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Charles Lewis travels to Oxford
Posted: Nov. 28, 2016 | Tags: Charles Lewis
Charles Lewis will travel to Oxford, England, to participate in an Oxford University Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism roundtable about the future of investigative journalism and collaboration.
Lewis, who founded the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 1997 on the premise of collaboration between journalists across newsrooms and countries, will talk about the recent success of the largely unprecedented Panama Papers project. The ICIJ investigation involved 370 journalists and more than 100 news organizations in 76 countries and revealed the pervasiveness of the widely used, illegal practice of wealthy individuals and corporations offshoring money in order to evade taxes or hide money earned from illicit transactions.
In a recent article for The Guardian, Lewis wrote, "What is distinctive about the Panama Papers project is its unprecedented scale in terms of data, documents, number of participating journalists and co-publishing news organizations... the crucial concept of public accountability cannot and should not be narrowly confined by local or national borders."
Also attending the collaborations roundtable will be Gerald Ryle, director of the International Consortium, and Mar Cabra, head of the data and research unit at the International Consortium. Both played significant roles in organizing and leading the various entities and journalists who worked on the Panama Papers investigation.
Shortly before the Panama Papers findings were published, Lewis spent a semester in the fall of 2015 at the University of Oxford as a Reuters Institute Visiting Fellow. The title of his research proposal was: "Tear Down These Walls: Exploring the Efficacy and Potential of Journalistic Data, Research and Reporting Collaboration."
This December and beyond, he will continue to explore the subject of collaboration in the connected world in order to continue to produce relevant investigative journalism.
