If you’re interested in look at Iraq under the microscope as it gets read to go to the polls, goes to the polls and what happens immediately after it votes there is a new website that is a must visit.
The website is Friends of Democracy (which we are blogrolling under Other Voices). Michael Totten will be editing it for the next two weeks and he explains in an email:
We have more than a dozen local Iraqi correspondents, at least one in
each province, filing daily reports. These reports include news,
interviews, quotes, photos, whatever they can get in a day. They
aren’t professional journalists. They are more or less ordinary
Iraqis. Some of them you already know – Omar and Mohammed from Iraq
the Model, for example. Others you don’t know because they don’t speak
or write in English. Their reports are translated from Arabic before
they are uploaded to the reports site.My job isn’t to edit the reports, exactly (they are published raw on a
secondary site), but to run a blog on the main site which summarizes,
excerpts, and links to the reports from the field. I’m also going to
be excerpting and linking to essays and posts in the Iraqi blogosphere
and – on rarer occasions – stories in the mainstream and Middle
Eastern media. The idea is to let Iraqis themselves tell their own
story of their own first free election.
He stresses that this site has nothing to do with him: "I am invisible. My name isn’t even on it."
In addition, he notes that this blog of comprehensive ground level election news from the Iraqis themselves is ujnlike anything out there "at least not in English. (We also have an Arabic site.)"
Indeed: the whole issue of Iraq is obviously politicized so it is interesting to read first hand accounts from people who are there.
During my time overseas, many publications — Time, Newsweek, etc. — used local stringers to supplement their coverage, tip them off, and give them inserts for reports written by correspondents who were sent in. My alma mater paper the San Diego Union also used the same kind of local "stringers" in covering nearby Tijuana.
Now readers — on the left and right — can read some first hand reports from Iraqis. No matter what your views on the war, this will be a must read site.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.