In WikiLeaks’ Growth, Some Control Is Lost

WikiLeaks’ latest release — files related to the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — took place Sunday in partnership with eight news organizations in the United States and other countries, including The Washington Post and the McClatchy newspapers and The Telegraph of London. The “official” release was sped up when WikiLeaks learned that two news organizations that were collaborators with WikiLeaks in the past but were explicitly shut out this time — The New York Times and The Guardian — were preparing their own Guantánamo stories anyway, having obtained the information independently.

This resulted in a mad scramble to be first online with secrets that would never have leaked so quickly if WikiLeaks had not possessed the documents to begin with. For journalism, it was a recalibration of the traditional relationships among competitors and sources. And for WikiLeaks, it was a lesson in how hard it is to steer news coverage rather than be buffeted by it.

In its first prominent collaboration with newspapers, last July, WikiLeaks gave exclusive access to a secret archive of Afghan war logs to The Times, The Guardian in Britain, and Der Spiegel in Germany. Now, as it gradually releases 250,000 United States diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks says it has more than 50 local partners, most of them newspapers, from the Daily Taraf in Turkey to Expresso in Portugal to The Hindu in India. Some of those newspapers describe the relationship with WikiLeaks as a contract.

WikiLeaks’ intent has always been to maximize its impact, but its media strategy has changed significantly since it began in 2007, with the idea that if it posted important documents to its site — come one, come all — journalists would eagerly report the news there. Since then, it has learned the value of an “exclusive” to journalists, creating partnerships with publishers that impose a collective embargo on when the material can be published in return for privileged access to the material.

On its Twitter page, WikiLeaks suggested that it did not mind that it had lost control of its cache of secrets, saying it was pleased that its former partner publications had “added their weight to increasing our impact.”

Yochai Benkler, the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said he thought that WikiLeaks’ anti-secrecy quest was “enhanced, not undermined, by the intensification of competition to cover the documents.” The Guantánamo files, he said, confirmed what the earlier releases already suggested: that “the future of the networked Fourth Estate will involve a mixture of traditional and online models, cooperating and competing on a global scale in a productive but difficult relationship.”

In an essay this month in the British magazine New Statesman, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, explained his reasoning. While he described WikiLeaks as “firmly in the tradition of those radical publishers who tried to lay ‘all the mysteries and secrets of government’ before the public,” he added that “for reasons of realpolitik, we have worked with some of the largest media groups.”

While the exclusive-access strategy has had obvious advantages in getting the news out, WikiLeaks faced criticism for allowing only a few news organizations to have access to the cables, said Greg Mitchell, a blogger for The Nation who published “The Age of WikiLeaks.” “Now,” he said, “it’s busting loose and other people are getting them.”

That owes partly to the falling out between Mr. Assange and The Times and The Guardian.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said Mr. Assange seemed to sour on the newspaper after he read both a front-page profile of himself and an article about the Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking information to WikiLeaks. The profile he deemed unflattering and the other article inadequate. He also complained to Mr. Keller that the newspaper’s Web site had not linked to the WikiLeaks site. “Where’s the respect?” he asked Mr. Keller.

Mr. Keller said Monday, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had any communication with Julian Assange.”

In essays and interviews Mr. Assange has complained that The Times had worked too closely with the United States government before publishing its material and had a “hostile attitude” toward WikiLeaks.