How is WikiLeaks' relationship with the news media evolving?

The newspapers and Wikileaks negotiated a release date for the information, and NYT and Der Spiegel reporters were invited to the Guardian's offices to study the documents. CJR explains that the reporters from the different paper shared some tasks and methods, but each went on to analyse the results in their own way.

NYT reporter Eric Schmitt insisted to CJR that the papers had not entered any sort of "partnership or collaboration" with Assange, and he and Davies stressed that it was "a source relationship." What made it different from a normal source relationship, however, was that Assange was not the primary source of the information, but a mediator who controlled how much was distributed. Assange told a press conference earlier that there was far "more to come" than had already been released: how much did he share with the newspapers?

Wikileaks believes that journalistic sources should be submitted to the public, as scientific data is submitted to back up research. Assange calls it "scientific journalism." In 2007, he published thousands of pages of secret military information describing army procurements in Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope that journalists would explore it in depth, but few did.

So this time, Wikileaks turned to the established old media to make its point heard in the most effective way possible. According to the New Yorker profile, Assange was frustrated by the way that the media handled the story of the Apache attack in Iraq, both for focusing on the killing of the journalists rather than the Hellfire attack or on the van, and because of journalists' repeated attempts to get clarification from official sources.

Getting media outlets involved early was a way to make sure that there was comprehensive coverage of the information. Wikileaks is not trying to be a news outlet, it wants to get the information out there , but does not intend to provide the kind of analysis that a newspaper might. As Nick Davies told CJR, agreeing to release the information simultaneously let each of the three newspapers know that they had an almost exclusive story in which it was worth investing time and effort. And as Poynter noted, its exclusivity caused competitors to scramble and try to bring something new out of the story.

The involvement of the three newspapers also gave the information immediate credibility. People who may not have had faith in Wikileaks would have trusted the information because it came from well-respected publications.

Wikileaks' great advantage is its protection from legal or any other repercussions because of its lack of a physical base. As Poynter's Steve Myers said, "being homeless means you don't have to play by anybody's rules." The closest thing Wikileaks has as to address are the 27 servers and hundreds of domain names which host its content. The idea, as a New Yorker profile of Assange noted in June, is that "a government or company that wanted to removed content from Wikileaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself."

Wikileaks received a significant amount of new funding following the release of 'Collateral Murder,' and it can be expected that the same will happen in light of the Afghanistan War Logs, so the whistleblower site is unlikely to be going anywhere any time soon, despite its recent failure to win a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant. Will it continue to cooperate with the mainstream media?

Source: CJR, Poynter, New Yorker, Journalism.co.uk