Sterling informed Risen of the program he oversaw for the CIA. Risen dedicated a chapter in his book to it.
The Bush administration opened an investigation into the incident. Obama's Holder-led DOJ oversaw a criminal prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling.
At no point that I can find was Risen ever criminally charged for anything. For a period of several years, Risen fought a subpoena compelling him to testify, naming his source (Sterling had already been indicted). That subpoena was appealed all the way to SCOTUS and ultimately held up. Holder, who already had enough evidence to convict Sterling, ultimately backed off. Risen was never compelled to name his source.
To me, this is sort of an acid-test case. It is hard to imagine a more consequential singular leak than one that reveals a carefully-planned human-intelligence counter-proliferation mission against a hostile state. Sterling had a position that appears to have involved the utmost level of trust --- he wasn't a sysadmin disquieted by the documents he was uncovering, but an operations officer intimately familiar with and actively participating in the operation he revealed. There is a colorable argument that there should in a truly free government no state secrets. My sense is, if you think this leak was praiseworthy and the government's investigation "overreaching", as the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School writes here, you kind of have to sign on to that argument, don't you?
Two more thoughts:
First, Risen is a startlingly effective journalist, one of the best of his generation, up there on the leaderboard with Seymour Hersh. The lede of this piece sets up a narrative about a reporter persecuted by his own government. But (a) Risen wasn't prosecuted at all, and (b) his serious legal entanglements seem to involve a single case on his long resume, which resume is recounted at some length in this piece. The narrative effect is to suggest that the government fought as hard against his NSA and torture stories as they did against this one. But that's an argument that doesn't seem to be supported by evidence.
Second, more of a question: I've tried to read the indictments of all the leakers on the roster of the Obama administration leak prosecutions, often said to be the most zealous of any President. At one point in this piece, Coll states outright that the Holder DOJ had imprisoned "a half dozen" sources for journalists. That doesn't square numerically with the prosecutions that have been reported on, nor are most of those prosecutions about people who were sources for journalists (apart from Chelsea Manning).