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Answer from Archie D'Cruz, Editor, Designer, Writer:
Why did journalists wait so long to unveil the news of the Panama Papers? For a few very good reasons that I can almost guarantee will be true:
1. The sheer size of the data that needed to be analyzed. Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), the German publication that was initially given the Mossack Fonseca documents by the anonymous source, was so overwhelmed by the amount of data that it decided to conduct their investigation in cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
Just how much data are we talking about? Here's a chart published by SZ that reveals how much bigger than Wikileaks this one was. Wikileaks (1.7GB, and two dots on the chart below) was a drop in the ocean compared to the 11.5 million documents and 2.6 terabytes of data that the paper was confronted with analyzing.
Simply being named in the documents was no guarantee of impropriety, so it needed careful analysis. An investigation that lasted only a year is pretty good in these circumstances.
2. A coordinated effort. There were some 400 journalists from 100 media organizations in over 80 countries involved in the investigation. It included teams from the Guardian and the BBC in England, Le Monde in France, the Toronto Star in Canada, the Indian Express in India, the Miami Herald in the United States and La Nación in Argentina. (Here's the full list of media partners for anyone interested).
According to SZ, the team initially met in Washington, Munich, Lillehammer and London to map out the research approach. SZ had access to Nuix, the same program that international investigators work with, which allowed them to transform data into machine-readable, searchable text. This allowed journalists with knowledge of local, well-known personalities (politicians, business people, criminals, athletes, movie stars) to identify names and dig deeper.
Given the legal implications, a thorough investigation was warranted, and coordinating that effort and then compiling the results would have required a lot of time. I can promise you the publications had lawyers vetting the reports before they went to print.
3. A timed release. Finally, there was no way that SZ would have permitted one media organization to scoop the rest even if they finished with their investigations first. This was clearly a coordinated release, and the publications involved will have been sworn to secrecy until everyone had their stories prepared. There will definitely have been embargoes and non-disclosure agreements involved, and, for news organizations of this repute, breaking an agreement for a one-time scoop would be unthinkable.
Why did journalists wait so long to unveil news of the Panama Papers? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:
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