It’s extremely newsworthy, but coverage of the kidnapping would have made Rhode a more valuable hostage. The higher profile the captive, the more attention the captors and their demands get – and the lower the chance of a happy ending.

In situations like this, news organisations often agree to hold off on reporting certain events. They lose a story in the short term, but a reporter gets a better chance at coming home.

In any case, for better or worse, everyone gets their story eventually.

This mutual cooperation used to be relatively straightforward to organise – journalists, especially war correspondents, are a pretty cliquey bunch – but it is one of the long list of things that have received a thorough shaking-up in the internet revolution.

Wikipedia, in particular, was a major problem.

Just three days after the kidnapping, despite a total blackout in the traditional media, the first Wikipedia user made reference to it on Rhode’s article – the first of a dozen attempts.

The NYT got in touch with Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, to arrange the removal of any trace of the story. Wales oversaw the effort himself, and spoke about it to the NYT.

We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source. I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.

But the general public were not the only ones who’d be looking at Wikipedia. The next concern was what Rhode’s captors would see when they began researching him online.

A colleague of his, Michael Moss, began altering Rhode’s entry. He highlighted that many pieces of Rhode’s work were sympathetic to Muslims, and removed all trace of his work with the Christian Science Monitor, fearing that the religious associations of the name wouldn’t sit well with the Taliban.

The idea was to convince them that Rhode was on-side, worth keeping around.

I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be. I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.

So, not only was the NYT suppressing information on a supposedly free, collaborative encyclopedia, but it was actively distorting it. An organisation devoted to shining a light on the facts was hiding them away, and even spinning them for Taliban approval.

Not so many years ago, newspaper editors decided what was and wasn’t worth column inches, and could hold off on stories to protect a group or an individual. It doesn’t happen that way anymore. A stray Facebook update, Tweet or blog post, and a story can explode whether mainstream media are involved or not.

The Iranian elections were covered extensively , despite strong efforts to stop any information leaks. Well, the door swings both ways.

In Rhode’s case the cat was kept mostly in the bag, but it required a massive and sustained effort. The help of Wikipedia’s founder, no less. That won’t happen every time.

Whether the NYT was right or wrong to do what they did is academic. If I was being held captive my idealist viewpoint on free information and open knowledge would be quickly distorted. In fact, it would be stretched to breaking point pretty much instantly.

PC Pro very rarely sends correspondents to war zones, but if it ever does I hope we’ll be dusting off those old Wikipedia accounts.