Back to Iraq | Being a recounting of my journalistic ventures in Iraq

Recently, my old boss, Jay Rosen, a jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor at NYU, penned a response to Michael Skube, who said that by and large, blog­gers rely on pub­lished report­ing from estab­lished media out­lets and don’t pro­vide a great deal of orig­i­nal report­ing on their own. Opin­ion and argu­ment is the cur­rency of the of blo­gos­phere, not report­ing — a state­ment that seems rather self-evident if you spend any time on the Inter­net. But that’s not good enough for Jay. He had to go and find exam­ples of blog­gers doing jour­nal­ism to show that there is so report­ing on the Net. In the process of find­ing 14 exam­ples — includ­ing me, which I’ll deal with in a moment — Jay attempted to put to rest Skube’s claim. Instead, he proved it.
Some of the blog­gers men­tioned in Jay’s piece, espe­cially the ones doing “real” report­ing, are already reporters in “real life.” Josh Mar­shall was a Wash­ing­ton jour­nal­ist before he started Talk­ing Points Memo. Michael Yon was a pub­lished author before he started his blog and today he’s sup­ported by a com­bi­na­tion of reader dona­tions and free­lanc­ing to places like The Weekly Stan­dard and Fox News. (They’re reprint­ing his dis­patches, but pre­sum­ably he’s get­ting some cash for this.)
Oth­ers are no doubt pro­vid­ing a pub­lic ser­vice and even doing some jour­nal­ism. Good for them. When I started Back-to-Iraq, almost five years ago, I was hope­ful that my brand of online jour­nal­ism, sup­ported by the pub­lic, would take off. That’s not been the case. Why? Because doing jour­nal­ism is expen­sive.
Josh has investors. Michael free­lances and embeds him­self where his costs are mainly paid for by the U.S. gov­ern­ment. (Food, trans­porta­tion around Iraq, con­nec­tion costs, etc.) And as for me, I stopped get­ting dona­tions long ago — I got kind of bored by the hus­tle required — and I sup­port myself by free­lanc­ing. And that brings me to my point. Jay’s list of 14 sites proves Skube’s cen­tral idea: there are very, very few blogs out there doing what might be called orig­i­nal report­ing. A friend of mine called it the Yertle-the-Turle Syn­drome: “blovi­a­tor on top of blovi­a­tor on top of blovi­a­tor on top of one lowly reporter, buried at the bot­tom of the pile, gath­er­ing the facts of the mat­ter,” he said.
As for me, I am not a “blog­ger.” I am a jour­nal­ist who chose to blog to make a career move. I am still a jour­nal­ist, proudly embed­ded in the so-called main­stream media, which gen­er­ates about 99.9999% of the orig­i­nal report­ing today. When I was first get­ting ready to go to Iraq in early 2003, many reporters called me and asked me why I was doing it, why blog? “I blog,” I said, “for the same rea­son I don’t use a man­ual type­writer instead of a lap­top. It’s the best tool for the job.” I still believe that in my case.
The arti­cles that Jay linked that I wrote were all done when I was in Iraq for TIME Mag­a­zine. I’m not sure why he didn’t link to my report­ing from April 2003 dur­ing the inva­sion, when it really was just for the blog, but there you go. I’ve been a jour­nal­ist since 1990, when I started at the Arkansas Demo­c­rat in Lit­tle Rock. I have a degree from Colum­bia University’s Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism and I’ve worked for The Asso­ci­ated Press, the New York Daily News and free­lanced for more news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines than I care to remem­ber. (They include New York mag­a­zine, TIME, Boston Globe, Newark Star-Ledger, Die Zeit, Wash­ing­ton TImes, San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle, Sin­ga­pore Strait-Times and oth­ers.) I’m work­ing on pitches for Esquire and oth­ers right now. Almost every day I’m engaged in shoe-leather report­ing here in Lebanon and the wider Mid­dle East and I try keep my opin­ions pre­sented on this blog backed up by my own report­ing. (It’s not a per­fect sys­tem; some­times I rant.)
Blog­ging can be really great. It’s empow­er­ing for the indi­vid­ual, you can do some risky stuff (you need to watch your facts, ethics, etc.) and it allows you to get your stuff out there when you can’t get the stuff in a mag­a­zine. The cul­ture has moved in such a way that includ­ing blog clips is per­fectly respectable to include now for a writ­ing assign­ment. But equat­ing the aver­age blog with jour­nal­ism done by sea­soned pros at the The New York Times or the Wash­ing­ton Post is wrong. It cheap­ens what costs money and time to pro­duce and it reduces the value of the “prod­uct.” It helps turn news into a com­mod­ity that makes jour­nal­ism worse because news­pa­pers can’t fig­ure out how to make money off it. And if they can’t do that, they’ll close down or scale back cov­er­age — to the detri­ment of all. Tragedy of the com­mons and all.
So, blog away, but please leave me out of the lists show­ing blog­gers doing jour­nal­ism. A blog is just a medium after all. Is every­one on TV a news anchor just because they share a stu­dio? Of course not. So at the risk of sound­ing elit­ist, just because I have a blog doesn’t mean I’m in your club — or you in mine.