Name: 【TED】Gerard Ryle: How the Panama Papers journalists broke the biggest leak in history (How the Panama Papers journalists broke the biggest leak in history | Gerard Ryle)
Uploaded: 2016-10-25T19:33:59.000Z
Duration: 13 min 9 s
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The second conditional

What do you do if you had to figure out the information

that a group of journalists had to face late last year.

An anonymous person calling himself John Doe

had somehow managed to copy nearly 40 years of records

of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

This is one of many firms around the world

that specialize in setting up accounts in offshore tax havens

for rich and powerful people who like to keep secrets.

John Doe had managed to copy every spreadsheet from this firm,

of inside information into the tax haven system

But it also presented a gigantic challenge to investigative journalism.

containing the secrets of people from more than 200 different countries.

Where do you start with such a vast resource?

that can trail off into every corner of the globe,

and that can affect almost any person in any language,

sometimes in ways they don't even know yet.

John Doe had given the information to two journalists

at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

He said he was motivated by -- and I quote --

"The scale of the injustice that the documents would reveal."

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

We decided to do something that was the very opposite

of everything we'd been taught to do as journalists:

By nature, investigative reporters are lone wolves.

because we know that the moment we tell them what we have,

But there's no doubt that we live in a shrinking world,

and that the media has largely been slow to wake up to this.

The issues we report on are more and more transnational.

Giant corporations operate on a global level.

Environmental and health crises are global.

So, too, are financial flows and financial crises.

So it seems staggering that journalism has been so late

And it also seems staggering that journalism has been so slow

to wake up to the possibilities that technology brings,

The reason journalists are scared of technology is this:

the profession's largest institutions are going through tough times

because of the changing way that people are consuming news.

The advertising business models that have sustained reporting are broken.

And this has plunged journalism into crisis,

forcing those institutions to reexamine how they function.

by what would eventually become known as the Panama Papers

was to make the documents searchable and readable.

two million PDFs that needed to be scanned and indexed,

and millions more files and other kinds of documents.

They all needed to be housed in a safe and secure location

We next invited reporters to have a look at the documents.

In all, reporters from more than 100 media organizations

"Native eyes on native names," we called it, the idea being,

who best to tell you who was important to Nigeria

There were only two rules for everyone who was invited:

we all agreed to share everything that we found with everybody else,

and we all agreed to publish together on the same day.

We chose our media partners based on trust

that had been built up through previous smaller collaborations

and also from leads that jumped out from the documents.

my small nonprofit organization of less than 20 people

was joined by more than 350 other reporters from 25 language groups.

had now spawned the biggest journalism collaboration in history:

376 sets of native eyes doing what journalists normally never do,

【TED】Gerard Ryle: How the Panama Papers journalists broke the biggest leak in history (How the Panama Papers journalists broke the biggest leak in history | Gerard Ryle)