<story><title>Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/business/media/panama-papers-leak-signals-a-shift-in-mainstream-journalism.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danso</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t have many quibbles with the rest of the piece, but not sure what the &amp;quot;shift in mainstream journalism&amp;quot; referred to in the headline is. That journalists would break big stories using suspiciously obtained data and documents? They&amp;#x27;ve been doing that well before Snowden and Assange became famous. What &lt;i&gt;would&lt;/i&gt; be a shift is if mainstream journalists &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; go Wikileaks-style and just dump everything online after they had reported on it...but ICIJ hasn&amp;#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&amp;#x2F;documents that they legally obtained for public inspection...a recent example that was on todays&amp;#x27; frontpage is BuzzFeed News&amp;#x27;s repos:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;BuzzFeedNews&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;BuzzFeedNews&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, the &amp;quot;shift&amp;quot; that I &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; see happening, that this article underplays, is the cooperation of dozens of news organizations to independently and securely investigate a big data&amp;#x2F;document dump, something made possible by today&amp;#x27;s technology and cloud hosting systems, and agreeing to an embargo date. This &amp;quot;distributed investigation&amp;quot; paradigm is very new in journalism, and I hope to see a lot more of it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/business/media/panama-papers-leak-signals-a-shift-in-mainstream-journalism.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kobayashi</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m unconvinced by the main argument of the article - that the Panama Papers signal a shift (perhaps paradigmatic?) in mainstream journalism.&lt;p&gt;Yes, the PP leaks are different than Wikileaks, and yes, the ICIJ reporting&amp;#x2F;investigation is different than most other cases of investigative journalism, but one outlier doesn&amp;#x27;t a shift make.&lt;p&gt;Simultaneously, the article does bring up some thought-provoking points, like the need by journalists to consider how they may be strategically used by leakers of data for their own ends.  But that&amp;#x27;s not really a new consideration for journalists, either.&lt;p&gt;Granted, the article&amp;#x27;s author is unlikely to have titled the piece, so perhaps the author would assert that the article wasn&amp;#x27;t trying to make the argument defined by the title.  Yet, all in all, I found the article to be sometimes interesting but ultimately unpersuasive.</text></comment>