Media organisations’ co-operation vital to public accountability
The recent publication of the Paradise Papers is another strong indication of the rising importance of global collaboration for investigative journalism.
In April 2016, a consortium of news organisations published the Panama Papers — the first major leak revealing the scale of tax avoidance by companies and high-profile individuals.
It was a huge logistical operation, co-ordinated by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism, which played the same role with the Paradise Papers, revealing further offshore dealings, although from a different source and involving different locations.
The Paradise Papers was coordinated by the consortium with 95 international partners comprising more than 380 journalists working on six continents in 30 languages.
The team scoured more than 13.4-million files obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung over more than a year using online platforms to communicate and to share documents.
The Consortium for Investigative Journalism is not the only organisation involved in large-scale investigation.
The Wikileaks Iraq war logs, Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency files and many other recent investigations led by whistle-blowers have been managed as collaborations across countries and organisations. It is an emerging trend that is becoming increasingly vital as these global investigations become ever more difficult for news organisations to tackle on their own.
Such collaborations are a way of managing risk and bringing greater attention to public issues than any newsroom on its own could manage.
Trust building between different organisations is essential. Collaborative initiatives often begin at newsroom level, where staff find the benefits of collaboration easier to identify than senior executives, who may be overly focused on exclusivity or other competitive factors.
Each organisation has to take responsibility and legal advice within its own territories, but sometimes complex co-ordination on stories and embargoes has to be agreed.
Confidentiality is crucial and needs to be supported by a high level of “communication hygiene” — for example, encryption. By the time that a whistleblower has contacted a news organisation, their identity may already be compromised. Secure channels of communication such as dropboxes need to be set up and publicised.
There are individuals and foundations prepared to fund investigative journalism, but agendas need to be understood and managed in the interests of transparency.
Technology — and the ability to develop and modify software or other technology to suit the needs of a particular project — is crucial. Developers and journalists need to work in an integrated way.
A neutral partner such as a nonprofit news organisation or joint venture can play a valuable role in managing tension and potential conflicts of interest between partners. In the end, one trusted party has to make decisions and hold other partners to account. This editorial co-ordinating calls on the traditional strengths of news editing and management but with additional responsibilities and skills required to manage across organisations and geographies.
The rise in multinational collaboration reveals something about the state of the news industry. With business models disrupted by digital platforms, many organisations that were once regarded as mighty news institutions are struggling to get by or to field the scale or resources required for long and complex investigations. At the same time, there has been a rise in small start-up organisations — some commercial, some nonprofit organisations — seeking to establish and differentiate themselves in a crowded market.
These two groups are often perceived as being in conflict with one another, with the startup insurgency seeking to undermine big legacy media.
But, in truth, they often need each other in the new communication environment.
Major organisations still have an institutional weight and broad audience reach that newcomers lack.
Equally, new players often have technical skills and market nimbleness and may be able to attract a younger audience in ways that the major players struggle to achieve.
As politics, business, trade and crime all develop into transnational activities, it is essential that journalism and those concerned with public accountability respond similarly. The need for news organisations to raise their sights beyond national boundaries and to raise their skills to engage with the highly developed systems of financial technology, or internet enabled crime is now acute.
The concept of public accountability — and, in particular, the important journalism about it — cannot and should not be narrowly confined by mere geographic boundaries.
NEW PLAYERS OFTEN HAVE TECHNICAL SKILLS AND MARKET NIMBLENESS AND MAY ATTRACT A YOUNGER AUDIENCE