Another Kind of Tip Jar

The recent surge in hyperlocal media has just met the WikiLeaks era. The new website localeaks is an interesting experiment described by Audrey Watters as "A Drop-Box for Anonymous Tips to 1400 U.S. Newspapers":

Although the mission of WikiLeaks is to "open governments," it's done quite a lot to make us think about how to open journalism as well. We've seen a number of new whistleblower sites crop up—OpenLeaks and Rospil, for example—as well as major news organizations—Al Jazeera, and perhaps even The New York Times—investigate ways to facilitate more whistle-blowing and leaking.

But why wait for local newspapers to roll out their own anonymous tips pipeline when a project from CUNY Graduate School's Entrepreneurial Journalism program has designed just that thing.

Using Localeaks, you can send an anonymous tip, including a file, to over 1400 newspapers in the U.S. through one online form. Choose your state. Choose the newspaper. Enter your information and submit your anonymous tip.

Bonus reading: "After the Newspaper," from early 2009, in which I speculated about "local equivalents [of WikiLeaks] appearing in the future."

Via Jeff Jarvis, who also shares a funny tidbit from Davos: "Sad irony: the session on transparency was off-the-record."