The WikiLeaks Story

In Politico "Playbook" (a great source if you are not already checking), Mike Allen sums up an article in this Sunday's NY Times Magazine (already available online):

BILL KELLER, N.Y. Times executive editor, in Sunday's Times Magazine, "Dealing With Assange and the Secrets He Spilled": "[W]e assembled a team of reporters, data experts and editors and quartered them in an out-of-the-way office. Andrew Lehren, of our computer-assisted-reporting unit, did the first cut, searching terms on his own or those suggested by other reporters, compiling batches of relevant documents and summarizing the contents. We assigned reporters to specific areas in which they had expertise and gave them password access to rummage in the data. ... Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping. On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always 'the source.' The latest data drop was 'the package.' ... On July 24, the day before the War Logs went live, I attended a farewell party ... that was given by Richard Holbrooke ... [H]e pulled me away from the crowd to show me the fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry ... [H]e was already spinning the reports of Pakistani duplicity as leverage he could use to pull the Pakistanis back into closer alignment with American interests." This essay is adapted from his introduction to "Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Expanded Coverage from The New York Times," an ebook available for purchase at nytimes.com/opensecrets. http://nyti.ms/hSskSL

WikiLeaks, the Daily Show, and Journalism

Michael Bugeja writes at Inside Higher Ed:

Satirist Jon Stewart and activist Julian Assange are symbols of a world without journalism — a largely online marketing-based, consumer-driven world at odds with principles of democracy and freedom.

Stewart is often considered a journalist because he holds people accountable when many metro media outlets no longer do so in their downsized newsrooms. "The Daily Show" does this often by following up on what newsmakers did or said in the past and then comparing that to current, contradictory actions and statements. Wikileaks purportedly holds people and governments accountable. It does so, however, by “WebThink.” Whereas responsible journalists scrutinize motives of tipsters and fact-check authenticity of cables, WebThink just dumps it all on the Internet and lets computer chips fly where they may.

...

"We need to challenge the notion that digital media and traditional journalism are somehow mutually exclusive," states Dick Doak, 42-year veteran of The Des Moines Register and vice chair of my Advisory Council at Iowa State University. "The digital revolution doesn't obviate the need for traditional journalism skills. It makes them more important than ever."

As evidence Doak cites WikiLeaks’ cables, calling them "a meaningless mass of information until the Guardian and The New York Times made sense of them, using traditional journalism techniques."

WikiLeaks, he adds, proves we need traditional journalism more than ever "to decipher and interpret the information overload."