How Wikileaks Can Factor into a New Business Model

(MoneyWatch)  Last week, Wikileaks scored a journalistic coup by releasing what it characterizes as "nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress. The documents cache consists of 6,780 reports by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which is sometimes referred to as "Congress's Brain." This represents the agency's total digital inventory, dating back to 1990, and many of the reports cover sensitive issues such the U.S.-Israel relationship and Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

CRS reports are not classified, but unless you are politically connected, they can be hard to obtain -- at least until now. Members of Congress and sister agencies like the General Accounting Office (GAO), which is the investigative arm of Congress.

Reporters traditionally have prized CRS reports due to their reputation as being relatively non-partisan and authoritative. So this is an attractive database for journalists and citizens to peruse, hunting for new angles on some of the most contentious issues of our time.

During an earlier look at Wikileaks and a couple other services last summer, I speculated about how this type of accountability site might be changing media, expanding coverage into issues and policies that all too often remain opaque to the press.

One thing that has become clear in the interim is that obscure documents like these can be keyword-matched and linked with the news and analytical content developed by media companies, thereby enhancing the user experience and providing necessary context for understanding complex matters.

Plus, from a business perspective, all of this data is free content (albeit already paid for by our tax dollars) that we can aggregate and present with a minimum of effort. At a talk I gave to a group of visiting journalists today at Stanford, I described how we discovered early on as online content producers how valuable free content was building robust websites and services.

At Salon in the 1990s, for example, grabbing free news service headlines and abstracts, transcripts of speeches, and other public domain content was a critical component of our effort to reduce the overall cost of content to an acceptable level, given budgetary constraints.

By now, everyone in the online content space knows how expensive traditional content creation is compared to aggregation. This, of course, is the but everybody is trying to crack -- how to finance the original work, the real journalism, that lies at the core of any newspaper, TV or radio news programming, or content website?

Nobody yet knows the answer to that question, but public service organizations like Wikileaks are providing us with more tools to search for one.