From your Sunlight piece, a choice bit:
"In countries desensitized to corruption, efforts to grow data journalism need to get serious. Transforming the legacy media’s messengers of breaking news into change agents for government accountability is a major challenge. It requires not just explaining the problem, but also exploring solutions. With this in mind, overcoming apathy will require not just a couple of data driven stories, but a structured journalism approach to covering governance consistently over time."
And two nice paragraphs from the other (OpenNews) piece:
In his criticism of another ICIJ project, Evicted and Abandoned, which examines displacement of populations by World Bank projects, Nicholas Benequista pointed out that to fix an international development issue, the most effective strategy is to go after the people who have a vested interest in their local reputation—and, better yet, go after them through local media. This raises a question about the objective of cross-border data journalism: Is the goal really to expose the wrongdoing in order to give the (local) public the information they need to solve the problem, or is it about scandal and the handwringing of a remote Western audience? As Jonathan Stray suggests “…it is always about scandal—what has been called ‘the journalism of outrage.’” This has sometimes made investigative journalism powerless in the face of huge systemic issues, when reaction to a scandal doesn’t carry through to policy or political changes.
Transforming the legacy media’s messengers of breaking news into change agents for government accountability requires an array of technical and analytical skills that begin with embracing the role of media as a change agent, a shift in the media industry’s attitude, and the coalescence of a global open data community around this common goal. It also requires overcoming public desensitization to the daily scandal, front-page corruption stories, and permanent dysfunction in countries where the problems are most deeply rooted.