Our events

October 2019: Why do they live 15 years longer?

Following publication of our first story, we hold a meeting in the Leys Estates, organised by us together with the hyperlocal Leys News, to discuss the story and its implications. It was attended by NHS Trust governors, county and district councillors, community workers and local residents. It facilitated a productive discussion around who needs to do what to help tackle health inequality in the community.

May 2018: What’s going on in social care in Oxfordshire? A hack evening

The Oxford NUJ branch issues an open invitation to a hack evening to collaborate in investigating what is happening to social care in the county. Participants were sent a set of documents and data files in advance. The Bureau Local sent a data journalism expert to advise and contribute. Around 25 local journalists, researchers, technologists and activists, including many with expertise in social and health care came to discuss opportunities for collaborating on investigating and reporting important local stories. A number of suggestions came from the meeting, including an investigation into the growing disparity in life expectancy between commmunities in richer and poorer parts of Oxford. That story became our first project.

June 2017: Unequal Oxford meets Brexit: reporting the story

The Oxford NUJ branch issues an open invitation to learn about reporting on social disparities using a wide variety of publicly available data. Nicola Headlam, then a Research Fellow in Urban Transformations & Foresight Future of Cities, talked through where to go for data on the many aspects of social and economic inequality – housing, income, health, education, etc – and how to map those inequalities, how they interact and change over time, and how they correlate with voting patterns.

April 2017: A Panama Papers Moment for Oxford

The Oxford NUJ branch invites Megan Lucero to its April branch meeting to talk through the concept of The Bureau Local network, which had just been launched as a local journalism project of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Can the collaborative approach that had been used to such effect at an international level to report on stories from the leaked Panama Papers also work at a local level? Can journalists working for competing local outlets collaborate? Can freelances earn money working in collaboration with staffers?

The meeting was reported on the Oxford NUJ blog. It is was the start of the conversation that led to the founding of Oxford Investigates.