[Some good links at the end of this one, and mention of Circulars via our embedded Toronto correspondent, Darren W=H.]
By JOHN ALLEMANG
The first Gulf War did it for CNN. The new one may do it for 'blogs' -- personal Web pages of news and opinion, tracking and debating Iraq's fate by the minute. As JOHN ALLEMANG writes, they're now many people's first choice for unembedded journalism.
He calls himself George Paine, in a proud allusion to the 18th-century American patriot and pamphleteer Thomas Paine. But in every other respect, the young New York technology consultant is a man of these anxious times.
Talking into his cellphone at a patio table in a Chelsea café, keeping one eye on the darkening clouds while searching the Web for updates on the war in Iraq, the young man in his 20s is the very model of a communications revolution.
But the news George Paine accumulates and analyzes isn't just for his own peace of mind or intellectual hunger. Within minutes of finding an Arab-media contradiction of a CNN report, he will post it on his argumentative antiwar site, warblogging.com, and subversive readers who share his doubts will also share his newfound knowledge.
George Paine is what's called a blogger, a man who keeps a running log on the Web ("Web log" is contracted to "blog") of news and links of interest to him, with his own commentary. As it turns out, they are also of interest to tens of thousands of avid readers who don't believe that either government or the mainstream media have their best interests in mind.
"Seven or eight months ago," he says, "I was feeling dismayed by the direction my country was going in. I was looking for an outlet to share my feelings and maybe score some points against the authorities, and when the Patriot Act came along, I started the site."
With no formal journalistic training, he began by writing a paragraph or two about civil-liberties issues and the American war on terror. He reckons he had about 100 readers in the first month. But now, as the fog of war sweeps through Iraq, and eager reports of surrenders and uprisings disappear into the desert air, about 100,000 readers search warblogging.com for news and arguments ("I am ashamed that my country is engaged in an aggressive war") that embedded journalists can't or won't put forward.
George Paine is now writing thousands of words every day, and with the help of sympathetic readers, he is passing on hundreds of links where a wider range of war stories are told. And he is still working full-time as a technology consultant. "I post during the day, but I don't allow it to interfere with my day job," he says. "I'm blogging on breaks, or while I'm waiting for someone to call back. If I spend nine or 10 hours in the office, I'll bill for eight."
This is a large part of how the world, and especially that part of it under 40, is informing itself about the war. The truth, as they see it, is being composed on coffee breaks by people nowhere near the front lines, writers who are beholden to no one -- except perhaps the bosses in their off-line lives, who force them to use a liberating pseudonym.
Using free and relatively simple software available from such sites as blogger.com, with tools that can handle a huge amount of data, anyone with a modem can publish his views and find a following. And that following will probably grow, as younger readers numbed by the conventions of mainstream reporting and discouraged by its connections to government find a shared intimacy in the Web's daily diaries.
"I think that sort of clarity of voice and immediacy is more possible on Web logs than in any print media," says Dean Allen of textism.com. "I can't think of another broadcast medium that has such a potential for directness. Someone reporting live from the battlefield for CNN can't come close: As impressive as it can be, the reporter is still speaking though an editorial, journalistic gauze."
Of course, when anyone can do all this at low cost and with minimal technological skill, there's no shortage of eye-glazing egomania. Personal Web logs -- the daily, hourly and even minute-by-minute chronicles of lifeless keystrokers -- abound on the Web and have a terrible reputation among the serious-minded war bloggers. Yet even the war chroniclers, Mr. Allen says, seem to be getting carried away by both the recent deluge of recent media hype and the increased feedback their sites are receiving.
"These factors have led to oceans of unself-consciously hilarious self-importance on the part of people who are, after all, sitting in front of a computer typing a commentary through links on this and that."
And for all the alternative-culture myth-making that surrounds blogging, it is not the exclusive preserve of the enlightened fringe. Hard as it is to believe, one of the roots of all this harried Web activity was Matt Drudge's scandal-chasing Drudge Report. Andrew Sullivan, one of the pioneers of blogdom's public-pundit side, came to the Web from the editorship of the influential magazine The New Republic, and actually makes good money from his daily words.
Power-worshippers as diverse as David Frum and Warren Kinsella now share their thoughts with Web readers, and few mainstream news operations don't include a Web log somewhere on their site -- in the case of msnbc.com and its affiliated slate.com, that comes to means all blogs, all the time.
This mainstreaming of the Web log caused trouble for CNN's Iraq reporter Kevin Sites, whose much admired personal war blog kevinsites.net was ordered closed (temporarily, he hopes) by the people paying his salary.
Yet the most powerful blog to emerge from the war in Iraq is not from a North American networker, but from a Baghdad blogger who calls himself Salam Pax (from the Arabic and Latin words for peace). Salam is described as a worldly, 28-year-old, gay architect, who has little use for either Saddam Hussein or the war against him. But what makes his diary so affecting is the way it achieves an easy intimacy that eludes the one-size-fits-all coverage of Baghdad's besieged residents.
Humane in an inhuman environment, Salam writes of how to pack in case you have to flee, why he dislikes the self-appointed foreign human shields ("every third one of these shields will be writing an article somewhere"), what you need to buy when the Americans are coming (manual pump, 60 litres of gasoline, two kerosene cookers, particle masks), the music on the radio ("What good are patriotic songs when bombs are dropping?") and the distressing TV behaviour of Iraq's Interior Minister ("Hurling abuse at the world is the only thing left for them to do").
Like all good bloggers, once discovered, Salam has been overwhelmed by comments and questions. "Please stop sending e-mails asking if I were for real," he writes. "Don't believe it? Then don't read it. I am not anybody's propaganda ploy -- well, except my own."
For Paul Grabowicz, a professor of new media at the University of California School of Journalism at Berkeley, it's this kind of dialogue, along with the back-and-forth debates at more formal sites, that elevates Web logs into a powerful new form of communication.
"Traditional journalism can be very good at collecting information, writing great narratives and crafting a story. But that's just the starting point -- if there's no conversation, it's like making art and not showing it in a gallery. To me, the whole point is to get people talking."
Part of that conversation demands that you know what other people are looking at. Toronto writer and teacher Darren Wershler-Henry finds out through a site called Blogdex, which tracks the top stories being read on Web logs. "This way you know what everyone else on the Web is talking about," he says, "The more connectivity you can generate, the more powerful are your applications."
Mr. Wershler-Henry contributes to three Web logs when he's not writing poetry or teaching communications students at York University. At http://www.arras.net/circulars, he and New York writer Brian Stefans have brought together a blog group they title "Poets, Artists and Critics Respond to U.S. Policy."
Here, you can learn how to filter out jingoistic spam, read an eye-opening PRWeek magazine article on how the White House spins its public relations, link to a gambling site where you can bet on Saddam Hussein's future (the odds change rapidly) or follow the diary of a American teaching in Turkey. All of this, Mr. Wershler-Henry says, contributes to creating "communities of interest."
Some observers, such as Mr. Grabowicz, are critical of sites that are simply an excuse for people of like minds to agree, but Mr. Wershler-Henry resists the idea that the poets, artists and critics may be segregating themselves.
"The Internet was founded on rigorous debate," he says, "and you don't have to go far to see a lively discussion. You read one Web log and, sure, you're limited in what you're seeing. But if you read one newspaper or watch one television network, you're just as limited."
At this early stage in war-blog history, most sites are extremely wide-ranging and and almost unbearably informative (do these people ever leave their laptops?) without sacrificing the first-person approach. Eric Alterman writes an opinionated column called Altercations for msnbc.com, and his paragraphs are filled with blue-tinted links.
"I make my arguments," he says, mentioning how he had called the Bush foreign-policy team incompetent bozos. "But it's important for me to show that I'm not just talking off the top of my head."
By writing for a mainstream outlet such as msnbc.com, Mr. Alterman gets much stronger reactions than he would if he were isolated in his own private blog space. He quotes a letter he's just opened (all bloggers are unapologetic multitaskers) that calls his diary "a compendium of extremist stupidity." And yet, he says, this wider exposure of his intimate thoughts is both good and necessary.
"You judge a man by his enemies to some extent. I need to be exposed to ideas outside my own cocoon."
That will certainly happen to bloggers as more and more big media organizations pick up on the device, and many Web logs will undoubtedly lose their edge as they move upscale. But even now, reaching thousands of readers instead of dozens, many war bloggers say they can only practise their craft by treating it as the personal space it originally was.
"It really doesn't concern me whether anyone looks at this besides me," Bruce Rolston says. Mr. Rolston, who manages a university Web site by day and serves as a Canadian Forces logistics officer on weekends, writes a wonderfully detailed analysis of the war's tactics at http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/flit.
Though he disclaims any military expertise, Mr. Rolston's trenchant critiques of what he believes is going on are bracing to war obsessives who need to know everything -- a group that appears to be growing day by day. If you want to follow the movements of the 101st Airborne, or consider how bad the fighting in Najal might be, or conjecture why the beleaguered U.S. military might cut some ties with the embedded journalists, read the man with the laptop in Toronto.
No newspaper editor or TV producer would ever allow Mr. Rolston's work near a general reader or viewer, for fear of taxing or boring them. But war creates a need to know and the desire to share expertise, whether it's about daily life in Baghdad, antiwar poets in New York, or where the war is going on the banks of the Euphrates.
"The thirst for information on-line is remarkable now," Mr. Rolston says. "It's a defence mechanism after Sept. 11 -- people are willing to suck the information system dry."
John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
Top war blogs
Some of the most popular and admired Web logs following the war, all linked with numerous other blogs and news sites:
The Agonist:
http://www.agonist.org
Renowned for its rapid reporting, this is the site many people turn to for the latest developments.
Tacitus:
A smart, generous pro-war blog specializing in strategy and deep background.
The Command Post:
Minute-by-minute war updates, and reliably rant-free.
Warblogging.com:
All-encompassing news and views, from an antiwar perspective.
Back to Iraq 2.0:
Supported by on-line donations, journalist Christopher Allbritton has been hailed as the first independent Web foreign correspondent.
Where is Raed?:
Moving accounts of daily life in Baghdad, now worryingly sporadic.
Kevin Sites:
The CNN correspondent's suspended personal site chronicles life in Northern Iraq.
InstaPundit:
Labelled the Grand Central Station of Bloggerville for its wide-ranging links, bolstered by cocky opinionizing from a Tennessee law professor.
Eschaton:
Mouthy, to-the-point observations on bad government and weak media.
-- John Allemang
Posted by Brian Stefans at March 31, 2003 12:41 AMI like your style
Posted by: Fred on November 29, 2003 07:34 AM