Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by krapp 2597 days ago
Assange doesn't write news, and classified documents are not, themselves, the product of journalism merely for being leaked. Writing a story about the Pentagon papers is journalism, printing them verbatim without context or comment is not journalism.

If running a website which publishes third party content makes one a journalist then I guess Reddit makes spez a journalist too.

1 comments

So an editor-in-chief is not a journalist to you?
> So an editor-in-chief is not a journalist to you?

I don't know, ask Wikipedia, because my comment was using the definition you provided via that site.

Either way, the answer isn't relevant to Assange or Wikileaks. He's not an editor in chief, because he doesn't run an organization which has editorial policies or which writes stories which have to conform to those policies. We disagree that the definition you provided applies to Assange - as I see it, it clearly doesn't.

There's a reason Snowden didn't go to Wikileaks - he wanted journalists to handle the release of his information responsibly, and to provide the necessary context and framing narrative to the public. Wikileaks would simply have dumped all of them onto the web, because that's what they do.

Correct. In the same way that a coach is not a player