this be a rare instance where the podcast is filled with positivity and joy? Well, Greg’s here, so probably not. Regardless, we do have a fascinating show lined up for you. We might be talking about trees, we might not, that's an exciting mystery. NCVO has a horrendous bullying problem and there's a new project to help the homeless in Manchester. Is there a genuine intent there or is it just a PR stunt? all that and more coming right up. Joining me today in this winter wonderland, we have Greg Ashton. Greg, if you were a perfume, how would you describe your scent?

Greg: Regret. [laughs] You know I was gonna say that. I'd be like that smell, you know when you're out in the wilderness and you’re like ah, it’s lovely to be out of the city, isn't it really nice and you take a deep breath and then you really realise that there's some underlying scent of decay there.

Bex: Okay. That’s very specific. 

Sam: That sounds like mulch Greg. Mulch is a very positive thing for the ecosystem. So,

Greg: Exactly. Exactly. 

Bex: And as you’ve just heard Sam Wilson is back on the podcast. Sam, same question.

Sam: Oh, I don't know, but less is definitely more, I would say.  I don't know, my Lynx Africa, why not?

Bex: Keep it classic, keep it classic

Sam: I wore that once as a teenager and it's strong enough, probably enough that it's probably still lurking on me somewhere.

Bex: And me, I'm Bex. If I was a perfume, it'll probably just be a gross chaotic blend of all my favorite scents: coffee, basil, jasmine, sorrow. And we have a guest with us here today, Katy Preen. Katy is a reporter for The Meteor, an independent media operative in Manchester.  Hello Katy.

Katy: Hello.

Bex: Thanks for joining in. 

Katy: Thanks for having me on today.

Bex: Do you want to talk about what you would smell like if you were a perfume?

Katy: Oh my goodness, um, am I allowed to, well, I won't mention any brand names but just talking about what your perfume would be, I actually filled in a survey to sort of create my perfect perfume and they would send a sample to me in the post. And so I answered all the questions and what came back, actually smelled like all of the things you mentioned at the same time. And it was horrendous. This is the perfume for my personality and it just smells like garbage. Hopefully, I wouldn't smell like that. I think maybe you know if I could have something perhaps like anticipation or joy or something like that, that'd be nice but I don't really know what that smells like.

Greg: I feel like anticipation would be quite sweaty. 

Katy: Yeah. 

Greg: Like getting all like anxious. 

Katy: Might need some Lynx Africa to cover that. 

Sam: Oh I’ve got you covered. 

Bex: I know what The Meteor is but do you want to tell everybody else? Only because I’m a Trustee of The Meteor now. My first Trustee position. Hopefully, I’ll do a good job.

Katy:  So, we are a new media company.  I joined The Meteor in 2018 and I think that it started as The Meteor quite soon before that. If you knew the Newl, some of the people who are involved with that are also involved in like the main production team of the Meteor and we're trying to tell stories that don't typically get told by the mainstream media or the mainstream local media. And we're also democratic as well. So our members can basically tell us what they want us to report on. Usually, we will present a few options and get them to vote on it but they're all things that are really important to Manchester and the people that live in Manchester, and we try to make sure that everyone's fully involved so that we are truly accountable to our membership, and hopefully accountable to our readership if any readers aren't members of course they are. It would be wonderful if they could sign up as members too because then that just gives us more support or we could do more of the work that we love. 

Bex: It feels to me like independent media is needed more now than ever. I don’t know. 

Katy: Yeah, definitely. Well, what our current media is...well there's a few issues there. There's problems of accountability, issues of bias and there are also issues of how is media going to pay for itself because traditional funding models where it'd be paid for by advertisers, that landscape has sort of changed because we don't have as much print media now as we used to. So a lot of media companies, you might see say the begging lighters at the end of each Guardian article, companies like the Guardian and other mainstream papers are really struggling. At the moment, but with The Meteor and other similar independent publications, we're using new funding models. We're trying to build something that's more sustainable and also just tells better news really. Because we're independent we try to avoid bias, we try to be completely accountable. We are currently in the process of signing up to Impress which is the Independent Press Regulator. We're not a member yet but we're on our way to being there and we want to sort of be part of the new media that is establishing proper trust in journalism because I don't know the exact stats but the UK media is one of the worst in Europe for trustworthiness. And that's a terrible situation because we're in a place right now where people don't trust the media, they don't trust politicians but they're heavily reliant on what we are told in the news. So, we have quite a distorted view of what life really like in this country and I want to be a part of changing that, making the news more reflective of what life's really like in the UK.

Greg: Yeah. What I love about The Meteor and independent news, in general, is all of that stuff but also like you get the same quality as international reporting but for your local news and I think we've been missing that.  You know those local stories where, you know, a big paper like the Guardian is not really going to spend that much time focusing on like local council, politics and things like that because they want to get as many eyeballs on it as possible. So I just think that's what we've been missing, is good quality, local reporting and it's really nice to see that happening again.

Katy:  One of the things that is quite interesting when you apply those sorts of reports into local news, is that you end up with the national papers picking up on things that we've uncovered. So one of the things that The Meteor has been focusing on a lot is planning because there's so much new development happening in Manchester and the process of approving these schemes can seem quite opaque to ordinary people. So we've been digging a bit more into these applications and we've been attending the planning meetings, and we're finding out, you know, just what is actually being said, why these schemes are being grazed, and how much money is involved and where's it going. And these stories have been picked up by the Nationals as well. So, we're actually not just influencing the media in Manchester, we're actually driving the national headlines in some cases because we do have very high standards. There's nothing that gets past my editor without extreme fact-checking and like all being very, very very precise and that's what exactly what we need in all of our media because, as well as accountability we need to show that what we're reporting is accurate and truthful. And a lot of mainstream papers do let themselves down a bit in that regard.

Sam: It's really interesting like how there seems to be a growth in the sort of local and even hyperlocal news outlets like The Meteor.  You've also got in Manchester, you've got the Manchester Mill which is relatively new as well and I think it's really good to see this, from my point of view, really high-quality local reporting. And, you know, traditionally local newspapers were a bit rubbish, weren’t they? The person who would be reporting on those same council meetings would also be writing the gardening column and reviewing the local play and all of that. And they were kind of a bit of a joke. You used them to like kindling for your fire type thing but it's really, I think it's really interesting we're seeing this growth of high quality, localised news by The Meteor. 

Katy: Yeah, I remember reading the local paper when I was growing up and I didn’t find that interesting. It seemed to be things like what the local media thought they should be telling us. But because we involve our members, they could tell us what they want us to report o and also there's a lot of new sites that are carrying out lots of investigative work, which is something that we never really saw in local media previously. And I think that's great. It just means there's more news getting out there and I think certainly in a huge city like Manchester of so many people, I mean, there aren't enough reporters, there aren't enough outlets to tell all the stories, so the more of these outlets start-up and flourish, then the better I think. 

Bex: Definitely. I've definitely seen some of the local actual media. I mean, The Meteor is actual media but you know I mean, not report on stuff because in Manchester everybody's in everybody else's pockets, and there have definitely been stories that I feel like have been skipped over or ignored completely just because they are a major funder or advertiser of the platform. You know who you are and what that story was. On that note though, we'll move on to the Start of the Week because I know you've got a project coming up that you're investigating about trees. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about it? 

Katy: Yes, so the idea began in a WhatsApp group. People who live in the city centre were concerned about trees being cut down for new development. And then we were discussing how many trees are there, are any of these trees protected. And so I carried out some research and I discovered how many trees inside the city centre had a tree protection order. I don't know if you saw it, but I did a poll on Twitter a few weeks ago, asking what people consider the city centre to be and it’s up for debate. I think we came up with six different answers and there wasn't really any consensus on it. What the council considers to be the city centre is a bit bigger than what many people thought it was but I decided to sort of just say okay, in Manchester, and inside the inner ring road, so not that little bit of Salford near Victoria station. Just the Manchester bit inside the inner ring road. How many TPOs do you think they are? 

Greg: 67. 

Katy: 67. Are we gonna go higher or lower? 

Bex: I'm gonna say 34 and I would be disappointed by that number. 

Katy: What about you Sam?  

Sam: Yeah, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna say 22. Actually, it’s probably zero isn't it? 

Katy: Ohhhhh. 

Sam:  I'm gonna go with zero.

Katy: You're the closest. 

Sam: I mean, is that something I should celebrate? 

Katy: There are actually eight.  

Bex: Eight? Which trees?

Katy: I can tell you exactly which trees.  Let me just get open up my phone. Okay. 

Bex: It’s going to have to be like amazing trees. 

Katy: They’re quite nice. There's certainly nothing wrong with them. I don't know why these trees, in particular, have been selected, but there are two on Lever Street, next to Chapter One Books.

Greg: Yeah, I was gonna say those two because they did want to knock them down and they can't.

Bex: Oh those are big trees. 

Katy: Well I'm glad it was opposed successfully. There are three on K Street, next to Overseas House. I'm not sure if you know which one that is, I had to look that up on a map as well.

Bex: No idea what those trees are. I’ll have to go and check them out. 

Katy: You should. We should appreciate all of these trees. And there are three more outside Albert Bridge House on Bridge Street. But it's not all bad news for the city's trees because it's not just CPOs that can protect them. We've got quite a lot of conservation orders in the city centre. It's actually, I don't know, it's possibly almost 50% and conservation orders are usually thought of to protect the local architecture and history, but they do also cover trees because if you have this fantastic building with these lovely trees outside, you don't want to get the chainsaws out because you just completely ruin the streetscape. So these trees also have some protection but essentially what you have to do if you do want to remove a tree in a conservation area, you just have to give the Council six weeks’ notice. And they can refuse it but it’s not as strict as a tree protection order. But then, even they can still be overturned by the Council. But as for new development, I was reading another report which has something to do with the climate emergency, and I haven't looked into it in any great detail but the Council themselves have said in this report that there have been previous issues with developers removing trees, But a lot of these trees that get removed, there won't have really been any sort of legal protection for them in the first place. So, where this article is gonna go is gonna be asking our readers, you know, what do we really think about the trees in Manchester? Do we want to ensure that we're saving them for future generations or is the situation adequate as it is? I mean I would argue that perhaps it's not adequate with the current level of development but other people might think differently on that one. 

Greg: There's a couple of things. So I work with a greening charity, A New Leaf and I've worked with the City of Trees, who are a charity based in Manchester whose goal is to plant a tree for every person in Manchester. So the main thing is planting trees is really, particularly in the city, is really really hard. And quite often gets cocked up, and I don't know whether that's just Manchester because that's only my experience, it could be that they just don't have the knowledge and skills here, or whether it is something that happens quite often in other cities, I'm not sure. I mean a great example they were building a new hotel in the city centre and they planted these two trees outside, but the hotel had like a section that jutted out and they planted the trees underneath it. So where were they going to grow to? So they were just gonna hit, and they were like just underneath and it's just like you couldn't write that, it was just so stupid. You often have people planting trees inappropriately, so they don’t have the correct drainage, so they die. There's a great example in Milton Keynes of this nice extension that they’d done on their shopping centre and they'd done this kind of open square around this big giant oak that had been there for centuries and it died because they poured loads of concrete round it.  And then there's just the whole thing of planting the wrong kind of tree, as well. So like, there's a habit of planting trees that just aren't suitable for the area or aren't suitable for the other plants that are in the area or just aren't suitable for the climate.

Katy: Yeah. When I see a lot of trees that are on a pavement, they tend to have quite a small opening in the ground and if you're only planning for that, that's not a long-term investment in that tree. That tree is basically a little piece of decoration that can be torn down and replaced by something else. And it does seem with the high levels of development in Manchester, that that's the kind of trees that were sort of promoting in the city because there are actually a lot of trees in the city centre, but you don't notice them all the time because they're all so small and spindly. I mean, these trees that have got tree protection orders, they are big mature trees and there's a lack of those I feel in the city. The suburbs are completely different. The majority of TPOs and conservation areas actually are outside of the city centre because the City Council's area is huge and goes all the way down to the airport. And there does seem to be there's a large concentration of TPOs in South Manchester. Not so many in the north and east Manchester and it's like a completely different city. Once you've gone so much further south outside of the city centre however we're defining that. And yes, you can't have as many trees in the city centre as you do in some leafy suburb in Didsbury.  I mean you wouldn't be able to move for the trees. But we should be like using the lessons from there because you can't pretend that you don't know how to care for big trees when you've got examples of them like five miles down the road from you.

Greg: One of the things I would raise is, I'd be really interested to see if you guys use this as an element in your story. So one thing my charity discussed was Dude where's my trees. So you'll notice on any development kind of promotional material they always have these little figures of people going about their happy lives and then there's always some greenery around there. Salboy is particularly, I’ve noted, is bad for this. Where they stick a bunch of trees in there or green space or a garden and when they finish it, these things have disappeared. And you kind of like, well, what happened. Oh well, we ran out of money and all these kinds of excuses and oh well, it was just promotional materials to demonstrate what it could look like. There was a great one in Salford where the urban splash properties were going up and they had like the River Mersey and they had like boats in there. You can't have boats in that. And also, it was quite a notorious hookup spot for young gay men across the river there, but they were selling these properties to families so they wanted to make it look more appealing. So we wanted to start kind of tracking who were the worst offenders for using greenspace as a marketing material thing and then just not actually developing it.

Katy: There was one development that made me laugh in particular. It's in the Ann Coats near the Islington area, just off Pollard Street, corner of Pollard Street and Manday Street. It was a very thin site and I think it was an 11 storey building they were going to put on this really really thin white T-shaped site. I think it might be Bowlers Yard or something. But most of the plot was full of buildings and there was a tiny triangular section at one end, where there were a couple of brushes in planters and one tree. And then in the report that they submitted for planning, they said that this was a clear commitment to biodiversity. 

Greg: [laughs]

Katy: And I thought well is there like a lower limit on how much tree counts as pro-diversity because there should be just a complete joke,

Sam: It made me think about what's going on with Great Anchor Street at the moment. I was just thinking about what Greg was saying about all the trees on the promotional materials and it turns out they haven't wanted any of the trees and in fact, they said, oh we couldn't and they're going to be around the corner or something like that and I just thought, oh c’mon. It also reminded me, I was looking up some tree preservation orders for Trafford and Manchester City Council for another project I was working on and there's a street and I think it's on the Trafford side and it's like borders Manchester and Trafford and almost every single tree on that street has a preservation order. And it looks like it's just a residential street and I've always wanted to get to the bottom of it. In my mind, they must have got together to stop some kind of big development being built there or put up but I've never found out the truth behind it and it's so surreal. So if anyone knows the answer to that, please let me know. 

Bex: Do you know what's the name of the street?

Sam: I can't remember off the top of my head, but I can dig it out. I’ll have an old GIS file somewhere. I’ll have a look. I’ll have to update our listeners on Twitter.

Bex: Also when the article’s ready Katy, we'd love to share that and talk more about it. I’m really excited to hear more about it. 

Greg: Definitely. 

Katy: I could do an investigation into this particular tree-lined street. Maybe?

Sam: [laughs] 

Bex: So on charity news of the week, this is less fun and not really nice to talk about but I mean there’s a big, big news article that we've all been talking about this week in the charity sector. MTVO has come out with a report that's been done on bullying and harassment internally and it's really really really bad right. Greg, for anybody who weirdly might not have seen it, do you want to talk more about it? 

Greg: Yeah, so I wanted to reference this because we did discuss the CEO leaving last week, Carl Manning. And we didn't know. The conversation went along the lines of, everybody's initial reaction was something dodgy has probably going on there but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and they haven't actually released this. I think it was released by the third sector. It was done by a third-party organisation last year and I think they published it to NCVO in the middle of last year. And, yeah, it basically calls out institutionalised racism from the ground up, at like every level basically.  They state that his leaving has nothing to do with this report but I mean you look at the way that he worded it, it’s in no way suggesting that he was involved or implicated, but he clearly saw himself as part of the problem because he'd been there for 23 years and if it's institutionalised at every level, then I think I would reiterate what we said last week, which was he's made the right choice, he's stepped aside and he's letting new people come in and move the organization forwards because it obviously needs some transformation and improvements there. 

Bex: Yeah, I think it's turned into a big hashtag on Twitter. Everyone’s talking about it, it's not just one organisation, the entire sector is a mess. But I think also, like, everywhere is a mess, and not just charities. And, yeah, and I think we all just need to get better at being nice to each other. And not be dicks. Generally, it’s an easy ask, right? Apparently not.

Greg: Oh God, no. People can’t help it. 

Katy: Maybe it's just an inherent sort of part of the human condition. And it's not just people sort of overtly being a dick. It's all of these prejudices that we all hold and institutionally have. They're so hard to sort of break down, I mean, we know this is everywhere. I mean I used to work in engineering, and, well, the number of stories I've got so you can we can have like a whole series of podcasts on that. And as someone who's worked in STEM, I'm actually, it seems wrong that the charity sector would have this problem because you think, oh they're meant to be nice people trying to make the world a better place. And yet, even bearing that in mind, it's still a massive issue. Yeah, I mean we've obviously got a lot of work to do but we can't just focus on the obvious things and of course, the non-obvious things then foster an environment where you can get away with saying terrible things to somebody's face and that's dreadful as well. I think this is a British problem, not just a British problem. It happens worldwide but I do think it's every, it's in our culture, and we need to do something about it. 

Bex: That's really interesting actually because like saying don’t be dicks is like a really easy way of putting it when, you know, I think the first thing to do is we all need to reflect on ourselves as well. I think we all have stuff that we do that we probably could be better at. Like I talked about this quite openly where I've come on a really massive personal journey. I was an engineer as wel, when I was 16 and surrounded by lads, lads lads. Like, to me, I didn't get the whole concept of feminism and thought women were a bit pants because that was the environment that I grew up in and it took me, you know until my early 20s and then left that environment, learnt from other people to shake that off. And you know, I think we all need to admit that I probably still got some of that latent sexism hanging around me and I need to work on it, and I do try and work on it every day, but until we admit that yeah we're probably all a bit ist in some ways, because that's what society's taught us. We're never gonna shake it off, are we?

Greg: No that's exactly right. A correction, it was Carl Wilding not Manning, I think I said before. And I think, yeah, that's it. That history. I mean, I don't know anyone in this country that can say they're not a racist because you know I’m not talking like frog steping crazy racist but you know, we've all been raised in a society that has imbalances. So there's always going to be those biases that are built into us that we try every day to overcome but they're just going to be built in there and I think accepting that you're going to get it wrong occasionally because you don't know any better, is a better way of going about it instead of saying well I'm better than you guys because I know I'm not racist. It's like, no, just accept that that's the way you've been raised and get better, be better than they were.

Sam: I think was quite shocking about this article is like they're talking about overt, aren’t they? That is the keyword. This isn't like unconscious bias or you know, or this is over oppression. And it is interesting that he resigned without, you know, at first I thought is it like a bit of a getting in front of the scandal type thing, but as you say like he didn't resign and stay because of this. That for me is what is so scary about this. They’re talking about overt oppression. 

Greg: I don’t want to get into too much because it’s kind of assuming but I do wonder, youo know, if you’re in an organisation and you’re not actively being overtly racist and you’re in charge and you found this out and you were culpable because you are, because you’re in charge, what do you do? I guess stepping aside seems like the best thing. When you’ve been there for 23 years, you’ve clearly not improved things and you’re not going to make a difference any further so let someone else come in and make things better. 

Katy: Wasn't there something about how the sector decided, you know, that it was progressive and then that actually limited these conversations about whether or not they were really progressive?

Greg: Yeah, I think that's an issue. It's like well we're already doing that thing. And you see it with so many topics, like sexism, racism. We've seen it with diversity conversations in the past couple years, where people have said, well we're doing everything we're supposed to for diversity because we got a woman to be a manager for this team over in HR. That's diverse right. Yeah, ticking boxes.

Bex: Talk about ticking boxes, we've got a new homeless initiative starting in Manchester City, where they’re putting homeless people in boxes, right Greg? Is that what’s happening?

Greg: [laughs] They’re not putting them in boxes [laughs] Well I suppose containers.  

Bex: I tried to make a segue, Greg. Don’t ruin it. 

Greg: Yeah, it's an interesting one. So it's from a charity called Embassy Village who initially converted a tour bus to help homeless people, but then COVID stopped that happening. So what they've done is they've come up with this really ambitious idea where they're going to convert 40 modular container homes in an area in Manchester, and create this community with like a town hall and it's going to house forty people who will be given guidance and support to get them into full-time work. And, yeah, there's a couple of elements there. Guidance and support for a homeless person to get them into work, the modular home kind of housing idea and this creating of the community. They've kind of pulled together a lot of threads that we've talked about on the podcast before and I'm just really interested to hear people's thoughts on this and, you know, whether we think it will work or are they're missing anything or could it have real promise. 

Katy: I wouldn't want to write off his gimmick straight away because I do think that there's a lot of good that can come from this. But what I am a little bit worried about is that it might not actually be as inclusive and helpful as it needs to be. Because a lot of people who are living on the streets of Manchester are there because the solutions that are available to them, they're quite conditional and they may not be able to meet these criteria. They might have problems with drugs or they might have a pet or there could be all sorts of other sort of barriers to access. The way that they spoke about in this article, it seemed quite aspirational. Like we're going to get homeless people off the streets, we're going to get them to have a job and then they won't be reliant on benefits and it's like well, some of these people have got, well probably the majority of them, have got really quite complicated and chaotic lives and I’m a bit concerned that this vision is going to end up missing the people who really need it. 

Greg: Yeah. A couple of things that flagged up for me was the Manchester Evening News article, you know, they got a quote from Richard Lease and he just talks about people at risk of homelessness. And so I'm looking at this and I'm going, it's kind of exactly what you're saying Katy, is who is this actually for? Is it actually people who are already on the streets or is it people that are at risk? I'm not saying that one is better than the other but I have questions myself. 

Sam: There is a place for that though. So you know for somebody who's newly homeless, I think I was told once you've got about eight weeks, in which you've got an opportunity to stop that person from becoming long-term homeless. In many cases, after that eight week period, mental health and other factors will have degraded to a point where it becomes exponentially harder to get that person off the street. So I think there is a place for preventative kind of measures, but yeah I agree on the aspirational aspects of this. I mean the imagery looks like something young professionals would try to apply for, so I do worry that they're going to get like, cherry-pick the people that might go there. 

Greg: The imagery they've released, just to go back a little bit, it's got lots of greenery.  I don't know if you noticed that. Lots of pot plants and I'm wondering, will they be there?

Bex: Yeah, yeah. It's really flashy and  not to say that homeless people shouldn't have a nice place to live. But I don't know. Something just struck me as being like, it's almost like a tourist hotspot. It’s almost like, let's go see the homeless people. I mean, I'm sure that's not how it’s gonna go across but that's kind of what it looks like. 

Katy: Don’t give them any ideas.

Bex: On the whole I think it sounds like a really great thing. Fingers crossed. Let's be positive about this. There's a lot of great things about it. Like you said Greg, it kind of pulls together a lot of the little things that sometimes these schemes miss. So let's see. Fingers crossed. Yeah? 

Katy: Yeah. 

Greg: Yeah we can slag it off when it all goes wrong. 

Katy: That’s the spirit. 

Sam: Oe of the images for it has a cat hanging out with two geese, so I quite like that. 

Greg: [laughs]

Sam: So a cat hanging out with two geese. I'm pretty sure I'm not making that up.

Bex: I did not see that one but I will have a little look. 

Bex: Tech of the Week. So something about Google because it wouldn’t be this podcast if we didn't feature one of those big tech people. You said it might be the most popular, but it's apparently not the best search engine. What's going on here, Greg? 

Greg: Yeah. So this is off the back of the them threatening to pull the search engine in Australia. So Monash University have done some research, specifically looking at news, so it's not search as a whole. They’ve found that Bing Ecosia, my favourite search engine, deliver more professionally produced news in the top 50 results. So Google was tending to produce unsubstantiated sites for faux news in the top 50 results whereas Ecosia and Bing were actually delivering news sites.

Bex: Every time I work on any web project or I look at the analytics and there's any hits for Ecosia, it’s like that’s Greg. No matter what project it is or what website it is, I’m like that has to be Greg. 

Greg: Probably. Probably.

Bex: I love how we all have our own favourite search engines. Tom's is Bing, which means he’s literally the only fan of Bing in the world. I like DuckDuckGo. You’ve got Ecosia. What’s your favourite search engine Sam? 

Sam: Oh DuckDuckgo. 

Bex: Yeah. Wooo. 

Sam: I don’t know why. It’s just is.  Ecosia is alright. 

Katy: I feel really, I don't know I feel like I'm a bit too mainstream because I use Google mostly. But I do like the idea of Ecosia because they sort of help plant trees don’t they? 

Bex: Yeah. 

Greg: Yeah. And really well. So it's not kind of, we're just gonna fling some money at this thing. They've really thought through how that process works, working with local communities to do it instead of sending over some Western white saviours there. Yeah, it's really really cool, the way that they've done it. 

Sam: I think like the study into Google not being the most efficient, absolutely it didn't come as a surprise, I think. It's the same with Google Maps, you know. I think the way that you've got to start looking at it, particularly Google is an advertising platform primarily right, so that article, that report saying that it was one of the worst in bringing up these news sites wasn't at all surprising because they'll go where they make money, basically. So I think that's how you got to look at it. That’s how I try to look at all of Google’s products now, is it's trying to sell you something. It's not the quality. 

Greg: Yeah, I think, that's it. When your priorities change to, like before it was be the best search engine and now it's kind of like well how do we maximise revenue. And you change the goals and you change the priorities of the people that work on it. 

Bex: We’ve got a Night of the week this week, thanks to Katy. So you will have been to the Data Driven 2021 conference and you want to talk to us about it. 

Katy: Yeah. So I normally wouldn't be able to go to the Data Driven Conference because it's in Toronto but this year because we have the pandemic, it's all been done remotely. So I heard about this from one of my Meteor colleagues and I went along and the most amazing thing happens. I'm a little bit of a night owl and I rise late as well. And I found out that Eastern Standard Time. actually it aligns with my schedule perfectly. It's wonderful. So, in Canada this conference was from 10am to 4pm, and it was 3pm to 9pm here. Great. That’s wonderful. Start work at 2pm, attend the conference, go home or switch off my computer and it just worked out so nicely. But it was a really interesting conference to go to and it was a bit different to other conferences that I've attended and I think part of that was that you couldn't see all of the attendees but you could see all of the presenters and main speakers. It felt a lot more intimate than an ordinary conference and there was a real sort of feeling of connection and it was encouraged to get in contact with the speakers if we had further questions and they gave us sort of like links to their GitHub pages and stuff, where they had useful resources on. And it was just so friendly and helpful and it was things that are actually useful, things that I can take away and use in my own reporting. And there was a lot of sort of things where you've got existing tools and you can use them better. So one of the things, a speaker from Bellingcat was talking about just recording sources because you want to be sure that you've got all the information to sort of like, be accountable and accurate. And they just have an Excel spreadsheet where they have certain standard columns like name of the source, what was the link to it, have you got a secondary sort of reference for it, that sort of thing? And it's to create a database of all of the sources you use so that if anyone questions you, you can go back and say well here is our evidence. So that was very simple. And I got introduced to some new tools as well. One, it's a business intelligence tool but you can also use it for data journalism purposes because it has some quite nice outputs. And that was really sort of the theme. A lot of the speakers’ talks was that this is about storytelling. You're not just crunching the numbers, and just spitting out a graph at the end of it. You've got to be able to sort of give it context, you’ve got to explain what these numbers mean. If you're going to use pretty graphics, you've got to be able to sort of like guide the reader to understand what you're telling them. And it was just fascinating really. A lot of the speakers focused on the indigenous population. This was something that we're seeing a lot more in various areas of work because we're finally figuring out that actually we need to be listening to their voices too. And there were lots of challenges and lots of opportunities. One really interesting thing, there was an environmental reporter who went along on some of the, expeditions is the wrong word, but basically they were like rangers for national parks and they employ local people because they know they know the land best than everybody else and they would come along and like observe their working day and understand how they've integrated the use of GPS trackers and other data monitoring equipment to sort of get data back that can then be used in stories. There was also a discussion of trawling through data for people in prison, which is an issue that affects the indigenous population disproportionately. We hear about it being predominantly an issue affecting black people in America but in Canada it's other indigenous groups as well that are adversely affected. And because we've now got all of this information at our fingertips, journalists can interrogate it and find out what the real stories are. So you can see something that looks a bit off. If you think, well why are there so many people in prison for this, from this particular social group. Why does this social group tend to suffer on these metrics, but not thrive in other ways. So we also discussed the way ways of presenting this sort of information and the impact of presenting information on something that's been neglected for so long. And that's really the kind of thing we look at The Meteor. It's not the same thing. We don't have anyone tracking polar bears.

Bex: Why not? [laughs]

Katy: I can tell you there are a fewer polar bears in Manchester City Centre, than there are trees at the TPO. 

Bex: Nice. 

Katy: But it's the same thing in terms of the unheard stories. This is like using data to get the real stories about real people out there that we might not know about otherwise. So, it was quite an exciting conference and I enjoyed it all from the comfort of my desk here in England. So that was nice. 

Greg: Do you feel like there's an interest in data-driven reporting now because it feels like not that long ago we were listening to very many people saying. well we don't want to know about the facts. But now it feels like every news reporter that I see or read is referencing some graph or some chart and I feel like COVID is just reminding people that we need that information. 

Katy: Yeah, definitely. And the pandemic I think has sort of pushed us more towards data journalism because that's the kind of thing that you don't necessarily need to travel to a location to do that. And there’s lots of public bodies that produce data that we can use. One of the speakers, they actually had AI writing their COVID stories for them. So it would just be a daily bulletin, like this number of cases in this district, how many hospitalizations, how many deaths. And no one was actually writing to the article, it was just sort of scraping the data from the government sites, and then a person would check it obviously, just so it doesn't look wrong. And then it would just get published. So, yeah, coronavirus has really sort of changed the media landscape. I don't know what it's going to be like when it's over. I hope that we're still as enthusiastic about data because I mean this is real information. We  might be sick of experts but these are the facts so we're gonna have to deal with them.

Bex: I love it. I love it.

Sam: I remember doing a session with The Meteor before lockdown about data and it was just you know, this was pre-COVID, so you know that The Meteor is a good paper. But like again I think, looking at other localised newspapers, there is a lot more data reportage. Their headlines are about numbers and data which I think it's so encouraging to see. So yeah, it's great. 

Katy: There's a lot more information available. I mean, anybody can search for certain things. I mean probably most of the things that we use in our stories, the actual data component is 99% of the time publicly available but the public doesn't necessarily know how to use the data or even what to look for in the first place. So I think it's a really important role that journalists are taking on now because we're sort of demystifying it for people.

Sam: You are. Yeah, absolutely,. But it's also, you're making it interesting to people and I think that's the thing about COVID is that people have become interested in it because it is, you know, but I think that's the key thing. You've got to get them interested in it and demystify for them and I think people are suddenly very very interested in data about COVID.

Bex: On that note, that’s all we have time for today. Thank you for listening. Katy, how did that go, was that alright? Did you enjoy yourself?

Bex: I really did enjoy it. I mean, I lost my thread a couple of times, but you know this is just how I think really. Sometimes I'll go off on a wild tangent and you've just had the contents of my brain for the last hour.

Greg: Well at least you had a thread. 

Bex: Yeah, you had a thread to start with. Greg does not have a thread. Yeah, no, brilliant. Awesome to have you. Thank you so much. 

Katy: Thank you. 

Bex: Where can people find you on the internet?

Katy: You can find the Meteor at the meteor.org. We're on Twitter at @MCRMeteor . And you can find me on Twitter at @katypreen.

Bex: Thank you very much. I did a tweet before this podcast to try and get some more guests and we have some amazing guests. So I'm just gonna shout out some of them. Next week we've got Jody Ginsburg who is CEO of Internews Europe and also used to run Index on Censorship, which I was a big fan girl of. I'm going to try and keep my cool next week.  We've also got Digital Marketing Manager for Cats coming up. Cats Protection, which I’m also very excited about. Will not fangirl over Emily either. I will act totally normal in her presence, despite the fact that she runs the biggest cats charity in the UK. 

Greg: Don’t ask her for cats. 

Bex: I don't need any more cats. Five is enough. That’s kind of it for this season and we do have a couple of Making Friends With, to round the season up. But I’ve I booked up basically next season as well, so you're going to hear from Ross McCormack of Third Sector Live. Nice bit of Scottish crew on the podcast. We've got Zoe Amar booked in. So, all looking good. Excellent guests, thank you, alongside Katy. Hopefully they will be as good as Katy.  So listeners, what did you think? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Get in touch on Twitter @techforgoodlive. Should we set up a core house, how do we even go about that. I don't know. it’s  what everyone's talking about. No?  Okay, Sam, what do you think? 

Sam: Errr, it’s an effort aint it? 

Bex: Ah ok, it’s still a no. We'd love it if you gave us a nice review on iTunes and tell your mates about this podcast and thank you to Podcast.co for hosting our podcast. It means a lot. Without it, it would just be us losers screaming into the void, whereas now we can scream into the void, and four or five people listen. We also need donations to make sure that we can keep doing transcripts. You can donate at Tech For Good Live. Okay, we're done. Thanks. Bye.

Greg: Bye. 

Katy: Bye.