16 - Infrastructuring Collaborations Around the Panama and Paradise Papers

Summary

Abstract

How the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) makes digging through gigantic amounts of documents and data more efficient.

Keywords: data leaks, text extraction, radical sharing, cross-border investigation, data journalism, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is an international network of journalists launched in 1997. Journalists who are part of ICIJ's large collaborations have diverse backgrounds and profiles. There is a wide range of reporters with different skills, some with strong data and coding skills, others with the best sources and shoe-leather reporting skills. All are united by an interest in journalism, collaboration and data.

When ICIJ's director Gerard Ryle received a hard drive in Australia with corporate data related to tax havens and people around the world as a result of his three-year investigation of Australia's Firepower scandal, he couldn't at that time imagine how it would transform the story of collaborations in journalism. He arrived at ICIJ in 2011 with more than 260 gigabytes of data about offshore entities, about 2.5 million files, which ended up turning in a collaboration of more than 86 journalists from 46 countries known as Offshore Leaks (published in 2013).

After Offshore Leaks came more investigative projects with large data sets and millions of files, more ad hoc developed technologies to explore them, and more networks of journalists to report on them. For instance, we recently shared with partners a new trove of 1.2 million leaked documents from the same law firm at the heart of the Panama Papers investigation, Mossack Fonseca. This was on top of the 11.5 million Panama Papers files brought to us in 2015 by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and 13.6 million documents that were the basis of the subsequent Paradise Papers probe.

If a single journalist were to spend one minute reading each file in the Paradise Papers, it would take 26 years to go through all of them. Obviously, that's not realistic. So, we asked ourselves, how can we find a shortcut? How can we make research more efficient and less time consuming? How can technology help us find new leads in this gigantic trove of documents and support our collaborative model?