As Mar Cabra of the Panama Papers team stated at the plenary session of the Second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference, massive electronic leaks are the new norm. Indeed, the smart use of data by journalists generally has been vital in uncovering big business scandals, exposing corruption, and revealing malpractices in both government and private sectors. And Asia and Asian journalists are an integral part of this global trend. At the conference Saturday morning, three well known data journalists from Asia shared their experience on how they collect data for stories and the challenges of digging out more than is publicly available. “It is not easy to get data from the governments in Asia,” observed Adek Media Roza, head of Katadata’s research unit in Jakarta, Indonesia. Continue Reading →