A Change in Investigative Reporting May Have Just Happened

Revelations about the widespread use of shell companies and offshore banking by politicians and business figures have challenged the traditional model of investigative reporting. It could be the new way investigative reporting is done. The "Panama Papers" - 11.5 million files, 2.6 terabytes of digital information in what one newspaper called "history's biggest data leak" - came from a Panamanian law firm that specializes in setting up offshore companies. An anonymous source leaked them to a German newspaper, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which proceeded to share them with a network of other media outlets. This is new territory who usually pursue exclusives, the vaunted "scoop." Instead, this was a partnership model, coordinated by a nonprofit group that had been launched by another nonprofit group called the Center for Public Integrity, which allowed global collaboration. It was all based on trust rather than competition among journalists from different countries with differing objectives. The project did pose new challenges. Some technical, such as how to reverse-engineer databases to make the documents useful, and some more traditionally journalistic, such as how to put the information in context. But potentially more important than changes in professional reporting methods is the question of the appropriate target for investigative reporters in mainstream news media. Should the focus be on violations of norms and laws within the existing system - the sphere to which conventional reporters have typically limited themselves - or the nature of the system itself?