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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
Team work
The Guardian brought the journalistic skills and expertise required to figure out what
was important, and the resources and commitment to deal responsibly with highly
sensitive material. David Leigh, The Guardian's investigations editor, spent the summer
of 2010 reading through the material. In September, about forty Guardian reporters
worked exclusively on the cables, led by the deputy editor responsible for news, Ian
Katz. Several teams were established in The Guardian's London offices to make sense
of the vast store of information. Journalists were allocated the appropriate resources to
cover this story and not leave the documents festering on WikiLeaks. A considerable
degree of expertise was needed to work with the complex databases and the large
amount of raw material (an estimated 300 million words), as well as the ability to
publish outside the reach of any individual jurisdiction (Wilson, 2010).
In the first days of June, Schmitt, from NYT's Washington bureau, worked at The
Guardian´s facilities to analyse and confirm that material was genuine. In London, he
led the The New York Times´ efforts with the material, “how to organise and study such
a voluminous cache of information; how to securely transport, store and share it; how
journalists from three very different publications would work together without
compromising their independence” (Keller, 2010). At that point, there was no clue
about the diplomatic cables. In fact, Assange was holding those back to see how the
venture with established media worked out. Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor, was the
main coordinator in processing the embassy cables. He met Julian Assange in
November and he coordinated the team to lead the reports. Dean Baquet, Washington
bureau chief, was the leader who negotiated with the White House. David E. Sanger,
chief Washington correspondent, was responsible for aligning the documents in
relation with the U.S. government international policy.
El País assigned thirty of its best journalists to work on the U.S. Embassy Cables,
coordinated with the coalition of news organisations. They launched an online tool to
collect all the news and reports on the issue (www.elpais.com/documentossecretos). It
was the first time this newspaper published something of the sort. The executive editor
was directly responsible for managing this team. “The team work required in a
newsroom is even more important with these types of documents” (2010b). To dissect
and analyse the information, they organised the material into 150 topics. Some
expertise journalists were assigned to address chats and questions from the audience.
Soledad Gallego-Díaz, Buenos Aires correspondent, was one of those journalists
assigned to analyse the Spanish focus on the cables and the relations between the
U.S. Government and South American countries. “We have been analysing the
documents with ethical and professionals criteria" (Gallego-Díaz, 2010).
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