The secret-spilling site Wikileaks announced this week that it's acquired thousands of e-mails belonging to a top aide to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But don't look for them online. In a departure from its full-disclosure past, Wikileaks is auctioning off the cache to the highest bidder.

Wikileaks began soliciting bids from media organizations on Tuesday, for what it describes as thousands of e-mails and attachments from 2005 to 2008 that provide insight into Chavez's management, CIA activities in Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution.

The winner gets exclusivity and embargoed access to the documents, though Wikileaks will publish all of them eventually.

The auction contrasts sharply with Wikileaks' original goal of recruiting legions of netizens to publicly analyze formerly secret corporate and government documents.

The site says the money it earns in the auction will go to its source defense fund.

University of Minnesota media ethics professor Jane Kirtley laughed when told of the scheme.

"Ethically speaking, why don't they just publish it?" Kirtley asked. "They pride themselves on being a new breed of news delivery."

Launched nearly two years ago, Wikileaks made its mark publishing sensitive Guantanamo Bay documents and fending off a lawsuit from Swiss banking company Julius Baer that attempted to wipe the site off the net, but only ended up rallying support for the site.

But Wikileaks' most public figure – Julian Assange, a former hacker and journalist – told Wired.com earlier this year that the wiki model had failed and that the site would be experimenting with new economic models, though he did not mention plans to ask media organizations to bid on leaked documents.

The auction is just an experiment, and carries too much overhead to be employed for every leak, Assange said by e-mail Tuesday.

When asked whether he expects news organizations such as The Washington Post to bid on documents, Assange argued that media outlets already pay for news.

"Media organizations pay hundreds of thousands to millions for photos and video footage," he said. "People magazine notoriously paid over $10 [million] for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's baby photos."

Stephen Aftergood, who runs a complementary and competing site called Secrecy News that focuses on U.S. government documents, called the e-mail trove a "coup" for Wikileaks. But Aftergood also doubts the auction model will attract quality media outlets.

"It looks like Wikileaks is still looking for the optimal method to distribute its materials," Aftergood said. "I think it will automatically rule out publications like The New York Times and others that might devote significant attention to an in-depth look at such internal e-mails but would not pay for them."

Outside of the tabloid press, U.S. media generally refuses to pay sources as a matter of professional ethics. The fear is that such payment would provide an economic incentive for sources to fabricate documents and stories.

Kirtley, who led the Reporters' Committee for the Freedom of the Press for 14 years, shares Aftergood's practical objections, noting that many outlets have strict policies against paying sources.

"Whether [U.S. media outlets] are cheap or have ethics, I don't know," Kirtly said."From an entrepreneurial standpoint, I think Wikileaks will be disappointed."

Assange, though, argues that any news worth reading is worth paying for.

"The degree to which news organizations refuse to pay for 'the' news is proportional to the degree to which they are able to bilk the public with unworthy alternatives," he writes.

"Indeed for anyone who has been in the news business for a while knows, manufacture of news is so arbitrary the result must be described primarily as mere entertainment."

For his part, Aftergood is skeptical of the auction, but he's not opposed to it.

"But maybe I'm wrong," he said. "It's worth a try."

UPDATE: This story was modified to note that the emails would be made public after a period of time when only the winning bidder has access. Professor Jane Kirtley's name was also misspelled.

Assange writes in with thoughts on scarcity and the perceived value of documents freely available on the web.

The big issue for Wikileaks is first rate source material going to waste because we make supply unlimited, so news organizations, wrongly or rightly, refuse to "invest" in analysis without additional incentives. The economics are counter-intuitive – temporarily restrict supply to increase uptake. This is not what we wanted to find, but it has been our solid experience over two years and is a known paradox in economics. Given that Wikileaks needs to restrict supply for a period to increase perceived value to the point that journalists will invest time to produce quality stories, the question arises as to which method should be employed to apportion material to those who are most likely to invest in it.

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