Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism
I don&#x27;t have many quibbles with the rest of the piece, but not sure what the &quot;shift in mainstream journalism&quot; referred to in the headline is. That journalists would break big stories using suspiciously obtained data and documents? They&#x27;ve been doing that well before Snowden and Assange became famous. What <i>would</i> be a shift is if mainstream journalists <i>did</i> go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn&#x27;t done that in any of their previous leak investigations...nor has any other mainstream organization done that with leaked information (e.g. Guardian with the Snowden documents). However, you do see a lot more news organizations putting up the data&#x2F;documents that they legally obtained for public inspection...a recent example that was on todays&#x27; frontpage is BuzzFeed News&#x27;s repos:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BuzzFeedNews" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BuzzFeedNews</a><p>However, the &quot;shift&quot; that I <i>do</i> see happening, that this article underplays, is the cooperation of dozens of news organizations to independently and securely investigate a big data&#x2F;document dump, something made possible by today&#x27;s technology and cloud hosting systems, and agreeing to an embargo date. This &quot;distributed investigation&quot; paradigm is very new in journalism, and I hope to see a lot more of it.