The ONS is committed to finding innovative ways of making data, statistics, and analysis more accessible, engaging, and easy to understand in line with the Better Statistics, Better Decisions (PDF, 1.40MB) strategy.
To meet those goals, we are actively seeking to develop partnerships with news media organisations to collaborate editorially on analysis and digital products.
Through such partnerships we aim to achieve:
greater reach and impact for our analysis and data to existing, new or under-served audiences via third-party platforms (online, print and broadcast)
improved understanding of statistics and their value to society, including their use to inform topical debate and provide deeper understanding of important issues in society
We aim to work with news media organisations who:
have a demonstrable track record of informing the public about important issues
have a public commitment to accuracy and impartiality
are members of an independent regulator, or have a transparent user complaints process in place
have a demonstrable commitment of using statistics accurately, and understanding their strengths and limitations
Collaborations will take the form of sharing publicly available official statistics with one or more news media organisations. Our goal is to work together on analysis and insight to develop stories and products that help users make better decisions by understanding their world more fully.
The output of any collaboration will be jointly published simultaneously on the news media organisation’s platforms, and on ONS platforms (which fall under the Open Government Licence). Appropriate attribution should be given to the collaboration, and the source of data.
Collaborations can include work with publishers whose content is behind a paywall, but only on the condition that the work is also published on the ONS website.
Collaboration on analysis does not commit the ONS or the news organisation to a publication. Editorial independence for both the ONS and the partner media organisation remains unaffected. Should a publication include any errors, both parties will commit to resolving this in published material as soon as possible. Both organisations should make an effort to share audience impact analytics with each other for any resulting products.
We aim to work across the breadth of national, regional and local news media organisations in the UK, as well as with international news media organisations which have significant reach into UK audiences.
A list of collaborations will be published on this page. Any news media organisations interested in an editorial collaboration can contact digitalcontent@ons.gov.uk. The ONS digital content team will also contact media organisations to discuss potential collaborations.