Steven Levy tackles a much-blogged subject of late — blogs, war, and conventional media — with fresh insight in a Newsweek story today. He also coins a handy new term: embloggers. If you find this of interest, you may also want to check out this blog that Anil Dash recently built to document press coverage of the recently-suspended-by-CNN kevinsites.net. The items in that press clip archive are tracked because they reference Sites' blog, but they all explore broader issues of blogs as a tranformative force in modern media, as does Steven Levy's story below.
The role of professional reporters is another matter. One blogger, freelancer Chris Allbritton, used his site to solicit $10,000 from readers to fund a trip to blog from the northern front. (He's just arrived in Turkey and will be in-country soon.) The BBC has a blog, and a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter has been using a blog to describe her stay on the USS Abraham Lincoln. But when CNN reporter Kevin Sites' bosses found out he’d been blogging his experiences on an unaffiliated site, they told him to stop.
CNN's response was seen in the Blogosphere as one more sign that the media dinosaurs are determined to stamp out this subversive new form of reporting. But judging from the television and print reports from journalists embedded in military units, there’s another way to look at things. Consider the reports from embedded journalists working for media institutions. They're ad hoc, using quick-and-dirty high-tech tools to pinpoint the reality of a single moment. They are shaped by the personal experience of the creator rather than gathering news from after-the-fact interviewing and document collection. They are delivered in the first person, creating a connection with the viewer that sometimes bulldozes over the deeper realties of the events
In other words, they're a hell of a lot like blogs. Not the heavily linked Weblogs like The Agonist or Instapundit but the personal accounts of Salam–or the thousands of bloggers who use the technology to keep a running diary of their activities for a small circle of friends–or anyone who cares to listen in.
Instead of documenting a trip to the video store and a random encounter with an old girlfriend, these "Embloggers" describe firefights at Umm Qasr and MRE cuisine. So while the war in Iraq might only be beginning, the pundits of the Blogosphere can already register a victory. It’s a blogger's world. We only link to it.
Link to Newsweek story, Link to press clips blog, Discuss
