March 28, 2003
Steven Levy on warblogging and big media
Steven Levy takes on blogs, war, and conventional media in Newsweek today. (Minor point, but let's ditch the Newsweek-style spelling "webloger." Y'know: logger ... weblogger ... weblogging. Hullo? Excerpt:
Perhaps it was inevitable that this war would become the breakthrough for blogs. The bigmouths of the so-called Blogosphere have long contended that the form deserves to be seen as a significant component of 21st-century media. And in the months preceding the invasion, blogging about the impending conflict had been feisty and furious. But it wasnít until the bombs hit Baghdad that Weblogs finally found their moment. The arrival of war, and the frustratingly variegated nature of this particular conflict, called for two things: an easy-to-parse overview for news junkies who wanted information from all sides, and a personal insight that bypassed the sanitizing Cuisinart of big-media news editing. ...
Ý Ý ÝEven some of the soldiers have been blogging. An American officer calling himself L.T. Smash presents sharp observations from his bivouac and some misty-eyed patriotism.Ý Ý Ý Ý The role of professional reporters is another matter. One blogger, freelancer Chris Allbritton, used his site to solicit $10,000 from readers to fund a trip to blog from the northern front. (Heís just arrived in Turkey and will be in-country soon.) The BBC has a blog, and a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter has been using a blog to describe her stay on the USS Abraham Lincoln. But when CNN reporter Kevin Sitesís bosses found out heíd been blogging his experiences on an unaffiliated site, they told him to stop.
Ý Ý Ý Ý CNNís response was seen in the Blogosphere as one more sign that the media dinosaurs are determined to stamp out this subversive new form of reporting. But judging from the television and print reports from journalists embedded in military units, thereís another way to look at things. Consider the reports from embedded journalists working for media institutions. Theyíre ad hoc, using quick-and-dirty high-tech tools to pinpoint the reality of a single moment. They are shaped by the personal experience of the creator rather than gathering news from after-the-fact interviewing and document collection. They are delivered in the first person, creating a connection with the viewer that sometimes bulldozes over the deeper realties of the events.
Ý Ý Ý Ý In other words, theyíre a hell of a lot like blogs. Not the heavily linked Weblogs like The Agonist or Instapundit but the personal accounts of Salamóor the thousands of bloggers who use the technology to keep a running diary of their activities for a small circle of friendsóor anyone who cares to listen in.
Backpack journalists and warblogs
Two stories on online journalism's role in the Iraq war:
AP story: Backpack journalists report from combat zones.
Armed with $15,000 in satellite phones and computers, Preston Mendenhall calls himself a "one-man band" who writes stories, snaps photographs and shoots video in combat zones.
Turning to Web for war news: "The Internet has been my lifeline on war developments."
Online journals, or blogs, alerted me to stories I might have missed.I read plenty about how Iraqis were cheering at a downed American helicopter. But only through the InstaPundit blog did I find a Los Angeles Times report on Iraqi-Americans hearing relatives in Iraq denouncing Saddam Hussein for the first time.
One site, meanwhile, showed gruesome shots of what looked like dead U.S. troops. One new e-mail discussion list, GulfWar-2, referred to a site with footage of American prisoners, some wounded, being interrogated by Iraqi television.
Faulty reporting from the war front
From Editor & Publsher, a list of stories on the Iraq war that have been misreported or poorly reported so far:
1. Saddam may well have been killed in the first night's surprise attack
(March 20).
2. Even if he wasn't killed, Iraqi command and control was no doubt
"decapitated" (March 22).
3. Umm Qasr has been taken (March 22).
4. Most Iraqis soldiers will not fight for Saddam and instead are surrendering
in droves (March 22).
5. Iraqi citizens are greeting Americans as liberators (March 22).
6. An entire division of 8,000 Iraqi soldiers surrendered en masse near Basra
(March 23).
7. Several Scud missiles, banned weapons, have been launched against U.S.
forces in Kuwait (March 23).
8. Saddam's Fedayeen militia are few in number and do not pose a serious
threat (March 23).
9. Basra has been taken (March 23).
10. Umm Qasr has been taken (March 23).
11. A captured chemical plant likely produced chemical weapons (March 23).
12. Nassiriya has been taken (March 23).
13. Umm Qasr has been taken (March 24).
14. The Iraqi government faces a "major rebellion" of anti-Saddam citizens in
Basra (March 24).
15. A convoy of 1,000 Iraqi vehicles and Republican Guards are speeding south
from Baghdad to engage U.S. troops (March 25).
State of the world
Paul Saffo got this in his email in-box today:
You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war.
A photojournalist friend in Iraq
I've started reading photo credits on the hundreds of war images I'm coming across in newspapers and magazines. This morning I spotted, to my surprise, the name of an old friend, a colleague from the Sacramento Bee who left for the LA Times about seven years ago: Carolyn Cole. Many of her photos are included in the LA Times' photo gallery of the war. She's one of the few women photojournalists in the field there.
Here's her latest photo gallery this morning after the shelling in Baghdad. The third image, republished below, ran in the San Jose Mercury News this morning.
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| The Shamua family was having breakfast when an artillery shell struck, killing a mother and her two children. |
Protesters target the news media
CBS.MarketWatch.com: Not only have antiwar protesters been complaining about the war in Iraq, they're now accusing the media of bias in favor of the Bush administration. Fox News, especially, has gone overboard in using "we, are, us" in their descriptions of U.S. troops.
Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
QuickTopic on Kevin Sites
QuickTopic has more than 600 postings on CNN's decision to stop its correspondent Kevin Sites' personal weblog from Iraq. I think this discussion has just about run its course.
By the way, spotted Kevin Sites last night on CNN during his report from the bottom of a bomb crater. He's quite a likable fellow.
Corante's got game
Corante, which long ago became a must-stop on my daily blog travels -- they feature such weblogs as Donna Wentworth's Copyfight, Hylton Jolliffe On Blogging. Jonathan Peterson's Amateur Hour, Dana Blankenhorn's Moore's Lore, and Renee Hopkins' Idea Flow, among others -- has added another blog to its lineup.
Andy Phelps is writing Got Game? The future of play. Not only fun, but informative. Writeth Mr. Phelps:
This blog is about tracking the rise of games as a medium of popular culture, and perhaps the medium of the times. The Jonesí kids all have game consoles, but more and more itís not just Saturday morning entertainment - games are impacting peoples lives in a way never seen before. There are fan sites, art books, academic theses, and a massive entertainment industry all waking up to the fact that these things are a lot more important than we gave them credit for.
Public hasn't embraced Movielink
Wired News: My friend Katie Dean has a report from Universal City on Movielink's efforts to win the hearts and minds of film lovers.
Website offers new view of music
BBC News: A website that acts as your personal music adviser has been set up by a student at Britain's University of Southampton.
Al-Jazeera's reporting on the war
Commentary in the Guardian UK: Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war.
