November 10, 2003

Blogging Polticos ... and "Microjournalism"

Wired.com looks at the new "community" blog resource planned by Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark. I don't care for Clark's politics, but his campaign's approach to using the Internet and blogs is certainly interesting.

Also in the same topical vicinity - blogs - is this from MediaPost.com, which examines the role and impact of blogs and "social networking" software on the news business. MediaPost.com is a new addition to my blogroll, under the "Media" category.

And Editor&Publisher has a story on blogging freelance journalist Chris Allbritton, who raised donations via his blog to fund a reporting trip to northern Iraq, where he reported on the war and its impact on the Kurds.

is coverage of the war was very different than that of traditional embedded journalists. His blog spends ample time musing on the future of Iraq and his observations on the transitional society he sees around him. Further, Allbritton uses his intense personal interest in the plight of the Kurds to discuss their ordeal in great detail - an issue he feels the mainstream press is uninterested in and often ignores.

"The Kurds were our best allies," Allbritton said. "They had 70,000 troops [in the American-led coalition], the Brits had 30 or 40,000."

Allbritton faults the "absolutely awful" war coverage by television outlets, but feels that newspapers, particularly The New York Times and The Washington Post, did an admirable job of covering the war. Allbritton also insists coverage such as his, which he believes benefited from its independence from the influence of editors and corporate-owned newspapers, should not be a substitute for more established media outlets.

"I feel that this type of microjournalism, or guerrilla journalism, should really be an addition to your media diet," Allbritton said. "Maybe the vitamins or the garnish rather than some kind of replacement for The New York Times. No one has a monopoly on the truth. It's usually better for readers or the public to go to several different sources and try to get as much of the mosaic of the truth as possible. I was part of that. I felt it was important to have someone in there without adding any kind of filter."

Allbritton says he utilized his close contact with his readers to create a more interactive style of journalism: "My readers e-mailed me and asked me to investigate stories. They would suggest story ideas. I didn't have one editor to answer to, I had thousands. And that was a new way of doing journalism."