How a Leak Becomes a Story
The most useful thing to understand about investigative reporting is how slow it is, and why the slowness is the product rather than a cost of it.
An anonymous source sent documents to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The material came from a Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, and it was enormous: 11.5 million files, 2.6 terabytes, spanning nearly forty years—emails, spreadsheets, passports, corporate records. Nothing was published for roughly a year.
What Happened in That Year
The newspaper gave the story away. SĂĽddeutsche Zeitung brought in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which brought in more than 100 other media organisations, working in 25 languages across nearly 80 countries. ICIJ’s data unit indexed and organised the archive so that reporters could search it. Then reporters at more than a hundred newsrooms spent months reading, in every country the documents touched at once.
They were not reading for surprises. They were converting documents into claims that could survive being contested—matching names in a leaked file against public company registers, land records, court filings and electoral declarations, so that the story did not rest on the leak alone. A document proves that a document exists. It takes outside corroboration to prove what the document means.
Then everybody published on the same day, 3 April 2016. Simultaneous publication is a defensive structure: it denies every subject the chance to injunct one outlet, and it denies every government the chance to make an example of one reporter. The final result named more than 214,000 offshore entities connected to people in more than 200 countries and territories.
What a Reader Should Take from It
Speed is not a virtue in this kind of work. When a giant story appears within hours of a document surfacing, the gap that a year of checking would have filled is still there; somebody has just decided to publish over it.
A leak is a beginning, not a verdict. ICIJ says so about its own material: the Offshore Leaks Database, which publishes the structured records from five separate investigations, states plainly that “many of the activities carried out through offshore entities are perfectly legal”. The database is evidence that a structure existed and who was attached to it. Turning that into a finding about a person requires everything that comes after.
Collaboration is a verification method, not a press release. A hundred newsrooms, each checking the part of the archive that lands in its own country against its own public records, catches errors that no single desk could. It is also why the credit lines on these stories are so long, and why we reproduce them.
Why We Are Careful About This
This desk exists in the space after publication—who was charged, who was not, what money came back. That is a beat with a specific temptation attached: the documents are public, most of the names in them were never charged with anything, and it would be easy to write as though the archive itself were the accusation.
It is not, and the organisation that published it says it is not. So our rule is that a person’s status is verified against current reporting with a source we can link, every time, and a person who has not been convicted is never written about as though they had been. That constraint costs us stories. It is also the only version of this beat worth running: the reason to follow accountability journalism is that it holds to a standard, and a desk that abandons the standard to move faster has become the thing it is covering.