Survivors of WikiLeaks Create OpenLeaks

Julian Assange became the story of the year in 2010. As 2011 moves forward, journalism has been changed forever. Whether you like Assange or not, he has changed history. Assange is arguably the biggest change agent of the decade. WikiLeaks has created a frenzy of its own sort.

Transparency should be the model of any democracy. Yet we live in an age where governments hide in layers of secrecy. Governments and their employees are humans and they can and do err.

Is Julian Assange a hero or is he a villain? Assange has friends in Iceland, Germany, and the U.K. But Assange must live on the run and seems to be in constant turmoil.

A couple of former members of WikiLeaks have started another branch of journalism 2.0 – called OpenLeaks. Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Herbert Snorrason want to be more transparent than their predecessor.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg is a German journalist who worked for WikiLeaks for three years. Herbert Snorrason is an Icelandic historian that by chance got involved with WikiLeaks.

On the 26th of January 2011 OpenLeaks went public. The main goal of OpenLeaks is to minimize the risks to whistleblowers. The new model will send leaked news to various news sources, instead of publishing the sources.

It remains to be seen if OpenLeaks will have the same impact that WikiLeaks did. And another possibility exists – the multiplication of more leaky networks. Whatever happens, Julian Assange has changed the landscape of journalism forever. Can major networks compete with his new wave of journalism?