Hi!

It’s Jan here. Next week marks 10 years since the Panama Papers. I’ve been thinking about how that project shaped my view on my own job - and how it changed the way investigations are done.

This is a personal look back, so it’s biased (and Eurocentric) by design. If you disagree, have comments or questions, we’re always curious to hear: readwritenewsletter@proton.me

Ten Years of Nerds in the Newsroom

In April 2016 hundreds of journalists around the world published stories based on leaked data from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The leak would become known as the Panama Papers: more than 11.5 million documents detailing offshore companies, shell structures, and the people behind them.

The reporting was coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and involved journalists from more than a hundred media organizations across dozens of countries. At the time it was the largest collaborative journalistic investigation ever pulled off. One of these journalists was me.

If you read the coverage back then, the scale of the leak was the headline. Eleven million documents. Decades of financial records. Presidents, billionaires, oligarchs, athletes. The Panama Papers are remembered for the people they exposed. Inside newsrooms, they revealed something else: investigative journalism had become a technical discipline.

Problem solving

When I say "nerds in the newsroom", I mean the people who could write a script to scrape a government registry, build a database from messy documents, or have a computer search millions of files overnight (in 2016, that was a huge deal). Some called themselves data journalists, others developers, or reporters who happened to code. A decade ago most of them sat somewhere off to the side of investigative teams. The Panama Papers pushed them right into the middle, both within the actual project but also in terms of newsroom dynamics.

Before journalists could write stories about offshore finance, someone had to build a way to search the leak. Someone had to process scanned documents, emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Someone had to connect the names of companies, directors, intermediaries, and addresses scattered across millions of files.

My colleague on the project, former ICIJ data editor Mar Cabra, put it simply: "[Working with developers] gives you super powers and allows you to journalistically search for questions you couldn’t have before."

Back then, I was far from a person with super powers. But I knew enough about computers to make a difference for the team I was working on. In the very early days, before the ICIJ infrastructure was in place, we exchanged data manually with Bastian and Frederik at Süddeutsche Zeitung, the journalists who received the leak, via encrypted thumb drives. Even with my limited skills at the time, being the person who could handle that exchange gave me a role I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

A shift in how investigations work

For a long time investigative journalism had been shaped by a particular mythology: the lone wolf type reporter following leads through documents, sources, and late-night calls. The parking garage where Deep Throat, the Watergate source, and reporter Bob Woodward met, has become a landmark. The work was personal and often opaque. Readers saw the result, not the process.

Large digital leaks started to change that. Instead of a limited set of documents, journalists were confronted with datasets too large to read in any traditional way. The problem shifted from access to analysis. Once that happened, investigations began to resemble technical projects as much as reporting projects. Extracting text, building indexes, mapping relationships, searching across millions of files: These were not side tasks, they were essential.

This also changed how investigations were organized. The Panama Papers brought together hundreds of journalists working across borders, sharing data and tools, coordinating publication. What had been exceptional became a model. Researchers later described this as the Networked or Global Fourth Estate.

Inside newsrooms, the consequences were more immediate. Before projects like this, technical people were usually seen as support. Developers built interactives. Data journalists helped reporters with spreadsheets. Their work mattered, but it was rarely seen as the core of an investigation.

After projects like this, that distinction was harder to maintain. The reporting depended on people who could make sense of the data. The nerd in the newsroom stopped being optional.

Becoming the nerd

For me personally, that shift was both empowering and confusing. It gave me a niche, something that made me useful in a competitive environment where people came and went quickly. At the same time, it blurred the boundaries of what my job actually was.

A colleague’s PGP key not working? My problem.

An external hard drive making strange noises and not connecting? My problem.

A spreadsheet falling apart, because a vlookup was broken? Also my problem.

None of that was what I had imagined doing as an investigative reporter. But it came with something else: recognition. Being able to handle data, to move it, search it, fix it - that became part of the reporting process, whether anyone had fully defined it that way or not.

The democratization effect

The effects went beyond a single project. Large investigations increasingly adopted the same model: distributed teams, shared datasets, common tooling. Organizations professionalized. Tools matured. Investigative journalism started to rely on infrastructure in a way it hadn’t before.

This also changed what counted as investigative work. I’m not saying there would be no OSINT wave without these projects, but they helped create the conditions for it. Groups like Bellingcat showed how public data - satellite images, social media, shipping records - could be combined to reconstruct events. The underlying idea is similar: if you know how to work with data, you can build evidence.

At the same time, the work itself became more visible. Traditional investigations often required trust. Readers had to believe the reporting because they couldn’t see how it was done. Data-driven projects made parts of the process more transparent. Datasets were often published, at least in redacted form (You can search parts of the Panama Papers and other ICIJ releases here).

Hakan here: I know, this is Jan's newsletter, but I nearly screamed "yes!" while proofreading. The reader not requiring to trust the journalist because there is data to back up the reporting rather than anonymous sourcing as the sole element is precisely what drove me to cybersecurity reporting in the first place.

Code was open-sourced, methods were explained. Journalists shared tools across newsrooms so others could check their work. All of a sudden, I had to know how Github works. That didn’t make investigative journalism fully accessible. Many datasets remain private, or shared amongst an small select group of people. Technical skills are still unevenly distributed. The deepest work still requires time, context, and persistence.

But the barrier moved. Someone with a laptop and some data skills can now do forms of investigative work that used to require a newsroom. The craft became a bit less mysterious.

Ten years later

Ten years after the Panama Papers, the presence of technical specialists in investigative teams no longer feels unusual. These roles exist in budgets. There are hiring pipelines. In some places, even career paths. What still feels unresolved is how well newsrooms understand what changed.

Many organizations recognized that they needed technical skills. Fewer worked out how investigations are actually structured. The work still often depends on individuals rather than systems, or sits awkwardly between roles that were never designed for it.

But even without that clarity, something fundamental has shifted. Ten years ago, the person who could move data securely, search documents, or write a quick script was often treated as adjacent to the reporting. The Panama Papers helped make that position legit.

The nerds are still in the newsroom. And people have stopped asking why.