Pajamas Media is providing extensive coverage of the situation in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza and has a huge roundup, continuously updated. If you're looking for information on the war that you will not find in the MSM, that's the place to go.
With full-time editors in Sydney, Barcelona and Los Angeles working with contributing bloggers worldwide in such places as Tel Aviv, Haifa, Baghdad and Washington, Pajamas Media has been offering round-the-clock battlefield reporting in tandem with the most thoughtful commentary from the global blogosphere and traditional sources. Under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Gerard Van der Leun in Seattle, Pajamas Media mixes the best news and views from on-the-scene citizen journalists with seasoned professionals in an unprecedented manner.
A literal living chronology of the ongoing Israel-Hezbollah War has been created and made available on the Pajamas Media front page (http://www.pajamasmedia.com). "This chronology's intention is to give the public moment-to-moment access to the vicissitudes of the war and ultimately to provide historians with a record of the evolving struggle," says Pajamas' CEO Roger L. Simon.
Podcast Interviews with Middle Eastern Bloggers and Citizens
In the early stages of the war, PJM wanted direct and exclusive coverage from the Middle East. With this Politics Central readers could actually hear what was going on from the people on the ground themselves.
"When we discovered a seventeen-year old — Eugene — blogging from a bunker in Haifa ('Live from an Israeli Bunker' @ http://www.israelibunker.blogspot.com), we jumped at the opportunity to do a podcast interview with him," said Simon. After Simon's podcast with Eugene was published on the Pajamas Media site, the young man from Haifa was immediately interviewed by the Washington Post, CNN and NBC, creating a virtual blog firestorm.
A situation like this is where bloggers can really be an enormous asset and source of information. Let's face it, a war correspondent only goes where the troops are. They wouldn't go see what life in a bunker is like.
What I have found so ironic in this is the extent to which the blogs are earning their place as legitimate sources of information. In many cases there are people on the spot reporting what they are seeing or people who have been in a professional capacity in military or government providing more insight in their analysis than the commercial media provides.
It was only a couple of months ago that Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post complained to the graduating class at the University of Maryland that “the public appears more and more willing to receive its ‘news’ online from nincompoops ranting in their underpants”. And now I see journalists from The Washington Post on Lebanese blogs begging for interviews.
Some blogs aggregate commercial news sources, some add opinion and analysis to a varying degree, most provide a forum for discussion and an increasing number are people who have some real life experiance that makes their analysis particularly valuable. These people no longer need to wait to “be discovered” by some media outlet. Blogs allow them to print and distribute their work globally.
This crises is, I believe, the first war with “blog coverage” and some of that coverage is not only more interesting than the commercial coverage, it is increasingly the source of the commercial coverage.
Weingarten has it all wrong. Many nincompoops rant commando.
Jokes aside, I think blogging will continue to grow and the traditional MSM will continue to suffer unless and until they get with the new program.