Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has been online and publishing leaked documents and data since July 2007. Prior to this week, I wouldn’t have hesitated in initially referring to it as “whistle-blowing website Wikileaks” and getting in a definition of what the site does and how it works.

Writing this afternoon though, that bit of exposition feels a lot less necessary. Last Sunday’s coordinated publication of the Afghanistan war logs by Wikileaks, the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel has catapulted the small, independent organisation – and it’s director Julian Assange – into an entirely new realm of public notoriety.

This post is a round-up of some of the media industry’s responses to the biggest leak in US military history.

On Monday the story took up the first 14 pages of the Guardian, 17 pages of Der Spiegel, and numerous lead stories in the New York Times.

Too much, too soon, writes Slate’s media commentator Jack Shafer.

By inundating readers with Assange’s trove, the three news organization broke one of the sacred rules of journalism: If you have a big story—especially one based on a leak like this one—drip, drip, drip it out to your audience rather than showering them with it. The reader can absorb drips better than torrents.

Ultimately, more time, and care, was needed, says Shafer: “There was too much material for the newspapers and magazines to swallow on such a short deadline.”

His assessment echoes that of BBC College of Journalism director Kevin Marsh, who reports on Assange’s press conference at the Frontline Club on Monday.

[W]hat was danced around (…) was how much the three news organisations were able to verify and test the documents – and, crucially, their exact provenance – to which Wikileaks gave them access. In the way they would if they were dealing direct with their own assessable sources.

How much did they know about the source or sources of the document pile? His/her/their motivation? Track record? What was not there and why not? What was incomplete about what was there?

This matters. A lot. Especially if Wikileaks is to become – or has already become – a kind of stateless brokerage for whistleblowing.

NYU’s Jay Rosen also picks up on the ‘no-fixed abode’ quality of Wikileaks, calling it the “world’s first stateless news organisation”:

If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that (…) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system.

According to Assange, Wikileaks, which is sort-of based in Sweden due to the country’s extremely progressive freedom of information laws, does “not have national security concerns” and is “not a national organisation.” He frequently claims the site’s loyalty is to truth and transparency. Writing for the Telegraph, Will Heaven (whose piece may smack ever so slightly of sour grapes), questions the idea that the organisation has no political agenda.

Wikileaks is a website with no political agenda, its founder Julian Assange would have you believe. So I’m puzzled by today’s “Afghanistan war log” story. It doesn’t strike me – or many of my colleagues – as politically neutral to feed such sensitive information to three Left-leaning newspapers: namely the Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel. Even more puzzling that Wikileaks would choose, very deliberately, to contravene its own mission statement – that crowdsourcing and open data are paramount.

It was Nick Davies of the Guardian with whom the possibility of this kind of publication was first discussed by Assange. The Guardian team threw everything but the kitchen sink at their run on the material, with all the interactive and data know-how we have come to expect of them. Editorially, they focused on bringing to light the abhorrent disregard for the lives of civilians detailed in parts of the logs but largely covered up by the military.

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed “blue on white” in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents (…)

Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians. The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

Media commentator Jeff Jarvis asked Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger if he thought the newspaper should have started Wikileaks itself, to which Rusbridger responded that he felt it worked better separately. Jarvis claims that the joint publication effort showed that the future of journalism lay in “adding value”:

If you don’t add value, then you’re not needed. And that’s not necessarily bad. When you don’t add value and someone else can perform the task as stenographer or leaker or reporter — and you can link to it — then that means you save resources and money. This means journalists need to look at where they add maximum value.

There were plenty of journalists in attendance when Assange appeared at the Frontline Club again on Tuesday night, this time for an extended discussion with both press and just the plain curious.

“We are not an organisation for protecting troops,” he told the audience. “We are an organisation for protecting human beings.”

To that end, Wikileaks held back 15,000 of the 92,000 documents contained in the archive because, the organisation claimed, they had the potential to put the lives of civilians and military informers in Afghanistan at risk.

But on Wednesday morning the Times alleged that:

In just two hours of searching the WikiLeaks archive, the Times found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to US forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers’ names. US officers recorded detailed logs of the information fed to them by named local informants, particularly tribal elders.

The backlash against Wikileaks and its director gathered steam on Thursday when New York Times editor Bill Keller strongly criticised the organisation in an email to the Daily Beast for making so much of the material available without properly vetting it.

In our own publication, in print and on our website, we were careful to remove anything that could put lives at risk. We could not be sure that the trove posted on WikiLeaks, even with some 15,000 documents held back, would not endanger lives. And, in fact, as we will be reporting in tomorrow’s paper, our subsequent search of the material posted on WikiLeaks found many names of Afghan informants who could now be targets of reprisals by the insurgents (…)

Assange released the information to three mainstream news organizations because we had the wherewithal to mine the data for news and analysis, and because we have a large audience that would take this seriously. I think the public interest was served by that. His decision to release the data to everyone, however, had potential consequences that I think anyone, regardless of how he views the war, would find regrettable.

Wikileaks has acted grossly irresponsibly in the eyes of some press organisations, but it has been lauded by others as a pioneer for both its commitment to increasing transparency – and in doing so encouraging reform – and for its approach to publicising the logs and trying to achieve the maximum amount of impact for material that people have risked a great deal to expose. From the Editorsweblog:

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.

Whichever side of the fence you fall on, it is difficult to deny that the method of the leak marks a significant change in the organisation’s relationship with the news media and in the role the industry has to play in events of this kind.Similar Posts:

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Listen below for this week’s news roundup from Journalism.co.uk reporter Rachel McAthy and sign up to our iTunes podcast feed for future audio.

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The 2010 Excellence in New Communications Awards are now open for entries.

The awards are organised by the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), a global non-profit research and education foundation focused on the study of development in new media and communication.

The awards are in six categories and recognise the work of individuals and corporations, nonprofit, educational and media outlets that are pioneering the use of social and mobile media, as well as marketing, public relations and advertising.

The SNCR is based in San Jose, California.

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Concern is growing in South Africa over the passing of a piece of legislation that could, if passed into law, restrict freedom of the press in the country and jeopardise government transparency.

According to Iqbal Jassat for the Media Monitors Network, the African National Congress (ANC) is in the process of passing the Protection of Information Bill, which would allow “classification of information associated with commercial contracts entered into by government, state-owned enterprise and state entities”.

At the heart of the current debate are two significant developments: a new piece of legislature before parliament titled the Protection of Information Bill; and the disclosure by the ANC that a media tribunal, a system of state regulation is back on the agenda.

While the purpose of the bill is to replace apartheid-era secrets act with a democratic framework of information protection, a range of submissions warning of its draconian nature has raised serious concerns.

Full story at this link…

The Protection of Information Bill can be downloaded from: www.info.gov.za Similar Posts:

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Stephen Janis, journalist and content director of Investigative Voice, gives a behind the scenes look at digital investigative journalism in relation to a recent story he broke on a local government employee who had been on the Baltimore city payroll and collecting sick pay while in prison.

Writing on Nieman Journalism Lab, Janis looks at the opportunities and challenges of investigating and breaking such a story on a digital platform, following a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) which he claims concluded that Investigative Voice “was all but irrelevant to the city’s news flow”.

The study entitled ‘A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City’ reports that “the expanding universe of new media, including blogs, Twitter and local websites—at least in Baltimore—played only a limited role: mainly an alert system and a way to disseminate stories from other places”.

But Janis says the impact of the case study shows a greater role than that.

These discoveries and quite a bit more—for example, DPW supervisors had threatened to fire an employee who discovered that McLaughlin was on the state’s Sex Offender Registry—were published in a series of stories on Investigative Voice, the website where I work as a senior reporter and content director. Baltimore’s inspector general opened a department-wide probe, and the city solicitor ordered a citywide review of personnel policies related to criminal convictions and the employment of sex offenders in jobs that bring them into contact with the public. Because of the governmental watchdog reporting we do at Investigative Voice, I was distressed by the implied assumption in the study that the purpose of a website like ours is to replicate what our print brethren is doing.

Yet folks at Investigative Voice and other websites like ours are rethinking how to keep a watchful eye on city government agencies, personnel, policies and practices in a ways that will have impact. The old assumption is not our starting point.Our impulse as digital journalists is to innovate—and this means finding stories that aren’t being covered by other news media in Baltimore and doing what we can to illuminate them in ways that propel people to act. While we take full advantage of our digital platform, we adamantly uphold the basic tenets of investigative journalism.

He adds that unlike some online news media, Investigative Voice’s focus is not on page impressions or clicks – but making the most of strong images, information rich material and “eye-catching” headlines.

What set us apart, however, are our homepage’s outsized graphics and our investigative mission; in both, we aim for a different model of social influence within the community.Our consistent focus on this scandal, coupled with bold, eye-catching two-word headlines (white words set against a black background), provocative subheads, and information-laden captions reinforced our emphasis on watchdog reporting and lent authority to the investigation as it unfolded on our Web site. In some ways, our digital approach harkens back to the heyday of newspapers in the early 1900’s when boys hawking papers shouted out headlines designed to catch the attention of passers-by. Economically, this translates into an ability to market our influence with readers and advertisers in a qualitative rather than a quantitative way; impact and influence triumph over eyeballs and clicks.

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The Atlantic Wire site has published a series of different points of view about this week’s Time Magazine cover, which shows a harrowing image of an 18-year-old Afghan woman who has had her nose and ears cut off by the Taliban.

Under the headline “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan”, the magazine’s picture caption reports that the woman was attacked for having tried to flee from “abusive in-laws”.

The Wire asks if the Time is right to publish the cover, with answers first quoted from managing editor Richard Stengel discussing the reasons for their decision.

I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of Time (…) But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan.

The article then moves to comments from a range of other publications, some who say the cover is “good journalism” while others feel is “oversimplifies war”.

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According to a report in the Financial Times, News Corporation is “nearing a decision” on plans to start a news organisation which could provide content specifically for tablet device applications.

The plans, which could still be dropped, would mean the creation of a “tablet-centric” subscription product, for devices such as the iPad, with dedicated content produced for that platform.

The ambitious undertaking under consideration would be another test of consumers’ appetite to pay for news. The momentum behind developing a tablet-centric product is driven by a belief that readers are willing to pay for portability. News Corp’s early progress in selling subscriptions on the iPad has inspired the company to consider the new business.

The report adds that if the project goes ahead, it would mean job opportunities for new staff who would have to produce new content on news, entertainment, sports and politics.

See the full report at this link… (note: registration required)Similar Posts:

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Twitter tools: Sitepoint offer their list of the top five tools for setting up automated Twitter feeds, great for breaking news or updates. Tipster: Rachel McAthy. To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link - we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Investigative journalism award the Bevins Prize is now open for entries.

According to its organisers, the award, which is named after political journalist Anthony Bevins, “aims to encourage and promote that relentless pursuit of truth”.

Bevins was born in Liverpool in 1942 and went on to work as a political correspondent and political editor for the Times, the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Observer, the Express and the Independent. He died in 2001.

Last year’s winner was awarded to Paul Lewis for his stories on the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of the police in the G20 riots in 2009.

The Prize is a bronze statue of a rat up a drainpipe.

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Poynter.org introduces the latest resource for editors short on news - iNeedaGreatStory.com, claiming it offers “well-reported, well-told, well-illustrated content”.

The site sells stories, infographics and videos which claim to be “100-percent original”, pitching themselves as providing value journalism as opposed to a “content mill”.

In a world flooded with “free” stories optimized to fit marketers’ commercial agendas, it’s difficult for editors to find content they can rely on. But with iNeedaGreatStory.com, editors now have access to a searchable database of thousands of reliable, high-quality stories, infographics and videos. Simply put, iNeedaGreatStory.com makes life easier for editors everywhere – editors at newspapers and websites, editors of company newsletters, editors who don’t even know they’re editors but are charged with finding content for a specific purpose. That’s value they can’t get from a content mill.

The stories are written by an editorial team from Content That Works.

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The editorsweblog.com has a post from Stefanie Churnow looking at the latest developments on a Chinese website called yeeyan.org – a news site made up of content translated from English in an attempt to help pull down the language barrier thrown up by the globalisation of journalism.

The site itself has been running since 2006 and has 150,000 registered users according to Nieman Journalism Lab, inviting translators to enable the movement of news from one language to the next.

Yeeyan focuses on the social aspect of its mission over quality of content. Users are highly encouraged to interact with the site and have their own profile which shows their statistics of their involvement on Yeeyan. People can recommend articles for translation, or they can attempt to translate an article themselves.

Commenting on the site’s success so far, Churnow says the significance is the support it provides to global journalism and offers a model for the future.

With the globalization of journalism, the need to translate different news sources into a variety of language is growing. The Paris based Courrier International is an established leader in this trend, translating articles from all over the world into French. Yet the Yeeyan community is an example of how it is possible to build cultural and language bridges at a cheaper rate than what is offered by conventional translating methods. Yeeyan may be replicated in the future to provide community based translating systems across many different languages. The drawback though is you get what you pay for; the communities are essentially free to sustain, but this social aspect to Yeeyan means that translation is not necessarily to a professional standard.

However when Journalism.co.uk tried to access the site today, we were unable. The reason for this is currently unknown, but just last year it was shut down following a partnership venture with the Guardian Media Group.

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Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, part of a coalition of libel reform campaigners in the UK, has a detailed post on the International Forum for Responsible Media (Inforrm) blog about the NGO and its stance on the public interest defence in libel reform.

He discusses the criticisms the group has faced in relation to its campaign from both sides and the difficulty of finding a balance accepted by everyone.

Nonetheless, both organisations, and our coalition partners at Sense about Science, have been routinely attacked throughout our campaign for libel reform for promoting a ‘defamers’ charter’, that would give the media a licence to print defamatory stories without restraint.

Needless to say, this has never been our intention. As human rights charities, we recognise the need – in the words of Alastair Mullis and Andrew Scott – to ‘strike a fair balance between private reputation and public information.’ Their suggestion that this has never been a ‘motivating factor’ for us seems ungrounded.

I have to report that, when we have attempted to strike this balance too carefully, we have been attacked from the other side for weakening the cause of libel reform. The course of public benefit never has run smooth.

He goes on to outline his hopes for the future government libel bill, discussing the scope of the Reynolds defence and burden of proof for both claimant and defendant.

I would suggest that we begin a new Libel Bill by defining the tort as the publication of inaccurate and damaging material about an identifiable individual or corporate entity. We would then require claimants to show that the publication is inaccurate and damaging. Only if claimants had been able to show this would the court ask respondents to mount a defence, based on one of the three headings of truth, honest opinion or public interest.

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Mark Shenton shares his thoughts on the world of arts journalism over on the Stage’s blog today, putting a spotlight on a profession being transformed by amateur critics online and an industry yet to fully accept the opinions of an unpaid commentator.

Of course, no special qualifications are required to be a theatre critic: just the fact that someone employs you to do so makes you one. But in the new online environment, no such appointments are necessary anymore; you can start a blog and call yourself one in the click of a mouse. It’s an increasing challenge amongst theatrical PRs to work out who they should extend the courtesy of free theatre tickets to.

The problem, according to Shenton, is that there are still organisations who put up barriers to those not yet being paid for their work.

The Edinburgh Fringe’s press office runs a media accreditation process to validate the numerous people claiming to be critics, so that there’s at least some kind of filter; but they’ve caused a little bit of a stir this year by denying accreditation to one particular website, The Public Reviews, which as its name suggests, uses members of the public to review shows as opposed to professionals. And being paid for your writing isn’t, of course, a pre-requisite either anymore to call yourself a critic. One of the best reviewing sites out there is theartsdesk.com, set up by a team of established print journalists, and it isn’t paying its contributors at the moment yet, either. (Neither does one of the biggest and most influential news and opinion sites in the US, The Huffington Post). But they’ve all noticed that the market is changing, and are taking a proactive step to be out there with a well-produced site that may, in turn, start making money in due course.

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Winning images from the World Press Photo 2010 contest will be exhibited at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh from 3 August until 28 August.

The WPP 10 exhibition is touring the the world and will return to the UK for an exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, London from 12 November until 9 December.

In 2009, Anthony Suau took the top prize in the photography contest for his image of home evictions in Cleveland, Ohio.

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#followjourn: Mark Ogier

Who? Mark is online editor and game reviewer for the Guernsey Press and the Globe.

Contact? @MarkOgier

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.Similar Posts:

• #FollowJourn: @markcrail/managing editor
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• #followjourn: @chriscondron/head of digital strategy

The Online Journalism Review has a great resource of how-to guides for any journalist working on the web, from maintaining online communities to dealing with ethical matters. Tipster: Rachel McAthy. To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link - we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says the four journalists were abducted from the Laguna region, which includes the violence filled state of Durango