A few weeks ago, WikiLeaks targeted three news outlets for a massive data dump of classified incident reports from the war in Afghanistan. After the news broke on Sunday night, the rest of the media world had to play catch-up and react. However, most local papers in the U.S. have so far failed to publish any new material other than wire copy.
Given the staff and resources, what would you like to see local newspapers do with this archive of documents? As a reader, what kinds of stories would you like to read? As a journalist, how can you turn this raw material into something useful for your audience?
Any local/regional news group should be careful not go overboard on describing the documents as something very profound. These docs display in raw form what happens in every war. Same sort were generated in WWI, WWII, etc...
They do not reach the depths of the Pentagon Papers and shouldn't be compared with that very thorough history that exposed considerable governmental error/venality and manipulation of events.
#1 Posted by CU, CJR on Tue 27 Jul 2010 at 04:29 PM
For one tiny case-study of what a regional paper could do to address this bear of a story, see my post on The Omaha World-Herald's coverage from the past few days.
#2 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Thu 29 Jul 2010 at 06:00 PM
Oops, meant to include the link: http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/bringing_a_big_story_home_at_t.php
#3 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Thu 29 Jul 2010 at 06:02 PM