How are wikileaks different from general news we hear every day?

The question for my research today is going to be about wikileaks.  But before I begin, I need to find out what wikileaks are?

Using google's search engine, I searched "wikileaks"
With 84,500,000 results found.

After skipping the ad links, I click on the first result

http://213.251.145.96/

and this site was confirmed by wikipedia's link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks

To begin my research I find that

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks

But what I want to know is... How are wikileaks different from general news we hear every day?

I looked over the main website for wikileaks, which I posted above, but I found all of my information to answer my question today on the wikipedia link

WikiLeaks is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press^[5] organisation,^[6] claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. 

In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by US forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks releasedAfghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.^[10] In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran, to be mapped.^[11] In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.

Although wikileaks has received praise as well as criticism, it has won several awards and in 2010, the New York City Daily News listed WikiLeaks first among websites "that could totally change the news" 

Wikileaks isn't afraid to show the public the truth of certain events.  They find news links to inform us of what is truly going on in the world instead of "buttering it up" like the general news seems to do.  U.S. government officials have criticized Wikileaks saying that they expose classified information and they claim that the links could potentially harm society.  They use mirror sites to hold their databases.