New investigative journalism emerges with Panama Papers

Revelations about the widespread use of shell companies and offshore banking by politicians and business figures has 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 for journalists, 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.

It allowed global collaboration, based on trust rather than competition, between journalists from different countries with differing objectives.

The project did pose new challenges.

Some were technical, such as how to reverse-engineer databases to make the documents useful.

Some were more traditionally journalistic, such as how to put the information into 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?

The stories emerging from the Panama Papers identified specific individuals tied to illegal activity, but it also reminded us that these practices of the rich are routine.

Follow-up stories, for example, have pointed out that the laws of some U.S. states, such as Delaware, allow the same shenanigans at home.

The next step might be to point out that such strategies of maximizing profits without regard to the social costs are, well, kind of the way capitalism works.

But whether mainstream journalism can move into a deeper analysis of the routine working of the economic system depends on the politics outside the newsroom.

The freedom journalists have to report critically about an amoral wealth-concentrating economic system depends not only on freedom from government censorship but on freedom from corporate constraints.

Media owners rarely have much interest in funding and promoting such reporting, unless social movements are demanding it.

A vibrant public conversation, not just about electoral politics and the platforms of the two major parties but also about the viability of the system itself, gives journalists more room to deepen their reporting.

With a more robust public sphere, collaborative projects such as the Panama Papers will help individual journalists and small newsrooms push harder and further than we’ve seen in recent decades.

The growing frustration of ordinary people with the everyday business practices of large corporations, combined with new models of journalistic collaboration using sophisticated techniques for analyzing data, could spark a flowering of democracy, around the world and in the United States.

This story was originally published April 13, 2016 at 5:39 PM with the headline "New investigative journalism emerges with Panama Papers."