The war in Afghanistan has dominated headlines since whistle-blower website WikiLeaks released 92,000 secret government documents with major revelations about the war.

But a large part of the global conversation has focused on the reaction of the mainstream media and what this means for the future of journalism.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times (one of the three news outlets that received the documents from WikiLeaks in advance), put it quite well: “It’s a reminder, if we need one, that technology has diminished our control over what the world knows."

Jay Rosen, a member of the NYU journalism faculty, who muses on all things press, media and journalism on his blog PressThink.org, spoke with Neon Tommy editor-in-chief Callie Schweitzer about what has unfolded since the release of the documents.

NT: How does the WikiLeaks release change the equation of journalism?

JR: Well I think it's important to try and be precise about what's different rather than engage in these aimless revolutionary hype propositions that people are vulnerable to.

What's different is this: First of all WikiLeaks is what I call a stateless news organization. In most countries around the world, there is no free press. It's hard for us to imagine that because it's a regular feature of our lives, but in most of the countries in the world you can't criticize the government in print. So every free press that we know of is in existence because the laws in a particular nation made it possible.

What's different about WikiLeaks is that it's the logic of the Internet that makes it possible. It essentially has no address.

Technically the servers for Wikileaks.org are located in Sweden, but if Sweden decided to prosecute WikiLeaks or shut down its servers, they could just move it to another country. They don't have an address, they don't have an office, they don't have a headquarters.

It's also important to understand what WikiLeaks is--against what it's not. It is a way for whistle-blowers who have documents of public interest to submit those documents anonymously in an encrypted way, so that no one can trace them back.

WikiLeaks makes the promise that it will accept those documents, try to verify that they are what they say they are, and then they will publish them online and therefore allow the whistle-blower to reach the world public.

That's what WikiLeaks is—a secure way for whistle-blowers to get documents to the public. And what's different is that it doesn't pass through the journalism profession or the editors of a particular publication, and in a sense then a more direct route from source to public has been established.

NT: Is that good or bad?

JR: Well I don’t know. I'm not in the business of making instant judgments like that, and I wouldn't want to at this stage because it's still unfolding and we have to see what WikiLeaks does and how it develops.

I hesitate to make judgments on WikiLeaks because it's in motion. They have said they are withholding 15,000 documents because they want to redact some names that might put some people in danger. So how good are they at that and how careful are they? This has a lot to do with whether they're good or bad, and we can't know that until we see this episode unfold.

I'm not putting much of my energy into whether they're good or bad. Trying to understand what WikiLeaks is—that’s hard enough.

NT: How does a site like WikiLeaks empower those formerly known as the audience?

JR: It's part of a sequence of changes in the media world that have allowed people to be several steps closer to the act of production. Stepping back for a moment you could see it in the same category as Napster and BitTorrent, where people can share information themselves without going through the media.

So that's sort of what it is—sources can share information with the public without going through the media. It's in that same line, and it brings people closer to acts of production that were once the province or exclusive territory of professional media. But the Internet as a whole is doing that constantly in hundreds of ways.

There's a very awkward term that might come up in journalism schools--disintermediation--which means taking the middleman out, taking the middle layer out. When my wife and I decide to sell our 2005 Dodge Magnum and we put it on Autotrader.com, we don't need the classified ads of the newspaper because we can connect with potential buyers directly and it's way cheaper. This is another example of that.

NT: Has the crowd jumped in and gotten involved?

JR: I don't think we know that. We know that the server for WikiLeaks was overloaded and a lot of people in the world couldn't even get to the site, so we know they're not sitting in obscurity. We know that among people who were already debating the Afghan War, the attentive audience for politics, a great buzz has been felt, but beyond that we don't know.

NT: Why didn't WikiLeaks try to draw conclusions itself?

JR: Insofar as it’s possible to grasp their mission, their mission is not to do that, their mission is to get information out.

Part of the reason I think they went for these newspapers is because they'd made a discovery about this profession. Even if a great story was lying there in a published cache of documents, journalists won't pluck it, produce it and run it because it's already public. Part of what they were doing was learning from that.

The other part was in order to sift through 100,000+ documents and reports and extract what's important and make news out of it, you actually need a lot of knowledge. There's no reason to believe that knowledge lies within WikiLeaks, which is a small organization.

Another reason was it probably gets more attention this way because instead of [the mainstream media] choosing to ignore it as they might if it wasn't their story, you have three of the biggest news organizations in the world trumpeting their own coverage because it’s in some ways theirs.

NT:  Is the mainstream media responding properly to the Web challenge or is it still hung up on the debate of journalists vs. bloggers and print vs. Web?

JR: In this sense, the hybrid forms are going to be the strongest forms, and the combination of an Internet-born WikiLeaks and the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel is a very potent combination. You can say that this shows that the traditional media is still in charge but that's not very smart because the New York Times's Bill Keller recognized in remarks he made after the thing was published, WikiLeaks was going to run these documents regardless of whether the New York Times got involved, so WikiLeaks is in charge.

WikiLeaks is smart because now they can say not only will we publish your documents on the Internet, but we will get a major news organization to run stories about them. That's an even better deal.

 

Related stories:

What WikiLeaks Means For The Future Of Journalism

Whistleblowers Have Some Protection, If They Leak To The Right People

"The War Logs" Show It’s Time To Rekindle A 40-Year Flame

WikiLeaks' Source For Afghan War Logs Unclear

To reach editor-in-chief Callie Schweitzer, click here.

Follow her on Twitter: @cschweitz