Updated, 2:19 p.m., Tuesday, to add comment from the consortium’s deputy director, Marina Walker, and The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, at the bottom of the post.

Updated, 4:22 p.m., Wednesday, to add mention of Univision News.

The “Panama Papers” are being called the largest ever leak of secret data. Articles based on those documents — developed by a global consortium of journalists — began appearing Sunday afternoon. Exposing the offshore bank accounts of bigwigs worldwide, the articles burst into the Sunday afternoon news lull, getting huge play in media outlets around the world and in the United States.

By Monday, I had heard from many Times readers who wanted to know why The Times didn’t seem to be giving the news a big ride. The Times posted a wire-service article on Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t until 9:15 p.m. that a staff-produced piece of moderate length went onto the website. It was not given prominent display; in Monday’s paper, the story did not make the front page. It ran at the top of Page A3.

Despite that, readers clearly were extremely interested. (And for good reason. Esquire’s Charles Pierce wrote Monday that the revelations raise the distinct possibility “that every political system in the world — even the nakedly authoritarian ones — is hopelessly rigged, and that the marvelous new world of the miraculous global economy is an even bigger thieves’ paradise than you, me, or even Jamie Dimon thought it was.”)

Quietly displayed and delayed as it was, the story nevertheless was among The Times’s 10 most widely read articles on Monday morning.

Blake Burton of Tulsa was one reader who wanted an explanation. He wrote:

Is there a reason that the New York Times is underplaying the Panama Papers? They are front-page news, usually as the top story, in both mainstream outlets (CNN, NBC, The Guardian, The Times of London, etc.) and further afield, from Argentina (Clarion) to Zimbabwe (The Mail). Even “banking friendly” outlets like the FT and Bloomberg are giving them top billing. As of this writing (noon eastern on the second day of public availability), the word “Panama” does not appear on your homepage, and the only article avoided the front page of my paper edition this morning (A3). Is there a good reason why?

I asked Matt Purdy, a deputy executive editor, to respond. He told me by phone that The Times is very interested in the data leak, and the articles produced from it. But he said Times editors believe that they owe it to their readers to do their own evaluation of the material. And that, he said, is happening now.

Because The Times was not a part of the global consortium and was not aware that the story was coming, it needed some time to get its own story going. “We didn’t know these documents were out there and being worked on,” he said.

“We didn’t have access to the documents, and that is a very big issue,” he said. But Mr. Purdy said he hoped, and had good reason to believe, that that would change soon.

“This is a great trove of documents — certainly interesting and valuable — and it takes a while to know what to make of them,” he said. Failing that on Sunday night, the story didn’t seem appropriate for the front page, he said. (In addition, I’ll note, The Times was publishing a major enterprise piece about corruption in Brazil. Very well done in its own right, it was given the most prominent space on Monday’s front page.)

Mr. Purdy was quick to say that the consortium journalists “did a really good job” with the Panama Papers reporting.

“We tried to put something in place, to do our best without the documents,” he told me.

Why did it take so long to post a staff-written story? Many Times readers told me that as soon as they heard the news, they went to the Times website for its version, and were disappointed not to find anything until late in the evening.

“This was not a case of a single-fact story that we could simply confirm and go with,” Mr. Purdy said. “This was a case where hundreds of reporters had been working on it for a long time.”

He pointed out that the article that was published added some information from The Times’s own previous digging on Russian financial holdings.

“We have a serious obligation to make sense of this as best we can, evaluate it and put it in context,” he said. He said reporters and editors were working on a follow-up article on Monday and would be doing more soon, “integrating it with our own reporting” on offshore accounts and related topics. (Shortly after this post went up, a new Times article on repercussions in Iceland was published.)

Update: Many readers have asked, in the comments here and on Twitter, why The Times was not a part of the consortium’s Panama project and why it did not have access to the documents which form the basis of the Panama Papers story.

I talked Tuesday afternoon with Marina Walker, the deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who told me that her organization’s model – which she calls “radical sharing” – has not proved a good fit for every news organization. In previous projects, she said, ICIJ worked with, or tried to work with, other news organizations, including The Times, and “it wasn’t always a good fit.”

Part of that, she said, is the idea of sharing all material, not keeping anything exclusive. Another part is agreeing to observe embargoes for when material would be published.

Before an earlier data-based reporting project, known as Swiss Leaks, she told me, her organization approached The Times, but didn’t hear back. “We were a little disappointed that that didn’t work out,” she said. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, reached by email, responded that he could not recall the details but “I remember one talk when I was managing editor, and was worried about a story that involved many news organizations. But that wasn’t this cache.” (Mr. Baquet was named executive editor in mid-2014.)

In this case, James Asher, until recently the Washington bureau chief for McClatchy newspaper group, made a strong case to the consortium that his organization would be a good fit.

Mr. Asher, who will soon join Injustice Watch, and Anders Gyllenhaal, McClatchy’s vice president for news, told me on Tuesday that this jibes with their recollection of what happened. And, in fact, McClatchy newspapers were chosen as the American partners for the current project, along with Fusion, the cable television channel. Update: Univision News, the American media company, was another partner, as it has been with earlier ICIJ projects.

“He told us, we have a good reputation, we did well before the Iraq War, and we will follow your rules,” Ms. Walker said. (The precursor to the McClatchy Washington bureau, the Knight Ridder Washington bureau, has earned high praise for its skeptical reporting before the Iraq invasion.)

“We do not always pick the biggest media organizations to work with,” Ms. Walker said. “We pick those that will be collaborative,” as well as having the right investigative talents. She said that some of the largest American organizations (and she mentioned, in different contexts, CNN, The Times, and the Wall Street Journal) were approached at various times, not necessarily for this project.

“We heard something like ‘it’s not our model – we don’t do that.’”

Ms. Walker said, however, that the organization is not ruling out working with The Times in the future. In fact, she said, “we would love to work with the New York Times – who would not want to work with The Times?”