Editor’s note: Media Insider is the podcast series by The Fix looking into the changing world of media. You can find it on all of your favorite platforms, including Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.

October 2021 was noted by one of the biggest journalistic collaborations to date. The release of the materials of Pandora Papers was the result of the joint effort of more than 600 journalists from 150 media outlets around the world, working through 12 million documents.

Collaborative investigative journalism is becoming more popular in the modern media landscape, despite being not exactly natural in a competitive journalistic environment.

In the new episode of Media Insider, we are talking to Fergus Shiel, Managing editor of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that was coordinating Pandora Papers investigation, and Brigitte Alfter, Director for Arena for Journalism in Europe. We are discussing the behind-the-scenes of journalistic collaborations, the challenges that come with that and how we can maximize the effects of investigative journalistic collaborations.

Here are a couple of thoughts from the episode:

Brigitte Alfter

”You can be happy about that [story] as a journalist and sad as a citizen.”

“Collaborative journalism as such is maybe a decade old as a respected mindset and method. So we are still experimenting with the development on how to use the knowledge in a collective team and how to use that knowledge to bring the topic to the public agenda.”

Fergus Shiel

“Reporters in different fields and with different expertise are now trying to embrace the collaborative model in the same way as forbidden stories.”

“At the heart of it, all [crime] is money. But the stories were not dull tales of opaque offshore accounts. Journalists can make everything interesting if they put their mind to it.”

This episode is hosted by Jakub Parusinski, the editor at The Fix.

Tune in to learn more insider information from the world of media.

https://anchor.fm/media-insider/episodes/More-than-Pandora-Papers–How-to-create-collaborative-investigative-journalism-that-stands-out-e1afmeh

Brigitte Alfter

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More than Pandora Papers. The behind-the-scenes of investigative journalism collaborations