First lessons from #PanamaPapers: sharing will help & whistle at journos

Everybody knows the value of dozens of journos that worked hard in analyzing data of #PanamaPapers, but a first lesson we would take out from this work: share your data and don’t be jealous, it will help you for doing better.

It is a huge change of mind for journalists, despite some people believe in this way of job from the dawn of this new journalistic era. The first time I heard, during the event DataHarvest+ in Brussels, it was from Mar Cabra, one of the journo-managers of ICIJ.org that has released #PanamaPapers. It is also happened in this case and you can go behind the story just reading this article from Sueddeutsche Zeitung: they’ve got data one year ago and they’ve shared it with the great team from Internation Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world (…) In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak. Ultimately, SZ acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with. (…) The Zeitung decided to analyze the data in cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). ICIJ had already coordinated the research for past projects that SZ was also involved in, among them Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks.

It means that the German newspaper has had by first such a huge leak and it has chosen to share data with others colleagues and teams (losing such an exclusive or the ownership). It is the same way we’ve walked with data of migrants died: we’ve shared the first dataset with Journalism++ to build a EU project titled MigrantsFiles. I must say thank to Mar for having taught me this lesson a few years ago.

Whistleblowers trust journalist?

Despite the past leaks was often released by people and team far from newsrooms (Wikileaks), this case seems to show that is there a way for whistleblowers to work with newspapers. It seems an interesting side, cause would mean that journalists are catching up in terms of accountability and reputation.

A sensible keypoint: share data with readers?

As we’ve seen for other leaks released from ICIJorg (LuxLeaks, SwissLeaks), they have not shared the full package of data with readers. I’ve already asked ICIJ one year ago why they did not released SwissLeaks data, and they told me that there were reasons of privacy. While I’m agree with this purpose, it remains a pending question: should we share this kind of data all at all? Looking forward to find out the answer.

Anyway, people want data :)