First of all, notice the name of this blog in the upper left. Time for a few changes around here. Sec­ondly, I received this email the other day from one of my con­trib­u­tors:

Mr. Allbrit­ton:
As a con­trib­u­tor to your trip to Iraq ear­lier this year, I wish you would return to Iraq and pro­vide an out­let for the col­lec­tive voice of the Iraqi peo­ple.
I have always been against the inva­sion of Iraq. I con­tinue to oppose our administration’s poli­cies. I feel that we are impos­ing our will rather than respect­ing the wishes of our fel­low human beings.
Would you con­sider return­ing to Iraq with the pur­pose of find­ing out just what the Iraqis want from us at this point?
With both sides of the polit­i­cal fence fail­ing to find answers, it just seems to make the most sense to turn straight to the source for answers.
If you can­not or choose not to return, can you please cre­ate a post that sum­ma­rizes pop­u­lar opin­ions of the var­i­ous Iraqi fac­tions towards the state of the coun­try and the con­tin­ued U.S. pres­ence? Or can you cre­ate a post that points to the best WWW out­lets for this kind of infor­ma­tion?
Thank you.
Sin­cerely,
Andrew Bren­ner
Whit­ing, Indi­ana USA

Andrew gra­ciously allowed me to repub­lish his note and use it as a start­ing to point to talk about some things.
Since the end of April, I’ve been back in New York, worked up a book pro­posal — which is cur­rently cir­cu­lat­ing; my agent reports that edi­tors are mak­ing interested-sounded noises — taught a class at “NYU”:http://journalism.nyu.edu on Dig­i­tal Jour­nal­ism and stewed and steamed while two coun­tries that I love, the United States and Iraq, march fur­ther down the road to a major league cock-up.
I’m not doing any­one any good here in New York. The action is over there, and while there are more reporters doing the jour­nal­ism of every day life, some­thing — I’m not sure what it is, exactly — is miss­ing from the cov­er­age.
So it’s time to get a move on and go back. But not as a reporter who goes there for a month and comes home. This time I would stay, per­haps per­ma­nently. My goal is to work up a return to the region, bas­ing myself in Bagh­dad and free­lance for major orga­ni­za­tions and con­tinue run­ning Back​-to​-Iraq​.com. In short, I would be your man in Bagh­dad, bring­ing my voice and expe­ri­ence that I gained dur­ing the war back to you.
This is not some gung-ho charge into the lion’s den in search of The Truth. I’ve stopped believ­ing there’s any such beast; there are only sto­ries to tell. But as dur­ing the early part of the war, in which donors directed cov­er­age by email­ing me sug­gested assign­ments, I would do that again. This time, how­ever, it would be on a long-term basis with an eye toward longish pieces that were both appeal­ing to you and mar­ketable as free­lance pieces (a guy’s got to earn a liv­ing, even there.)
No embed­ding, no hid­ing behind the skirts of the U.S. mil­i­tary. The Iraqi peo­ple would be front and cen­ter, and the big media corps can cover what they do. B2I would cover what _we_ want. I’d likely start with an empha­sis on the Kurdish/Arabic/Turkoman pow­derkeg known as Kirkuk, but only because it’s a good start­ing point. I’m most famil­iar with the issue there. How­ever, the Arabs got short shrift on this blog dur­ing the first part of the war. I’d like to rem­edy that.
My goal is to have enough money, $10,000 or so, in time to be on the ground and run­ning by March 26, 2004 early– to mid-May. Why that date? Because that’s exactly a year since I landed in Istan­bul and started work as the Web’s first fully reader-funded journalist-blogger I have teach­ing com­mit­ments at NYU that end May 3. This time, the money would go for set­ting myself up and hav­ing a small padding to make it through the time before free­lance cash begins to come my way.
I’m work­ing out plans now for what to do with my apart­ment, where to move to in the mean­time to save money, since that’s impos­si­ble on New York professor/freelance wages. I’ll prob­a­bly be out on my brother’s couch in Cal­i­for­nia for a few months before head­ing over.
And so we come to the crux of this note. You all were so gen­er­ous last time, and I hate to ask, but I ask you all to feel invested again and donate to this endeavor. Same deal as before. Donors get on a spe­cial list­serv that gets dis­patches before the Web site does. They will get extra dis­patches and pho­tos. They also get a pipeline to me to act as assign­ment edi­tors.
Now, in the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, you all should know that this endeavor can’t be the not-for-profit jaunt the last trip was. Then, I specif­i­cally rejected free­lance assign­ments from mag­a­zines so I could con­cen­trate on pure blog­ging. I can’t do that this time, as the money raised from this fund-raising call, as well as my own sav­ings, will go for the ini­tial costs of estab­lish­ing a pres­ence in Bagh­dad. After that, I’ll have to sup­port myself with string­ing and free­lanc­ing. But I promise you that B2I will remain a non-commercial blog with you, the read­ers, and the Iraqi peo­ple front and cen­ter. No one will edit this blog but me, and I won’t let other free­lanc­ing inter­fere with it.
So what do you say? Shall we suit up again for New New Jour­nal­ism? I hope so.