WikiLeaks and Its Relationship to Journalism

Cardiff.
The final speaker in this session at Future of Journalism 2009 is Lisa Lynch, whose focus is on the WikiLeaks whistleblowing site. The site exists in the context of investigative journalism and the global transparency movement, and what is particularly interesting here is how professional journalists relate to it; this can also be studied by examining the composition of the follower community for the WikiLeaks Twitter feed (which contains a very wide range of groups from anarchists and activists through to Sarah Palin fans and white supremacists).

What WikiLeaks provides is a wiki-based platform for the safe dissemination of whistleblower material; the site, which is operated from the comparative safe haven of Sweden with its strong information protection laws, acts as a clearinghouse for such information and thus helps protect the identity and lifelihood of the sources. It has disseminated a great range of leaked, classified information, and such material has been covered by a great range of quality news publications.

But how do journalists encounter WikiLeaks and track the material being made available through the site? There is an interesting back story to WikiLeaks itself; it was started as a journalistic tool which was nonetheless in direct competition with mainstream journalism especially as the quality of such journalism has declined - it describes itself occasionally as a social movement and/or a journalist institution which was 'able to be more accurate than the mainstream media' because of its provision of source documents and the editable wiki model.

There was something of a self-chosen martyr role here, too, expecting the site to be attacked as a competitor by the mainstream media (and as a result also keen to have its ideas articulated clearly in the mainstream media, rather than misrepresented through the prism of journalists' self-interest). Such views changed as the site became better known and accepted in the mainstream media, however.

Some reporters have been following WikiLeaks since its inception and follow it very frequently; these were often technology or politics reporters, and some of them have developed a traditional journalist-source relationship with the operators of the site (this includes the reporters from the Sydney Morning Herald who drew on WikiLeaks's publishing of the purported Australian 'cleanfeed' filter blacklist).

Other reporters found out about the site from the mainstream media themselves (or through colleagues), and began to follow it from there; this group have a more skeptical view of the site and the materials made available on it, and may have encountered material from the site through traditional sources and only in a second step found that these documents were also available on the site. Such reporters generally prefer the leaking of documents directly to them, but understand the use of the site as an identity protection system. Some such reporters barely remember about the site, and are focussed much more on the documents leaked through it than on the site as a regular source for such material.

WikiLeaks is now also becoming an important space for material which is being sourced by traditional media outlets (e.g. through freedom of information proceedings) and are subsequently removed from the public sphere due to court-ordered injunctions; the site thus becomes a space where such material remains available. While media outlets themselves may no longer report about this material directly, they may still find ways to direct their audiences towards WikiLeaks to look for themselves (and in return, this may then lead to the lifting of court injunctions as the material is already in the public sphere and can no longer be pulled back).

So, WikiLeaks is becoming a significant outlet both as a source for stories and as a safe house for documents which are attempted to be pulled back by the court system. This may also undermine legal challenges to the availability of such material, leading to a greater level of information availability.

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