Rethinking the Role of Journalism in the Open-Source Intelligence Ecosystem: Inside the Data Pipeline of Cross-Border Investigative Journalism Hubs

Cross-border investigative journalism increasingly operates through a journalism-commons logic that integrates open-source intelligence (OSINT) practices into shared digital infrastructures. This paper examines investigative platforms built by five prominent global and regional cross-border hubs (OCCRP, ICIJ, ARIJ, CLIP, and Code for Africa) to analyze how their technical design enacts the journalism-commons logic across technological, social, and content layers. Using a comparative case-study approach informed by knowledge management systems (KMS) theory, the analysis identifies an infrastructure typology that ranges from document-centric collaboration tools to entity-centric repositories and decentralized connectors, revealing three modes of knowledge sharing: technological, content-driven, and hybrid. By tracing how each organization balances openness, security, and long-term sustainability, the paper emphasizes implications of public-records mining under divergent political and socio-cultural conditions for asymmetric dependencies between the Global North and the Majority World.