WikiLeaks taps press partners to make sense of its document deluge

GIVEN he's a secretive man, it is a neat paradox that one of Julian Assange's problems is how to share as much information as possible. 

So massive has been the recent document deluge from WikiLeaks, the leaked information organisation Assange founded in 2007, that simply putting the material on its own website would have seen readers drown in a flood of detail.
Instead, WikiLeaks has developed a "press partners" strategy in which it works with selected traditional media outlets around the world so they can extract what they judge to be the biggest news stories, while also publishing the original source material.
Assange reportedly realised WikiLeaks needed to harness the mainstream media after becoming frustrated that information leaked to the site, including video footage of US soldiers shooting people from a helicopter in Iraq in 2007, had not made more of an impact.

In July, when WikiLeaks published about 91,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan, and again in October, when it released about 390,000 documents on the Iraq war, it provided the material in advance to The New York Times, The Guardian of London and Germany's Der Spiegel.
For last week's release, of some of approximately 250,000 confidential US State Department cables, it again worked with The Guardian and Der Spiegel, as well as Spain's El Pais and France's Le Monde. This time The New York Times was reportedly left out, but The Guardian shared its trove. The Wall Street Journal (owned by News Corporation, the ultimate owner of The Australian) and CNN were also approached by WikiLeaks, but declined to participate.
WikiLeaks apparently did not contact any Australian media outlets, but Assange has been keen to co-operate when asked. When The Australian contacted Assange for an interview, he offered instead to write an article for the paper defending his organisation.
On the weekend, freelance journalist Philip Dorling described how he approached WikiLeaks to get access to cables sent from the US embassy in Canberra, which he has mined for a series of articles published in Fairfax Media mastheads The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Unlike other news outlets, as of yesterday Fairfax had not published its source material, contrary to the ethos of what Assange calls WikiLeaks' "new type of journalism: scientific journalism".
Writing for The Australian last week, Assange said: "We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?"
No one from Fairfax contacted by The Australian would comment. Investigative journalist and author Phillip Knightley believes WikiLeaks turned to traditional media "to give it respectability", as well as to tap into their pool of journalists.
"It was not the first to do this. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington has done it many times," Knightley says.
"It has proved a very effective media strategy for WikiLeaks. Governments are going to be reluctant to take on the New York Times or The Guardian, especially over what is essentially a freedom of expression issue."
Michael Bromley, head of the school of journalism and communications at Queensland University, says the press partners are playing an important role by making the documents digestible.
"There's so much data, it's information overload," Bromley says. "You need to have informed interpretation."
Meanwhile, the world should get more insight into WikiLeaks itself next year with the release of Inside WikiLeaks: My Time at the World's Most Dangerous Website by "WikiLeaks defector" Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Publisher Scribe says it has acquired the rights to the book, due out in April.