heather brooke BBC minutes

Heather Brooke born 1970 is a journalist, writer, and freedom of information activist, resident in London, England. She is best known as one of the leading figures exposing the House of Commons resistance to disclosing expenses of Members of Parliament (MPs), generating a furore that culminated in the resignation of Speaker Michael Martin. She is also a Honorary Visiting Fellow at City University London's Journalism Department.
Contents
* 1 Biography
o 1.1 American career
o 1.2 United Kingdom
* 2 Freedom of Information writing and activism
o 2.1 BBC minutes
o 2.2 MPs expenses
* 3 Aftermath
* 4 Bibliography
* 5 References
* 6 External links
Biography
Brooke was born in Pennsylvania in the USA to English-immigrant parents from Liverpool, and has dual citizenship in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. She grew up in the state of Washington, where her mother worked for Boeing, and graduated from Federal Way High School, after having also spent some time being educated in the UK.
American career
Brooke graduated from the University of Washington school of communications in 1993, where she also got her start in journalism at The Daily, the student newspaper. Along with covering news stories she was also a sex columnist for the paper, writing with what she called a "feminist" slant. An internship with The Spokesman-Review, working in Olympia to cover the state legislature, gave Brooke an early exposure to using public records requests to investigate the expenses of politicians, although she found little beyond taking advantage of frequent flyer miles.
After graduation, Brooke worked a year at the Spokesman-Review, but it lacked the funds to keep her on longer. She then became a crime reporter for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, where she reported on murder cases and uncovered flaws in South Carolina’s forensic crime lab.
United Kingdom
Describing herself as "burnt out" from covering over 300 murders, Brooke took a break from journalism. With her mother having died in a car accident in 1996, and her father having moved back to England, she no longer had family in America and decided to relocate to the United Kingdom. She studied English literature at the University of Warwick, then moved to east London and worked for the BBC as an assistant publicist in International Television.
With the BBC, Brooke moved from publicist to copywriter for BBC News, then to BBC Magazines as a sub-editor for children's magazines.She also became a neighborhood activist, but from that experience described public officials as having a surprisingly hostile attitude compared to local governments in the US.
Freedom of Information writing and activism
With the enactment of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Brooke began work on a book explaining how to use the law, which was not scheduled to come into effect for another five years. Originally titled Your Right to Know: How to Use the Freedom of Information Act and Other Access Laws, the book was reissued in October 2004 as Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to Freedom of Information, with a foreword by Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian newspaper. In October 2006 it was revised and published in paperback and hardcover editions that included a foreword by satirist Ian Hislop.
BBC minutes
In early 2007, Brooke won a landmark legal case that led the BBC to disclose the minutes of its Board of Governors' meeting of 28 January 2004. At that meeting, the Governors had decided to dismiss director general Greg Dyke and issue an apology to the British Government in response to the Hutton Inquiry.
Brooke, along with journalists from the Guardian newspaper, had requested the minutes shortly after the Freedom of Information Act had come into force, but the BBC resisted disclosure for nearly two years. In December 2006, the case came before the Information Tribunal, which the following month ruled that the BBC should disclose the minutes.

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