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The future of investigative journalism is collaborative - NewsDay Zimbabwe

Investigative journalism plays an important role in uncovering corruption, human rights abuses and other forms of wrong-doing by people in power. Carolyne M. Lunga It has a history of bringing about reforms, policy change and resulting in arrests of corrupt politicians and business people and the downfall of corrupt governments. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, known as Covid-19, has shown that there is more power and impact in newsrooms and journalists collaborating than in working individually. There is empirical evidence of research done in Europe, America and Australia which shows that there are more benefits in collaborating which is what this article seeks to discuss. The Panama Papers (2017), Paradise Papers (2017), West African Leaks (2017), Gupta Leaks (2017) are such examples among others. As the world continues to battle the outbreak of Covid-19, a lot of changes have negatively impacted the role of journalism in informing the public and uncovering corruption. Journalists have been forced to work remotely, which has brought about difficulties in accessing information and reporting issues in the public interest. Some newsrooms and fact checking networks have started collaborating in order to ensure that citizens are kept up to date on issues that matter to them. By collaborating, diverse stories are told better and supported with data. A number of newsrooms in Oregon in the United States of America (USA) including Bend Bulletin, Statesman Journal among others are collaborating. Because of its adversarial nature, investigative journalism is under threat and as the commercial model of journalism has broken down and more and more journalists are being retrenched and made redundant. In addition, governments are enacting legislation which make it difficult for journalists to access information and carry out their work and artificial intelligence or propaganda bots are being used to discredit journalism. The Panama Papers investigation has been described by scholars as the largest global collaborative investigative journalism project in the history of investigative journalism involving more than 80 countries and almost 400 journalists. It also had the biggest leak amounting to 2.6TB of data from a Panamanian Law firm called Mossack Fonseca, leaked by an anonymous source. The data involved emails, passports, and anonymous shell companies’ papers. Journalists exploited the affordances of technology in order to communicate with each other and share leads and tips via encrypted channels. This enabled journalists involved to avoid leakage of information, in a context in which keeping secrets has become very difficult due to traces/metadata left by communicating electronically via email or phone. By using encrypted communication channels, journalists are able to avoid mass and targeted surveillance which threaten their privacy and safety in this era with great risks and fear of reprisal in response to their revelations. The rise of non-profit investigative journalism organisations such as the International

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