Tuesday, July 27, 2010

WORLD'S FIRST STATELESS NEWS ORGANZATION


1. Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists ‘round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first?

2. The initial response from the White House was extremely unimpressive:
This leak will harm national security
There’s nothing new here.
Wikileaks is irresponsible; they didn’t even try to contact us!
Wikileaks is against the war in Afghanistan; they’re not an objective news source
“The period of time covered in these documents… is before the President announced his new strategy.

3. If you don’t know much about Wikileaks or why it exists, the best way to catch up is this New Yorker profile of Julien Assange.

4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. world’s first stateless news organization.

5. And just as government doesn’t know what to think, the traditional press isn’t used to this

Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show.

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