Johannesburg, Feb 3 (I-Net Bridge) - Statistician-General (SG) Pali Lehohla mooted a new system for embargoed releases that will eliminate human error in discussions with news organisations such as I-Net Bridge/BusinessLIVE in Rosebank on Friday.
At the moment Statistics SA (Stats SA) keeps new estimates of economic indicators strictly confidential prior to the date and time of release.
To enable selected government departments to prepare their public responses, the following pre-release procedure is applied and is used by other leading statistical agencies.
A strict lock-up procedure is put in place that allows media and government officials access to the data one hour before embargo compared with the eight hours allowed for the far lengthier Budget by Treasury.
There are strict controls to ensure that the information is not disseminated outside of the lock-up facility before the embargo time, but sometimes a human will press the send button seconds before the embargo time. This is normally by mistake and because of the tension of the moment.
To prevent this from happening in future the SG proposed that only newsrooms with automated embargo release systems will be allowed to receive statistical releases before they are published on the Stats SA website.
The aim is to allow newsrooms to better inform end users as Stats SA cannot use descriptive adverbs or adjectives and make pronouncements on whether a policy has succeeded or failed.
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