Stefania Maurizi on how Julian Assange changed journalism:

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/05/08/stefania-maurizio-on-how-julian-assange-changed-journalism/

“Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have won numerous major journalism prizes, including Australia's highest journalistic honour (equivalent to the Pulitzer), the Walkley prize for “The Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism”, The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (UK), the Index on Censorship and The Economist's New Media Award, the Amnesty International New Media Award,and has been nominated for the UN Mandela Prize (2015) and the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize (nominated by Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire).
WikiLeaks has been repeatedly found by courts to be a media organization.

WikiLeaks receives censored and restricted documents anonymously after Julian Assange invented the first anonymous secure online submission system for documents from journalistic sources. For years it was the only such system of its kind, but secure anonymous dropboxes are now seen as essential for many major news and human rights organizations.

WikiLeaks publications have been cited in tens of thousands of articles and academic papers and have been used in numerous court cases promoting human rights and human rights defenders. For example, documents published by WikiLeaks were recently successfully used in the International Court of Justice over the UK's illegal depopulation of the Chagos Islands, which were cleared to make way for a giant US military base at the largest Island, Diego Garcia. The Islanders have been fighting for decades for recognition.

Julian Assange pioneered large international collaborations to secure maximum spread and contextual analysis of large whistleblower leaks. For “Cablegate”,WikiLeaks entered into partnerships with 110 different media organizations and continues to establish partnerships in its publications. This model has since been replicated in other international media collaborations with significant successes, such as the Panama Papers.”

“Not only have we learned a lot about the illegal activities of the US and other great powers. Not only have the WikiLeaks revelations put secret services on the defensive and set in motion legislative acts to better control them. WikiLeaks has achieved much more: millions of ordinary people have become aware of the society in which they live. Something that until now we silently tolerated as unproblematic is rendered problematic.” - Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/19/hypocrisy-freedom-julian-assange-wikileaks

See also Assange's awards and recognition