do you sense that? yeah, for sure. and i think the challenge of stories that confirm i what people already knewl is that they can sometimes shrug because they re not surprised. - that said, i think there sl a real series of icij leaks, of which is the latest - and biggest, they have caused a bunch of legal action, at least in the states. i i mean, the us, the congress, in pretty large part due - to the fincen files, made it much harder to operate through anonymous shell companies. i that is a real- meaningful advance. and actually the relationship between tonnes of people i reading and getting excited about story and legislative i or law enforcement action, i it s not always totally linear, right? like sometimes you have one reader, but it s the right- reader, it s the chairwoman of the committee, so. - margot, from your perspective, do you think this will lead to real change? well, you are already seeing in the us that lawmakers are pushing an anti corruption bill called the enabler
times, i mean, that s the pandora papers, but you ve had your own expose of sorts this week, and for listeners who don t know, tell us what is ozy media and how did you come to be writing about it? you know, i think i shouldl premise this by saying that as high stakes and global. and really kind of important as the pandora papers were, this is like the lowest stakes| story in the history of media. and i actually think that i that is maybe part of why people liked it so much- and it is sort of a challenge. i worked on the previous icij, the fincen files, it is hard i to get people to engage with those stories, - whereas the story i m - about to tell people really love to engage with, which was about a media company in california that presented itself on the inside - and as the leading millennial- media company, even though no one has ever heard of it, essentially. l it persuaded many of- the richest people in the world and various media investors to give them their money, i
and i think you ve seen, from the guardian s fantastic coverage of uk political donations, part of the process is you run all political donors over a certain size and then you see what the results are. and then comes the huge amount of reporting that goes into digging through, ok, is this a false positive, is this an interesting record? what can we do by going outside the files and reporting elsewhere? as i think that they have done fantastically with one report for example. and, yeah, isuppose you start with the hypothesis of something that would be an important story to tell, and then you go and quiz the data with what would, you know, if this were true, we would find something, right? yeah, so that s the kind of process. i mean, from a personal point of view, what i m really
0k. the reason we asked about. i asked what this whole notion of what this whole notion of the public is interested in is because that is the kind of investigative journalism that i can argue all four of you do. i mean, alexandra from the economist, frances haugen, the former facebook employee appeared before the us senate this week accusing facebook of harming democracy and putting profits before public good. now obviously they deny this and have disputed much of what she said, and this all seems like a juicy story. but i want to read you a tweet from veteran silicon valley observer benedict evans. he says, i really wonder how much any facebook story now changes anyone s minds. this group of people is now quite convinced that facebook is evil. and see any news story as proof. and the rest of us who think it s alljust a noisy mess. but you have just published a piece for the economist pretty much arguing
gatherings in germany and it s like united nations of journalism. you have people there from every part of the world and they are all talking about the same project and it s a very forceful feeling and we re like a big family and we come back to each other and we trust each other. and i could not believe when i worked in the first one of these that nobody had kind of tried to get a head start on the rest. and that s because you know that you are just going to have so much more impact when you do it together. it s an international firestorm, and it only works that way because we do it together. and there were moments when information started leaking out because the people we were writing to were trying to get ahead of the game on all these projects and trying to get their side of the story out before we published. and i remember gerard, who s a director of icij, like a sort of general at the front of his troops, saying, hold, hold, hold and then charge! and you all go down the hill to