Making Sense of Overwhelming Flows of Financial Data

This chapter asks what investigative journalists working on revelations such as the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Lux Leaks, Swiss Leaks, etc. can teach journalism educators. Can this type of cross-border cooperation help prepare journalism education for a future in which money increasingly flows across borders? Without having some understanding of the core concepts of finance, it will be difficult to hold power to account. This chapter builds mainly on qualitative interviews with journalists around the world working on stories connected to illicit financial flows, corruption and tax havens. In the conclusion, we discuss the challenges and paradoxes educators must consider when designing journalism education for the future. Considering the growing importance of Problem-Based Learning (PBL), the journalists interviewed here emphasize the promise of teams learning together while investigating and solving problems as they arise. However, there are limitations to the usefulness of PBL in understanding economic or financial theories. For instance, it is doubtful that PBL alone would be the best and most effective way to learn the quantitative methods needed to understand economic theories. It would be helpful if journalism education could include basic instruction, at least, in economics and finance.