4 ms·

>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

>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.

danso 11y ago
> 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 https://www.documentcloud.org/featured [2] https://efdsearch.senate.gov/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/ [3] http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/reuters-gutting-web-infrastructure-reuters-next-its-big-online-retooli http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html [5] http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/ http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/
- spullara 11y ago
  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.
  - danso 11y ago
    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/ 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.
jonnathanson 11y ago
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.
- r00fus 11y ago
  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...

danso 11y ago

> 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 https://www.documentcloud.org/featured [2] https://efdsearch.senate.gov/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/ [3] http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/reuters-gutting-web-infrastructure-reuters-next-its-big-online-retooli http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2013/01/7111960/... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10teacher.html [5] http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/ http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/

spullara 11y ago
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.
- danso 11y ago
  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/ 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.

jonnathanson 11y ago

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.

r00fus 11y ago
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...