The symbiotic relationship between WikiLeaks and the press

WikiLeaks used to be the press’s only source for anonymously submitted online document dumps. Since then, the press has developed its own digital capabilities and a comfort with leaked material—and WikiLeaks has strayed from editorial curation and toward publishing unedited archives.

Before the election, the conversation around Wikileaks focused on the question of whether or not the press should report on the Podesta e-mails, since they are so targeted, uncurated, and not even clearly newsworthy. The verdict, rightly, was that the press should report on the leaks: Glenn Greenwald argues in The Intercept, and Trevor Timm in The Guardian, that it is the journalist’s job to take what was leaked, decide what is newsworthy, and report on it. The role of the press is not only to report the leaks, but to interrogate the information and assess its newsworthiness. But now, after the election, there is another layer of transparency that is the press’s job to add: transparency on WikiLeaks itself.