NYT unhappy at being dependent on Wikileaks for news
CJR has a very detailed explanation on how the arrangement around "The Afghan War Diaries" between Wikileaks and three newspapers (Guardian, NYT, Der Spiegel) came to pass. Notably, the article incorporates a disparaging use of the verb "flounce."
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The ongoing theme of this article: journalists have never heard of encrypted email.
The most interesting part of that for me was how desperate one of the reporters was to put wikileaks in its place. But the fact is they had little choice but to eat what they were fed. They transmuted raw data into credible, heavily-hyped reportage, on demand.
The defensiveness of those given the story -- and the aloofness of those who aren't in Leak Club -- suggests that Wikileaks knows it's figured out how to exploit their competitive insecurities to propagate information, and that they know it too.
The NYT's man talks of Assange 'flouncing' around and gets pert about the idea that it was a collaborative effort, but the fact is he's as much a resource to Wikileaks as Wikileaks is a source to him. No newspaper will quit Wikileaks as long as it can feed in the scoops, but Wikileaks can switch horses any time it pleases.
And I'm just fine wit dat.
I agree with Rob's assessment. And Assange has proven himself to be a very dangerous man to the US government. It sounds like he's probably fairly paranoid - hopefully he's paranoid enough.
You are so right.
I'm glad it's working out for Wikileaks.
I disagree Rob. Assange was vital, but he was a source. He was not acting as a journalistic collaborator, and that is what the journalists were trying to emphasize. That the reporting is all their work. I don't begrudge them that. And I do think it's rather positive that they managed to work together well on this project.
"And I do think it's rather positive that they managed to work together well on this project."
They kind of had to. Wikileaks contacted the Guardian, but because of the UK's horrible laws, the Guardian felt the need to bring in the others to give themselves a defense (I'm not quite clear on how that worked, exactly. Might be a 'horse out of the barn' thing.)
Right. Not to disparage Wikileaks's role in all of this, but their collaboration with the newspapers was the same sort of collaboration between a vital source and reporters. And each side acquitted itself nicely, any flouncing aside.
Having the data doesn't mean anything without the ability to analyze it and put it into context. Heck, it's something that intelligence agencies [should damn well] have known for years and years.
The information becomes usable once someone takes the time to interpret it, and the source is (just) a source.
...of course, of course.
Interesting, from one of the links about not just dumping a ton of data to the public, Assange says
“It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”
This suggests me to me that he should split the data randomly into many small pieces, and send each small piece to different news outlets. This way, they each have some piece of information that no other one has (maybe send each small piece to three, rather than just one), so that they all want to break their stories and aren't waiting for someone else to do so. With some frequency, mail the mail the shards of the documents to other journalists that haven't seen that particular information yet, so the information will eventually be open to everyone.
This does suffer from the problem of breaking the internal synergy between the documents, with 10 mutually consistent documents, perhaps you can trust it far more than a single consistent document.
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