🧵 It’s time for another roller-coaster thread digging into how one journalist has used company accounts* to get a great story.
This time it's a front page story by @Robert_Booththeguardian.com/society/2023/j…
*Featuring: other useful open sources
2/ The first par is a lesson in concrete writing which has some key factual statements we can start unpacking:
💸 £21m in payments
🎩 He is the "boss"/"owner"
🔎 Multiple breaches of rules
How did the reporter arrive at those facts? The answer isn't as simple as you might think
3/ How can we calculate how much a company boss earns? Normally a story like this relies on the company accounts' ‘notes to the accounts’ section on directors’ remuneration where payments to the highest paid director are disclosed. Those payments add up to £29m...
4/ (I pause at this point to say that the company accounts can be found on Companies House, in the 'Filing history' tab for the company: …te.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/007312… - you can check you have the right company by looking on their website for a company name & number)
5/ How do we know if the boss is the highest paid director at a company? In fact, we might not — and in the 2018 accounts it is explicitly stated that the highest paid director was *not* G G Sanders, the subject of Booth's story...
6/ ...Booth therefore doesn’t include most of those director payments in his headline £21m. He only includes the 2017 payment — with the other potential £10m mentioned in the penultimate par.
So how is the extra £18.6m found..? theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
7/ ...The other place to find money going to a company owner is dividends: payments made to people who hold shares in a company.
You can find them in various places in the company accounts: the cash flow statement, the notes to the accounts, and the directors’ report.
8/ ...But how many shares does G G Sanders own? A good place to look for this information is on the last page of a company’s accounts, where the ‘controlling party’ is named.
Here is where we can find out that Sanders owns all the shares in each year — and the dividends
9/ ...The last page of a company's accounts also allows you to report that someone is the "owner" of the company.
Or: look on Companies House under the 'People' tab for a company — and then the 'Persons with significant control' tab …te.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/007312…
10/ So public info in company accounts on dividends and remuneration provides a 'scale' story on exec pay for @Robert_Booth (more on that and other common data angles at onlinejournalismblog.com/2020/08/11/her…)
— But there's a lot more to learn from how the core story is fleshed out...
11/ It’s one thing to report the scale of executive pay at a company — but why does that matter? Here Booth uses company accounts to provide the context of the scale of public money given to the company — alongside the total 💰 going to directors
12/ 'Why does exec pay matter' part 2 is those breaches of rules. At the CQC website you can find reports for care homes — and calculate what proportion of an operator’s homes are below a certain standard.
Start at cqc.org.uk/care-services — but be patient...
13/ The LONG way to find all a provider’s care home CQC ratings is to:
1️⃣Search for one of the homes operated by the company at cqc.org.uk/care-services
2️⃣Click on the ‘Provided and run by:’ link
3️⃣Click on ‘services’ to see all the ratings
But...
14/ ...Here's a search hack to get to a provider page on the CQC website: prefix your search with
site:cqc.org.uk/provider
inurl:services
And then add the keyword google.com/search?q=site%…
Note: the URL above will be shortened so use the one at the link
17/ But the paragraph that really caught my eye in @Robert_Booth’s article was this, on two £4m+ properties the executive owned. How did he get these..? theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
18/ To trace a director’s property assets we might try Companies House again, and the director’s appointments page: most of this person’s directorships use the company address as the correspondence address, but there is an address in Essex… …te.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/kHKNx…
19/ 🔎...Once you've got an address from Companies House, Streetview and Zoopla can help establish what sort of location it is.
20/ ...But a correspondence address isn't proof that it's *owned* by the director in question.
To establish that, use the Land Registry to search for a property — once found, it's £3 to download the document which confirms it gov.uk/search-propert…
21/ ...Finding the second exec property is trickier — and here former MA Data Journalism student @Jarnavic steps in. He focuses on companies with a family connection: "In the filing history I found an address at a flat in London..."
@Jarnavic 22/ There's more open source wonder in @Robert_Booth's article, including the wages jobs are being advertised with (and how that compares to McDonalds) — but also, crucially, interviews and a (declined) right of reply theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
@Jarnavic@Robert_Booth 23/ ...and the last paragraph of Booth's piece is worth ending with here: it's not always going to be so easy to find the same info for other companies receiving public money for social care. theguardian.com/society/2023/j…
You want 35 tips on interviewing for journalists? Here goes... THREAD. 🧵 #bcujournos
1/ "For the first question, ask a gentle, wise question as it allows them to collect their thoughts and get ready to answer," says @PardeepKalirai#bcujournos
@PardeepKalirai 2/ "Stand out from other journalists - don't ask the same questions as it can bore the interviewee" #bcujournos
🧵It's time for another journey into the world of telling stories through company accounts - this time Naomi Campbell's fashion charity is under investigation!
The story is here: theguardian.com/society/2021/n… But how did the reporter find the details..?
2/ First up: the story *lead* doesn't come from company accounts, it comes from a press release: gov.uk/government/new… — you can get email alerts about announcements from the Charity Commission here: gov.uk/government/lat… ...
3/ ...But a reporter could have found some good story leads on the supermodel's charity much earlier if they'd been looking, as the details of the story show...
THREAD! I've reverse-engineered @jimwaterson's excellent article on sex-worker social media platform OnlyFans to show you how to find all sorts of stories in company accounts. Here's the article - theguardian.com/culture/2021/m… - now let's begin...🧵 #bcujournos
2/ First, you need to locate the company behind OnlyFans. It's not called OnlyFans so you can either Google it, or look for an 'About' section on the site that leads you to the company - in this case, Fenix International Limited
Succinctly expressed point by @carolinebeavon on the methodological issues of using social media to conduct surveys: "We're not gathering data at all - we're gathering testimonials". @Typeform was useful for this because people could upload files (recordings) #bcujournos
3/ ...but only one person uploaded an audio clip, so @carolinebeavon decided to contact respondents who left details to conduct interviews via Zoom in order to generate audiovisual material #bcujournos
THREAD: As many journalism students are understandably concerned about their work during the disruption caused by #coronavirus, here is some of the advice I've been giving to my students...
1/ Adaptability is a key skill in journalism. This period will see you learning how to adapt in ways that you will draw on throughout your journalism career. See this as a challenge, not an obstacle...
2/ Watch a range of news to see how professional journalists are adapting to limitations on the movement of their sources, colleagues, and themselves — as well as adapting to the news agenda being dominated by one story