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They're not reporting on a shift, they're announcing a shift. Special interests, more than ever, are now going to manufacture the news and release what news they want to in order to pull the strings behind the curtains. Remember that the Panama Papers weren't journalistic in any sense. US corps make the most use of these tax haven schemes in Panama, but hardly anyone in the US was implicated; Nationalists and Putin were primarily implicated.

This isn't about democratization of data and journalism, and it's not about "everyone has a press"

It's about large monied institutions using strong news brands to provide news not for enlightening people, but for their consumption so that they can continue feeding narratives that people already believe. It's not news, it's programming.

The absence of americans is because the US does its tax fraud in Delaware, not as some sort of smear action by a rouge CIA cell.

http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/local/2016/04/09/pa...

And Ireland. And Caymans. And Switzerland (esp Zug). And quite a few others to dodge federal taxes. The Delaware and Nevada corps are to maximize local control while dodging state taxes.

You can't make a double irish without the Netherlands!

Delaware provides a mostly sane legal environment for resolving disputes, I've in fact never gotten the impression that dodging state taxes is that big a motivation to register there (as opposed to another state with merely better tax rates), although I could well be wrong. And some states have taxes that are almost a duty to dodge, like Washington State's on gross revenue, even if you're not profitable, designed to capture money from big firms like Boeing in bad as well as good years.

That's interesting. I'll have to look into the dispute aspect of things as nobody has mentioned that before.

Here's a start without telling you anything that's really special about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Court_of_Chancery See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_L... for some meat on the subject.

In general, providing sane corporate governance is Deleware's unique selling proposition, and it's a big business for a very small state. I once worked for a company that in the early '90s sold that part of its government a monster Kodak ImageLink scanner (600 lb, peak scanning rate 18 inches per second at 200dpi, realistic rate 3,000 pages per hour), and the people involved in that sale said they really needed it.

>What would be a shift is if mainstream journalists did go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn't done that

This obsession for shielding the public from direct access to their source material. The so called mass/mainstream media never seems to share links when reporting about new laws being passed or new studies being published.

> This obsession for shielding the public from direct access to their source material.

I don't think reporters and news orgs go out of their way to "shield" people from source material when it is publicly available and relatively easy to link to.

For example, there's DocumentCloud [1] (from which Backbone and Underscore came out of) is a news project that started out as a project collaboration between New York Times and ProPublica...think of it as Scribd, except free for news orgs, and geared towards open access and making source documents more visible.

That said, there are plenty of times when news orgs should be linking but don't...but a lot of that is out of carelessness, CMS limitations, and/or incompetence -- from various angles. For example, some government websites do not have direct URLs (that don't require some kind of cookie to be set)...such as the individual documents in this U.S. Senate Financial Disclosures database [2]. Ideally, a journalist could figure a way around it, or hand assemble the scanned pages (which are stored as GIFs)...but that's a lot of production work to ask from people who typically have almost zero web production skills beyond knowing how to use a browser.

Then there's the classic case of Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world, having a CMS that wasn't designed to incorporate hyperlinks (among other HTML features I imagine) [3]

A lot of tech savvy news orgs these days will upload raw data dumps to their S3 servers. And some even create news applications around that data to make it more accessible. One controversial example that comes to mind is when the LA Times fought to get teacher ratings data and then built an online database, which included their value-added interpretation. Teacher ratings are extremely controversial, nevermind any proposition to do value-adding, and the LA Times critics went so far as to blame a teacher's suicide on their database [4]

Those teacher scores were public records. While not everyone agrees with how the LAT chose to augment them [5], they did show the raw data for each teacher.

If the LAT faced such pushback from the government in just getting the records, and then such outcry from the teachers unions when they published those records, for public records...then I imagine the pushback against a news org that publishes a data dump of illegally obtained private data is going to be quite harsh.

In the Panama Papers scenario, it seems that most of the records deal with private persons, many of whom aren't interesting to the public and who are too numerous for the journalists to do individual checkups on. And what they're doing is not illegal. So the ICIJ has made the right moral call, IMO, in not just throwing everything out there.

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/featured

[2] https://efdsearch.senate.gov/

[3] http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html

[5] http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/

Or they could just be acting as gatekeepers to the information so they can make money / awards as their stories are published. Could be either reason.

Doubtful. Journalists are not particularly savvy at monetizing their work beyond the normal publication channels. The only news org that I can think of that has organized anything remotely like that is ProPublica and its Data Store:

https://projects.propublica.org/data-store/

It publishes for free the public data that it has collated. For datasets in which they've put significant amount of work wrangling and vetting it, they charge fees. I don't know how much money they've recouped from that but them being a non-profit, if it were enough to change the game, we'd probably hear about it at some point.

It's not about shielding the public from access to their sources. It's about shielding their sources from the public (or from any interest groups who might wish to retaliate against the sources should they be named individuals).

Traditionally speaking, confidential sources were most often people, and not always documents. Or they were people passing along documents. These people needed protection from those whose interests their leaks would disrupt. And thus, a strict code of confidentiality is often considered to be part of traditional journalistic ethics.

I'm not saying this is always upheld, everywhere. I'm not saying certain unscrupulous publishers won't hide behind or twist this code to their personal benefit. But the code exists, at least ostensibly, for a good reason.

Furthermore, there's the issue that some of the data could represent a compromise of a person or group's identity and/or financials.

Recklessly releasing data (according the mainstream media) could put (very important) people at risk...

> However, the "shift" that I do see happening, that this article underplays, is the cooperation of dozens of news organizations to independently and securely investigate a big data/document dump, something made possible by today's technology and cloud hosting systems, and agreeing to an embargo date. This "distributed investigation" paradigm is very new in journalism, and I hope to see a lot more of it.

I find it horrifying that all major journalistic outlets are colluding about what they will and won't report, and when. It shouldn't even be possible that they're all that chummy and editorially identical. Realistically, they're all just small parts of the same hedge funds, but it still bothers me.

The collusion part worries me as well. It's not that bad in this case, because the story clearly has value. But journalists in general should avoid colluding with each other at all costs, because it just deepens the divide betwen the media and the public and opens things up to ideological hijacking of the press.

Unfortunately, we've already seen this sort of thing happening.

I think the shift is about scale. It's one thing to have a small set of documents. It's something else to have a very large set: the interlocking and mutually reinforcing nature of large disclosures gives another degree of legitimacy.

It also has a "dragnet" aspect to it, unlike a small targeted leak.