The Secrets are no longer Secrets

The snitch, or not?

In the year of 2007, governments all over the world are stunned by a newly emerged threat: WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization that reveals important information to the world. It is an organization founded by Julian Assange and The Sunshine Press organization which relies on volunteers’ involvements in disclosing governments’ exclusive news into a anonymous drop box and the Wiki Journalists will then analyse, verify, and write a news piece about the material to the public. The WikiLeaks is a successful attempt in disclosing governments’ secrets to the world; despite the risks of being arrested, it claimed a database of over 1.2 million leaked documents within the year of its launch. A lot of new front page stories are has been released by WikiLeaks in the past few years, including a package of documents called Iraq War Logs which contains 400,000 documents about the Iraq war and occupation held between 2004 and 2009.

These documents are provided by a US soldier, and it is the largest scale of leak in the US military history. The leaks included more than 15,000 of unreported deaths of civilians killed by US soldiers. As well as hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and murder by the Iraqi police and soldiers that are have not been investigated.  This leakage of documents is trusted by many organizations and has aroused reactions from many countries and organizations. The United Nations suggest that an investigation should be held towards the US military in terms of Human Rights. The US condemns the WikiLeaks to be putting the US and its partners’ civilians at risk since the documents reveal the names and private information of people involved in the Iraq War log. In addition, the prime minister of Iraq and an Iranian politician both reject the claims made up by US government to accuse.  Other than that, many countries and non-profit organizations have also reacted to the Iraq War Log incident. For more information, please click here.

WikiLeaks: a journalistic organization?

The WikiLeaks is somehow thought to be a journalistic organization in terms of releasing news to the public; however, the creditability is questionable. Since the WikiLeaks is rely heavily on volunteers and citizen journalists, it takes a lot of works for WikiLeaks’ journalists to fact check the news. The Youtube video that is released by the WikiLeaks is also doubted to be edited by its members; therefore, it is hard to decide whether the news revealed by WikiLeaks are reliable or not.  So, is WikiLeaks a creditable journalistic organization? What do you think?

Angel or Evil—Human rights

The WikiLeaks on the one hand acts as a humanity activist as it discloses covered information on incidents that violate human rights; however, on the other hand, it defies the basic integrity by ignoring others’ privacy, stealing secrets and revealing them to the public. This not only put people involved in these incidents at risk, but also arouses worldwide attention and stimulates hostilities between countries. Perhaps the price of helping ones from torture is putting others at risk; will there be a better way for people to make peace?

“To be or not to be, this is the question.”

April Chan

Salon.com: a new media pioneer–by April Chan

“SALON.COM”—a presentation by Alexandra Downing Watkins and Joy Richu

http://www.salon.com/

ABOUT

“Salon.com” is one of the pioneers of online media magazine. It was founded by journalist David Talbot in the year 1995 with the aim to broaden the boundaries of journalism. The magazine updated every weekday and is mainly focused on U.S. politics and personal affairs, but as well included reviews and articles about lifestyle and entertainments such as books, films and music etc. Not only being the pioneer of online publication, Salon.com had also established an online radio in 1999.  

Salon.com has adopted the concept of “readers’ online interactions” from another virtual community The WELL (http://www.well.com/aboutwell.html) long before the popularization of blogging and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

 

THE HISTORY

A timeline would be better to demonstrate the progress of Salon.com between 1995 and 2012.

1995 —Salon.com and was launched by David Talbot

1999 —Salon Radio was launched

—purchased online community The WELL

— Salon.com officially went public and raised $2,500,000 revenue mainly through ads

2000— as an effect of the stock market crash, internet “.com” recession occur

2001—Salon Premium online content subscription ($30/month) OR free access with                 advertisements à lost a lot of membership

2008— “Open Salon”, a social and blogging network, was launched with the capacity                        for readers to blog and post comments on it à increased in viewership

              http://open.salon.com/cover.php

2011— the plan of selling to Newser.com was failed due to disagreement over price

— Online discussion board and interactive forum closed down with no official                            reason

— David Talbot returned as CEO and the site re-launched

Impacts on nowadays media (and what do I think =)

Salon.com, as one of the first online magazine, had basically started the revolution and transformation of a new form of media—an online, writer-reader interactive, free-access media. This new format has completely changed the habit and role of both readers and writers. It not only enables readers to have 24-hour access in any part of the world but also allowed viewers to take part in the process of news media through websites like Open Salon. The launching of Open Salon and other online forums/discussion boards also help to develop a new idea of “citizen journalism”, in which bloggers are able to post articles, if not first-handed news and videos, via internet and share them worldwide to other viewers. Nevertheless, there are as well downsides of these new platforms; as Joy and Alexandra had mentioned today, the openness to different bloggers has caused the lost of creditability of the online magazine. Not like the old media which are treated to be objective, or even “divine” (in terms of its disinterestedness to day-to-day events), websites like Open Salon are tend to be more personal and biased due to the lack of control towards news posts; these, thus, believed to be less trustworthy then traditional newspaper. The viewers nowadays have subtly changed their attitudes to be more and more skeptical on these news sources. Therefore, Salon.com did helped in changing the new style of media and journalism and I truly feel that it opened up a lot of opportunities for readers to be more active on participating in everyday news—from community wide to worldwide. If there’s not a website like Salon.com back in the 90s, the new media as well as social networking might not be that sophisticated as now they are.

 

A little sidetrack (if you are interested…)

David Talbot had also written a book called”Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” to reveal some new information about the assassination of President JFK!

http://www.amazon.ca/Brothers-Hidden-History-Kennedy-Years/dp/0743269195