From a media outlet that pays citizens to report from remote areas of Kenya to a portal that uses humor as its main strategy to inform Russians, journalism faces different challenges in different cultural and social contexts. Creativity, however, seems to be a common skill that media entrepreneurs shared in addressing their problems at the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) on Saturday, April 16.
Since premiering in the United States in late 2015, the movie Spotlight has earned US$88 million in revenue, split almost evenly between U.S. ($45 million) and international sales ($43 million). Along the way, the movie has earned two Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Screenplay) and given journalists around the world a needed boost. But winning Academy Awards didn’t lift Spotlight too high. The movie is the second lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in the last 38 years.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for April 2-11: Behind the Panama Papers Investigation (@ICIJorg, @SZ); Best #ddj on taxes (@OKFN); Spies in the Sky (@BuzzFeed); EU Data Journalism Manifesto (@medium); World scientific collaboration (@storybench); & more.
The ongoing and spectacular investigation “Panama Papers” represents the culmination of a significant shift in the way journalism is now practiced. The project also represents 40 years of work done by groups of investigative reporters to bring the profession into the 21st Century. “The Panama Papers showcases not so much technological power but the power of the global investigative reporting movement,” says Sheila Coronel of the Columbia Journalism School.
In the past year, a group of Arab journalists has been working secretly in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen as part of a global network of investigative reporters mining the so called “Panama Papers.” They found that some Arab strongmen and their business partners are linked to offshore companies and bank accounts. What’s astonishing about this story is not that Arab dictators are going offshore to hide their wealth and evade sanctions. It’s that a community of Arab journalists is continuing to do investigative reporting in a region where there is increasingly little tolerance for accountability of any kind.
This June, the membership of the Global Investigative Journalism Network will vote to elect members of the GIJN Board of Directors. The board consists of 15 members. Of these, seven seats are now up for election — all for a period of two years.
“Hello,” wrote the anonymous source to a German newspaper, “this is John Doe. Interested in data?” Thus began what would soon become an international financial investigation into what are being called the Panama Papers—an investigation so massive that even whistleblower Edward Snowden, on Twitter, called it the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism.”
We do agree with Ramon Fonseca about one thing: that “Each person has a right to privacy, whether they are a king or a beggar.” But that’s where our commonality with co-founder of disgraced Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca ends. This scandal isn’t about privacy. If anything, it’s about the need for transparency about how the powerful wield their power.
