Snowden went to WAPO first but they didn't publish within his requested 72 hrs (ran by Govt) [View all]
So he went to Glenn Greenwald who did publish.
To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish within 72 hours the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the documents source.
I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when. (The Post broke the story two weeks later, on Thursday. The Post sought the views of government officials about the potential harm to national security prior to publication and decided to reproduce only four of the 41 slides.)
Snowden replied succinctly, I regret that we werent able to keep this project unilateral. Shortly afterward he made contact with Glenn Greenwald of the British newspaper the Guardian.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/code-name-verax-snowden-in-exchanges-with-post-reporter-made-clear-he-knew-risks/2013/06/09/c9a25b54-d14c-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_print.html