The Pulitzer Center’s Marina Walker Guevara sees collaboration as one of the most significant paradigm changes in journalism of the past 50 years. In a keynote speech at the Collaborative Journalism Summit, she said that by working together, reporters can investigate stories that “transcend us, transcend our competitive instincts, our newsrooms’ politics, and our own egos.”
Frustrated by journalism that gave voice to those in power rather than the voiceless, Yasuomi Sawa was inspired to become an investigative journalist. He shares with Scilla Alecci about the state of journalism in Japan, including the limitations to its existing freedom of information laws and how preventing institutional or individual embarrassment can hinder a relentless free press and uncomfortable public debates.
Investigative journalism in this wired world is vastly different from what it used to be. Cobrapost editor Aniruddha Bahal writes about how journalism has changed over time, from postcard complaints to internet trolling, meeting sources in parking lots and using apps and being highly competitive versus collaborative.
In late May, journalists from CENOZO in West Africa — with support from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — published #WestAfricaLeaks, the largest collaboration of investigative journalists in the region, exposing tactics used by regional tycoons, multinational companies and politicians to take their money offshore and out of reach. Here’s how they did it.
Nonprofits have been touted as a possible alternative to the collapsing business models of for-profit news. But a study released last week by the Pew Research Center points to the fragility of that model and also to the need for a more concerted effort to shore it up. The study identified 172 nonprofit news outlets throughout the U.S. – two-thirds of these were launched only since the 2008 financial crisis. While the recession has accelerated the closure of newspapers and the downsizing of news staffs throughout the country, it has given rise to a boom in nonprofit news.
It’s certainly one of the single biggest leaks of documents in the history of investigative reporting. Over the last 15 months, 86 journalists in 46 countries have been poring over a cache of 2.5 million documents on offshore holdings obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ coordinated the investigation from DC, using a secure messaging system to communicate with a worldwide team of journalists and free-text retrieval software and programmers on three continents to mine the information from the documents.
