A new media organization could upend the sacred cows of traditional journalism. Wikileaks, an Internet-savvy investigative journalism outfit, released a video showing an American Apache helicopter open fire on a group of men, killing two Reuters employees, along with 10 other people, on July 12, 2007. No traditional journalism organization was able to bring it to the public, as these tapes are normally classified; Reuters filed an FOIA request but never received a response.
The organization was launched in December 2006. Funded by private donors, it does not accept government or corporate funding, encourages would-be whistleblowers to upload incriminating material anonymously on its website. The small editorial staff verifies submitted documents, decrypts or translates them when necessary, and then publishes them in full -- often with commentary.
It prints no paper, but instead stores its articles online in Sweden, where journalists are required by law not to reveal sources. Its domain name, wikileaks.org, is registered in California, where the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation intervened when an aggrieved Swiss bank tried shut the site down.
Wikileaks' editors released the evidence of toxic waste dumping, posted the so-called "climategate" emails from the University of East Anglia in November 2009, leaked the confidential creditor list of a collapsed Icelandic bank, Australia's secret blacklist of censored URLs, and more than 500,000 pager messages from New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Despite these public-interest successes, Wikileaks' disregard for gag orders and their unabashed advocacy makes full-throated praise for the organization rare. Some are skeptical of using Wikileaks as a blueprint for a new, hard-hitting form of journalism. Yet no journalist I've spoken to will speak ill of Wikileaks in private: Every reporter understands that Wikileaks is the thin end of the wedge. If they can't run a dangerous story, no one can.
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