DataDrivenJournalism: “Just because there’s a duty to disclose, doesn’t mean there’s a duty to make it easy. This seems to be a universally true when it comes to public records, regardless of the country or government making them available.
The consequences for journalists can be profound: hours of time spent digging through messy data, missing stories that go untold, and the opportunity costs that come with these, just to name a few.
This is a problem we set out to improve a couple of years ago in the US with the introduction of Sqoop, a free data journalism site intended to make it easier for reporters to find and track public records, starting with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Patent Office, and the federal court system, otherwise known as PACER (public access to court automated records).
Think of it as a search box across all of these public records sites (and we’re working to add others) as well as a rapid alerting service. If a journalist has saved searches for “Facebook”, “Jeffrey P. Bezos”, or “Internet of Things”, she will receive email alerts every time these search terms show up in new public filings.
Journalists can refine search results based on data source, form type, and geographic factors, and then save those searches as alerts….(More)”.