Matt Terenzio, an entrepreneurial journalism student at CUNY, has developed Localeaks, which lets citizens “leak” anonymous tips to more than 1,400 local U.S. newspapers.

The service operates via an online form that allows you to pick your local newspaper and then submit your tip. As you would expect from an anonymous service, Localeaks encrypts the data, removes any identifiable metadata, and scrubs session cookies and IP addresses from the data exchange. Localeaks also destroys the original tip/file that was uploaded.

After the file is submitted, the newspaper receives an email alert; if they want to follow-up on the tip, the newspaper replies and initiates a secure file transfer. If not, the files are never transferred.

Localeaks seems like a natural evolution given that, as Terenzio points out, “the people formerly called the audience and the sources are setting the pace of change, not the news organizations.”

Localeaks

[via Jeff Jarvis and ReadWriteWeb]