Collaborative-investigative journalism : From the “lonely wolf” to the “power of the pack”

Kurzfassung/Abstract

In the past decade, journalists around the world have joined forces in networks to investigate social grievances across media companies. These projects are linked by journalism’s democratic political claim to critique and control, which technological progress has accelerated. Such collaborations, as they became known, for example, through the Panama Papers, turned the classic journalistic task of investigation into an innovative field. Investigative reports are no longer limited to individual countries or societies but are of importance across countries. This cultural change was clearly manifested in the JoIn-DemoS project: in all five participating countries, “collaborative-investigative journalism” was identified as one of the 20 most important innovations in journalism. Investigative journalism across media houses, national and international, has an impact both at the level of the product – i.e., the journalistic offering – and at the organizational level.