It’s not that I distrust them, it’s just that I’m a lawyer, operations, and finance guy. The source documents would be extremely interesting to me. Instead I get a meaningless graph that tells me almost nothing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in personal experiences with journalists is that they’re just that, journalists. They don’t have expertise in finance, law, or most anything complex. Let the data be open sourced and mined by actual experts.
93 media agencies working together to analyse some 13 million documents ... and you don't think they've employed one or two lawyers with domain expertise to assist?
While the documents may be interesting to you and others, they're not yours to disseminate. If the graph is meaningless to you, then you should ignore it.
I note that the Australian Tax Office published a press release [1] earlier this month around the Paradise Papers. Presumably other nation state revenue collection agencies have released similar, or at least have comparable expectations from this latest set of papers.
Reading between the lines, there's an expectation that a release of the entire set of source papers may reduce the efficacy of their efforts to recover these lost revenues. I concede that I may be optimistic in my interpretation and expectations here.
A journalist without domain expertise or the support of a domain expert without an agenda related to the subject-matter of the reporting is crippled in the same way a programmer without domain expertise or support of a domain expert is; journalism may, itself, be a complex domain (as programming is), but expertise in it does not provide relevant domain expertise in the domain that is the subject of reporting.
And it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain, and in most domains the market doesn't really reward development of domain expertise (in political reporting, there's some pressure driving reporters to develop some expertise in electoral politics, but that's kind of exceptional, and isn't reflected in other domains, even the policy end of political reporting.)
The GGP made claims about these journalists in particular; I don't see anything to back up those claims.
Also, I know people like to criticize journalists (despite having no domain expertise in journalism), but let's raise our standards to making well-supported, informative statements:
> A journalist without domain expertise or the support of a domain expert without an agenda related to the subject-matter of the reporting is crippled ...
A developer who is illiterate also is limited, but that isn't meaningful. It tells us nothing about any particular developer or about the population of developers.
> it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain
That's a very broad statement, about every journalist who covers every "complex" domain. How many have backgrounds in what domains?
And it implies that lacking educational background means they don't understand the field they cover. Certainly that's not true. Many people I know lack an educational background in their professions; many Silicon Valley legends have no educational background. Some lawyers run large companies, including financial companies, despite lacking MBAs or any financial education. As I wrote in another HN post, Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in Economics, won a Turing Award, wrote the book on industrial organization, was a leader in cognitive psychology, and his educational background was political science.
A journalist who has covered finance for decades certainly has domain expertise.
