Journalism is committed to the truth and to the public, and often this commitment ends up being more powerful than the media outlet where each journalist works. This is where the central point of collaborative journalism comes in: journalists producing and investigating a story together, focusing on the information that will be transmitted.
Remember when you used to team up with other schoolmates to hand in a project? The dynamic here is quite similar; after all, these are professionals coming together to deliver a news story. Often, these are articles that emerge after extensive research, and some even require the creation of databases and analysis.
Operation “Vaza Jato”
A very famous case of collaborative and investigative journalism, published in 2019 by The Intercept Brazil. The work was done with the participation of six other media outlets, namely: Public Agency, Folha de S. Paulo, Buzzfeed, Veja, Uol, El País and Reinaldo Azevedo's Blog.
The operation, as it was dubbed, gathered data obtained by The Intercept Brasil and published in seven media outlets, exposing and calling into question the methods used by the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF) and Judge Sérgio Moro to investigate corruption cases in Brazil.
"The Panama Papers"
The work of 370 journalists from 76 countries resulted in the publication of a list bearing the names of 107 offshore (companies established abroad in tax havens). More than 11 million documents were analyzed to arrive at the names of the companies and people linked to the Petrobras corruption case in 2016.
The investigation helped to uncover an entire industry involving the names of heads of state, ministers, parliamentarians, and major construction companies in several countries. The list was published worldwide by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
"The Implant Files"
Also mobilized by the ICIJ, in 2018 a group of 250 journalists from 58 media outlets joined forces to create the Implant Files. A database with information on medical devices that have presented some type of defect or that pose a danger to patients' health. Piauí magazine Agência Pública and other Brazilian media outlets participated in the reporting.
Public participation
The internet has enabled greater interaction, which has changed the way the public receives news. The reader is no longer a passive agent and has found in the internet a universe conducive to research and validation of news. For example, if a news item is published with a misspelled name, a reader can alert the news outlet to the error, which can then be corrected, through a comment.
All of this transforms the audience into much more than a passive recipient, as stated in the hypodermic needle theory. And now it becomes... participatory element and that can also contribute to the research and preparation of a story/text in a media outlet, which can also be interpreted as collaborative journalism.
