On the editorial side, many newsrooms blew or missed one major story after another, from the Whitewater “scandal,” hitting the snooze button on the global warming alarm, the emergence of al Qaeda before 9/11, the Bush administration’s phony case for war in Iraq, to the abandonment of mortgage lending standards that inflated a housing bubble.

But not every news organization blew it. Indeed, as journalism has suffered some of its darkest moments over the past decade, a few news organizations stand apart for their bright triumphs. On the Washington beat, perhaps no single news organization so often has gotten the story right as the McClatchy Washington bureau.

From providing one of the few domestic voices to consistently challenge the Bush administration’s bogus claims before the Iraq War (The New Yorker being another), to dogging the administration over the politicalization of the U.S. Justice Department, the bureau, and its website, www.mcclatchydc.com have become the must-click destination for readers thirsty for clear, accurate, spin-free reporting. The bureau will publish this weekend an in-depth investigation of the situation at Guantanamo Bay, where the United States has been holding alleged terrorists, in violation of due process rights, according to a Supreme Court ruling this week.

I spoke with McClatchy Washington Bureau Web editor Jim Van Nostrand by phone this week, and asked him why McClatchy’s had such success, and why the bureau took the unusual step of launching its own, stand-alone website. An edited transcript of our conversations follows:

Robert Niles: Why a standalone website for the bureau? Why not just stick with the traditional role of providing copy for member papers and their websites?

Jim Van Nostrand: I launched the bureau’s first website back in 2000, back when it was Knight Ridder. They never had a website before that. It started out in that they had a dilemma that their content had no home. Let’s say you were a national reporter and you interviewed Colin Powell, and Colin Powell turned around and said, “Well where can I read this story tomorrow?” You had to say, “Well, you might try the Philadelphia Inquirer or you might try the San Jose Mercury News. You never could predict where or how your stories were gonna land, so you really were in a conundrum.

The first goal was just to give their stuff a home so that you could hand Colin Powell a business card that had KR Washington on it, and say, “Hey, read it here tomorrow.”

The reporters here are competing in the national space against the New York Times and the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, and CNN and MSNBC. For a news organization such as ours, they found out very quickly that the Web helped them extend their brand beyond their local markets. Even if you were, say, a reader in Aberdeen, South Dakota or in Miami, Florida, where we had newspapers, and they may know that their newspaper is a McClatchy paper, all of a sudden with the Web, they’re reaching readers who don’t read their newspapers. We were finding, with columnists like Joe Galloway, and with the reporting team on the Iraq war and the lead-up to the Iraq war and that sort of thing, that they found the Web was a very powerful tool for building the brand.

Niles: How has having the standalone site affected the work done by reporters in the bureau?

Van Nostrand: The bureau’s reporting and the things that it’s known for – the pre-war Iraq reporting and that sort of thing, the whole truth-to-power stuff – aligns very well with McClatchy’s commitment to public service journalism. The two mesh pretty well. The ideals are the same.

Frankly, what you saw during the pre-war reporting leading up to that, some of our [Knight Ridder] newspapers didn’t run our reporting. It varied widely in the play that it got. Not only were you competing with the big brands of the New York Times and the Washington Post and trying to get noticed, quite frankly, you had editors that wouldn’t run some of these stories because they were too hard-hitting.

We’re a small bureau. We can’t tackle everything. The places where we’ve planted our flag or where we stake our claim, they’re finding that this national platform helps increase [the bureau's] visibility, because our traffic is growing.

We’re now getting a million unique visitors a month, up from just more than half a million in January. With that growth in traffic and attention means that they’re getting noticed more than they used to be.

Niles: Which websites do you see reporters at the bureau reading on a regular basis?

Van Nostrand: Well they have to read the Times and the Post because those are their big competitors. We run into the same thing here that, say, Salon did on the Walter Reed story. We will break news, but until it gets reported in the other outlets, nobody notices it. Salon had the Walter Reed story two years before the Post did, but the Post reports it and all of a sudden things start happening.

In the new media world, there are new competitors. For example, on the U.S. Attorney story, Marisa Taylor led the pack all the way through that reporting. Neck-and-neck with her was Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Depending on the story, it’s not who you think it might be anymore. You have the usual suspects, but there’s a whole new crop of competitors on these beats.

Niles: What do you see as being the biggest challenge facing Washington beat reporters these days?

Van Nostrand: The biggest challenge from my perspective is the polarization of the audience. You have an audience that’s used to now listening to only those news organizations that cater to their points of view. The whole Fox News thing, the whole right-wing blogosphere, the whole left-wing blogosphere. When you do hard-hitting reporting like we like to do, you have a large set of your audience that’s either going to dismiss what you’re going to say or agree with it out of hand based on their own personal belief sets. If you raise tough questions, regardless of orientation, people are assuming that you’re bias one way or the other. That’s not unique to us. That’s unique to everybody. That’s probably the biggest challenge we have at the moment, especially involved in a two-and-a-half-year long presidential campaign. We’ve spent a good deal of our resources planting our flag in the political coverage for the size bureau that we are.

Niles: How can, or do, you address that challenge?

Van Nostrand: You sort of have to be deaf to it almost, because if you think about it too much it will almost consume you, and you just can’t let it. You just have to trust your sense of smell, and go where the story is, and just sort of disregard the consequences. This Guantanamo package coming out Sunday is an excellent example of that. You’re going to have a segment of your audience that’s going to look at pictures of people with beards and turbans and say, “They’re all terrorists.” They’re not gonna read past the third graph, you know? You’re gonna have others that are gonna read every word of it. I fully expect a very heated response to this series, but it’s the kind of thing that you just have to pursue no matter where it takes you.

Niles: Tell me a little bit about what you would like to be able to do to address or provide a forum for that heated response.

Van Nostrand: We moderate after the fact. We let comments go live, and we have somebody looking at them. The time spent on that is significant for a small operation. There are things we’d like to be doing with crowdsourcing, with wikis. Putting those into practice has been problematic because you’ve still got to be able to produce multimedia and push breaking news to the Web.

One of our biggest pushes has been to incorporate good stories from around the McClatchy network of newspapers onto our site. You know the old argument between national and local sites is they want to keep the traffic, because local sites have their own traffic and revenue goals. We did a small experiment to work around that, where we will pick up a story from one of our sites. We’ll run the headline in the first three graphs on our site, and then link to a local site for the remainder.

It’s worked out fine as a compromise because we tend to get good traffic on the good stories from our local sites, and they get more traffic that they never would have had.

Niles: What if anything do you think that the McClatchy Bureau is doing, or Knight Ridder in the past has done, differently from others in covering this particular administration in Washington?

Van Nostrand: I can tell you from working with these folks that what they do differently is based on necessity. The term that John Walcott, our bureau chief, likes to use is that we’re the “skunk at the garden party.” We don’t have the access that the big shots from the Times or the Post have. We’re not on the first-call list. We’re not invited to some of the inner-circle type of things. When the Bush administration came in, that got even worse. We just didn’t have access to the high level.

So what happened in the pre-war reporting, for example, is that folks like Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay and John Walcott, they were talking to the rank-and-file folks at the respective agencies, the folks who actually did the work; the folks who were actually preparing the reports and reviewing the intelligence. They weren’t talking to the political hacks at the highest level. Those folks were telling them, giving them a different picture than was being fed to the national outlets. By virtue of having to do their reporting at the grassroots level, they weren’t getting the sanitized picture that other folks were getting. That made a big difference. We were consistently saying that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and the intelligence was saying that there were no weapons of mass destruction. But yet our competitors were saying breathlessly, taking the administration line, that there were. It’s a matter of perspective; who were you talking to.

Niles: I’m gonna wrap up by asking what are the lessons, from your perspective, that online journalists need to know in order to cover Washington truthfully, based on your experience with the bureau?

Van Nostrand: Well, the lessons are the same as they would be for any non-online journalist. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Move quickly. Look for what is unique and interesting about a particular story. One advantage we have online is that we cam move quickly on a story without getting bogged down in background, like in other media, because we can link to that background information.

Ultimately, the same intellectual curiosity that drove us into journalism in the first place applies. We don’t want to be stuck doing the same thing everyday.

Across the nation, more than 4,600 have died while in service to the country. Of the California dead, the median age was 23. Their deaths left 205 widows and three widowers, and 300 children who will grow up without their fathers, two without their mothers. Thirty-eight of the 492 were engaged.

About 67% were in the Army, Army National Guard or Army Reserve; 27% in the Marine Corps or Marine Corps Reserve. The Air Force accounted for 2%, the Navy and Navy Reserve for 4%. Two percent of those killed were women.

At least 59 were immigrants.

The site just launched an ambitious interactive platform in support of the two-part TV series. Part One aired Monday night on PBS, and since then the program has had more than 325,000 views online, with an additional 22,000 for a separate video timeline section. Not bad, especially when 50 percent of users are watching more than five minutes per chapter clip.

Compiled from past reports and fresh content, Frontline has packaged the most comprehensive, digestible Iraq war encyclopedia to be found on the Web—or anywhere else.

Appropriately, once you’re in, it’s tough to get out.

The video timeline stretches back to the 1980s—a four-minute feature on the rise of Islamic terrorism—and scrolls up to a behind-the-scenes dissection of the January 2007 plan for the troop surge.

The site’s new-and-improved video platform makes navigation a breeze. Each timeline entry comes with links to related videos, full-length interviews and past multimedia Frontline reports. And the entire PBS-aired program is just a click away—broken into 26 chapters, each clocking in at about eight or 10 minutes.

We swapped e-mails with Editorial Director Marrie Campbell and New Media Director Sam Bailey to find out more about the program—and what else they have cooking.

–

OJR: What’s new at Frontline Online? Any big developments on deck for the site?

FL: Video is our overriding focus these days. We’re streaming some 70 programs on our site and recently launched a new video platform that uses Flash video on the front end enabling online viewers to link to related video clips, related full programs, and an array of related content (interviews, timelines, documents, etc.) with just a click. This upgraded video platform also allows the viewer to link to related video from other PBS public affairs series.

Starting March 24th, as part of the Google Video, sitemaps and some Google ads advertising, mainly in pre-broadcast promotion. We don’t develop new features for our sites without looking closely at how it will interact with search engines; we’re slowly retuning our site to help with that process. We’re also looking to partner with other news organizations sites to get our online brand out to a wider audience. And we want to work with bloggers more and make it easier for them to reference or “quote” our video and text content.

OJR: Can you talk about the relationship between your online and TV content? How does the reader/viewership of your exclusive online sections stack up against the broadcast pieces you post to the site?

FL: Most of Frontline’s online content is drawn from the research and reporting done by the program’s producing team. We sometimes commission sidebar text stories and occasionally have the opportunity to produce Web-exclusive video reports – stories/sequences the producers couldn’t fit into the broadcast program.

Over the past three years we’ve seen the streamed programs’ video drawing the highest traffic, compared to other site content. However, many online visitors/viewers come via search engines seeking specific information from our large archive of interview transcripts, chronologies, articles, timelines, etc. that work well for search bots.

OJR: Your colleagues at Frontline/World are experimenting with special Web sections like Rough Cut and Flash Point, which they treat as sort of an online breeding ground for bigger broadcast pieces. What are your thoughts on those projects, and what’s to stop you from doing the same thing on the main Frontline site?

FL: These Frontline/World projects are very interesting and important initiatives for us. It’s a way for Frontline to innovate and be more nimble and wider ranging in the kind of stories we can cover and the new journalists we can bring into the series. It’s also key to us in another way: Frontline/World allows us to experiment with new kinds of production and distribution of our reports in order to reach new audiences.

We’re pondering a similar idea for the Frontline series’ site—developing in the next six to 12 months a more flexible area online for Frontline to experiment with non-broadcast content. In the future, there’ll be more crossover between the two sites.

We are all part of Frontline and we continue to learn a lot from each other. Most of the technology is shared across the sites. So too are story ideas for long and short pieces—on-air and online—so too is the scouting and development of new producers and journalists for both series. While on an editorial/production level they’re separate units, there’s overlapping senior staff.

And again, the really vital part of Frontline/World is that this sister series enables us to try new things, incubate new media projects, attract and develop new, younger journalists and build new audiences.

OJR: Who else is doing great work online that you would like to emulate?

FL: We like the Guardian and the [Washington] Post sites. They’re offering a lot of good material and features on many different fronts. We also like the CJR Campaign Desk and the [ABC News] Blotter. We wish we had the resources to mount something like that.

There are a lot of little pieces from different sites that are interesting ideas that we’d love to somehow replicate on our site. For example, the blog from the Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer, because it’s bilingual and he actively reads and responds to the comments from readers. We think the WSJ.com blogs are great. The Corner and similar group blogs from National Review, the American Prospect and the individual blogs from The Atlantic are interesting because they’re so active and eventually tie into the written pieces—but not always, they don’t have to.

OJR: What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned about producing your journalism online that you wish you’d known when you started this job?

FL: Know who/what you are at the core and seek to maximize that. Build your audience by exploiting this amazing revolution we’re in. It’s important to know when to use the flashy new media tools that you have, in terms of interactivity and fancy new media presentation. In general, people still want to go for the basics: quick, easy delivery of content, video and interactive options. A TV producer’s instinct is to do everything one can in that medium, in terms of making the program pretty, making it “pop.” But TV’s a defined space—we know how it works as a medium. There’s much more to know about the array of Web browsers: your video/content could be on an iPhone, a PC, a Mac, etc. All look different. The Web is not one single experience.

Back in the mid-1850s, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that a citizenry could not, would not, flourish unless it was nourished by the full spectrum of voices that exist among the people:

It is, however, obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining either [side or sides of the debate], while opinion ought, in every instance, to determine its verdict by the circumstances of the individual case, condemning every one, on whichever side of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacy either want of candour, or malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling manifest themselves; but not inferring these vices from the side which a person takes, though it be the contrary side of the question to our own; and giving merited honour to every one, whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell in their favour. This is the real morality of public discussion.

Well over one hundred years later, the blogosphere came into our lives, allowing us, in the words of Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, to “hear voices that had been shut out of the corporate media outlets.”

These old “corporate media outlets,” refusing to fade away, have held their ground. According to William Dietrich, a writer with the Seattle Times Sunday magazine, the sacred purpose of the newspaper reporter “is to fulfill an essential function of our democracy not just by disseminating information but also by analyzing it, detecting patterns, spotting trends, and increasing societal understanding.” Indeed, bloggers may generate a more democratic Public Square, but can they facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of how political events are most likely to evolve, the Old Guard worries and wonders. In other words, Mill might not be enough.

To contribute to this Great Debate, I decided to conduct a content analysis of how blogs and newspapers covered the Iraq War during one week in late March 2007. By looking at how the two media have sourced their news stories, I hoped to offer insights into what exactly the American public “hears” from newspapers and blogs.

More specifically, my research, by examining five major newspapers and six popular political blogs, sought to answer three questions:

• Which media platform uses more sources?
• Which offers a more diverse range of sources?
• And which types of sources are more prevalent in each platform?

Findings

Overall, the data showed that blogs included a higher number of total sources and a slightly wider range of sources.

Blogs included an average number of nine sources per blog posting, compared to an average of just six for newspapers stories.

The gap between newspapers and blogs was considerably narrower when evaluating the types of sourcing. Still, blogs were slightly more diverse in their sourcing, with four sources per posting compared to an average of three in newspaper stories.

Digging deeper, which types of sources were the two media most likely to use?

Both blogs and newspapers were likely to include traditional Washington sources, both political and intellectual.

But blogs and newspapers did diverge in several key ways. Compared to newspapers, blogs were considerably less likely than newspapers to include official Iraqi sources.

And perhaps as a tell-tale sign of what the mainstream press really thinks of the blogosphere, just two percent of newspaper stories used a blog as a source. Not surprisingly, bloggers used other bloggers as sources at almost the same frequency as they used the mainstream press.

Sourcing in Blogs

Seven in ten (69%) blog postings included a mainstream media outlet (e.g. Washington Post, AP, The New York Times) as a source and 64% used other bloggers as sources.

Political Washington was well represented. Thirty percent of all stories had a source from a Democratic politician or party strategist, 28% included one from a Republican or GOP operative, and 23% included a source from the White House.

Meanwhile, a quarter (25%) included sources from the Pentagon, a soldier fighting in Iraq, or an immediate member of a soldier’s family. Ten percent of all blog postings had a source from other government officials, such as analysts from the State Department or the American embassy in Iraq. Furthermore, 16% of all postings included a government document as a source, such as a hyperlink to a PDF of a legislative bill or the complete voting results for a particular bill from the Office of the Clerk at the U.S. House of Representatives.

Considerably fewer blog postings, however, included sources from Iraqi government officials (11%), such as local police and security forces and hospital administrators, and an even smaller number offered sources from Sunni or Shiite politicians (five percent). And only two percent of all postings included a source from the Iraqi insurgency.

Five percent of posts included sources from Iraqi civilians, and eight percent had sources from U.S. civilians.

Finally, a quarter (25%) offered a source from a non-partisan, non-governmental entity, such as a think tank, polling organization, or university.

Sourcing in Newspapers

Turning to newspapers, the most frequent source was a U.S. military official or family member. Over half (53%) of all newspaper stories included a source from this cohort—more than double the percentage in blogs.

The second most common source was a Democratic one; more than three in ten stories (32%) offered a Democratic source.

A quarter (24%) included a source from the Bush Administration, and another 16% had a source from other Republican politicians or strategists.

Another 22% included a source from other government officials outside the halls of Congress, the White House or the Pentagon.

Newspapers were also likely to offer an Iraqi point of view. Thirty-one percent of all stories included sources from the Iraqi authorities. Two in ten (20%) stories included sources from either Shiite or Sunni politicians. An additional seven percent was from sources coded as insurgents.

At the non-political level, newspapers were more likely to quote an Iraqi civilian, with ten percent of all stories offering this point of view. Half that percentage (five percent) included sources from U.S. civilians who were not family members of an American solider fighting in Iraq.

Twenty-three percent used a poll, statement from a non-partisan think tank, or academic as a source.

Finally, eight percent of stories used a mainstream media outlet as a source, and just two percent included blogs.

Conclusion

Much of the current debate in journalism that centers around how sourcing is used in blogs concerns the issues of verification of information not reported in the mainstream press. But for now, this doesn’t appear to be their raison d’etre. The function of blogs may be an equally important one, however, offering a more nuanced, synthesized perspective not found anywhere else on the Web.

Perhaps what’s most at stake for blogs is to evaluate which voices are being synthesized. According to the data for this study, an admittedly limited one, bloggers may be missing perhaps the most important piece of the political puzzle when we acknowledge the realpolitik of Iraq.

Both the American and Iraqi people are growing increasingly weary of the American military presence in Iraq, according to public opinion polls in both countries. If there is one point Democrats and Republicans can agree on it is that Iraq’s future success rests on the further strengthening of Iraq’s political institutions.

Right now, it may be that the traditional press—represented by newspapers here-has picked up on this better than blogs. The data shows that roughly four times as many stories in newspapers included sources from leading Sunni and Shiite politicians as did blogs. Where blogs excelled, with more bloggers, media sources and original texts as sources, is perhaps more easily to duplicate for newspapers on their websites. What cannot be mimicked so easily is the ability to discern which way the political winds are blowing in Baghdad and Washington.

One might dismiss this conclusion as an elitist, Lippmanian one. Regardless, it begs the question of whether or not the public most benefits from a traditional journalist sensibility that, despite its flaws and declining commitment to foreign affairs, can still be found at the country’s best newspapers. Perhaps all those years of having boots on the ground overseas still colors, positively, newspaper coverage.

However, one should keep in mind that only a third (34%) of all bloggers considers their blog a form of journalism, according to a study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. So my insights may be a case of trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Furthermore, until the mainstream press can better understand that media consumption and production are increasingly conversational, collaborative activities—where bloggers and citizens talk to each other—perhaps the best advice I can give is to take the time to read a newspaper and a blog or two.

About the Study

For this study, I counted the number of sources over seven days in late March 2007 (March 23-March 29). Only stories with the war in Iraq as the dominant story (50% or more of the story) were coded. Overall, 172 newspaper stories and blog postings–the units of analysis–were coded.

Sources did not have to be original. For example, a blog that quoted an interview from Senator John McCain that originally appeared in the Washington Post would be counted as a source, even though the actual reporting was not done by the blogger. Original sources, though in small numbers, could be found in blogs, most notably in Greg Sargent’s postings on Talking Points Memo.

First, I looked at five major newspapers: Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Wire stories that appeared in newspapers were included. A total of 111 newspaper stories were coded.

Second, I conducted an analysis of three major blogs from the left and three from the right. They included: Talking Points Memo, Political Animal (the Washington Monthly blog), Daily Kos, Michelle Malkin, Powerline, and Hugh Hewitt. A total of 61 blog postings were analyzed for the research.

For blogs, a source was defined as those that were available either on the homepage posting or those on secondary pages within one mouse click from the original blog posting. Then, sources within these secondary pages were coded as well (e.g. links to other news sources, bloggers, and government documents). This methodology was employed in order to measure—as much as possible—the total available number of sources that are consumed by the typical blog reader, and not just those that appear in the original blog posting. Sources within tertiary pages (and beyond) were not coded because I felt that only a small number of blog readers would actually read this deep into a blog posting. Nevertheless, these tertiary (and beyond) pages theoretically expand the number of potential sources and should be kept in mind before forming any firm conclusions about the nature of sourcing in blogs.

But instead of creating a documentary that screens at film festivals, he decided to create a website that “airs” short videos weekly. The site, Alive in Baghdad, has seen its traffic rise to well beyond film festival capacity.

“We’ve grown to actually become a small organization,” said Conley. “We have two Iraqi correspondents producing stories about daily life in Baghdad.”

Conley, 26, spoke to OJR about the challenges of running an independent Web operation that focuses on the lives of Iraqi struggling to survive in a war zone.

OJR: When I Google the word “Baghdad” and “video,” Alive in Baghdad comes up as the No. 1 result — above CNN, MSNBC, the BBC or Al Jazeera. What does this mean to you?

Conley: I think one thing is that we’ve got a niche. Alive in Baghdad is video only about Iraq and at this point still primarily about Baghdad. I think that if you look up “news” and “video,” you’ll likely get CNN much higher. But if you are looking for something about Baghdad specifically with video, there we are. It is really great for us because it means that we are really getting our message out that we have video about life in Baghdad.

OJR: The Alive in Baghdad correspondents… are they shooting and editing the video or does it come back to you?

Conley: They edit the video to the degree that they select tapes, but as of right now we do the editing here in the States. We try to take pains to do the editing in a way that it captures the story that they are interested in telling. And so far we haven’t had anybody say that ‘you took it out of context’ or ‘that is not what I was trying to get at.’

We try to produce stories in collaboration, where I’ll pitch some story ideas to the guys over there, and they’ll pitch story ideas to me. Then we come up with what’s do-able and what makes sense.

OJR: Do consider yourself a news organization?

Conley: Well, we take pains to be somewhat objective and unbiased.

OJR: What does “objectivity” mean to an independent Web-based organization?

Conley: I think being objective means that we always say that this is the story, these are the limitations of the story, and these are limitations for us get the story. Depending on the story, we try three to five sources but sometimes it is difficult. We did a piece about young people in Baghdad and what do they do for entertainment. We ended up airing it with only one interview because after trying for three months, we just couldn’t get the young people to even talk on camera about something as basic as “what do you do for fun?” Everyone is just so scared. Those were the limitations in that piece.

We also take really great pains to educate the correspondents. One correspondent very often would ask leading questions. So we told him to be more general. Don’t say, “Tell me about your son who was killed by the Americans,” say, “Tell me what happened to your son.”

OJR: And what are some of the challenges of running Alive in Baghdad?

Conley: Iraq and Baghdad have gotten more and more dangerous. We are realizing we have to branch out and find correspondents in different neighborhoods because somebody in one area doesn’t feel safe covering another area. But if we want to maintain balance and objectivity, we need to get stories from different parts of Baghdad instead of just one or two neighborhoods. That’s particularly challenging.

Tied to that is the issue of translations. I’m trying to get translations done in time to produce a story for every Monday. We have correspondents from one part of the Baghdad ship the video to us by DHL, which provides some level of security. Then in Boston, we capture the video as highly compressed QuickTime movies and then send the files by email or FTP to a translator in another part of Baghdad. The correspondent who shot the video from one part of Baghdad doesn’t feel safe traveling to another part of the city to hand the tapes to the translator.

OJR: You have actually interviewed an insurgent and a mother of a suicide bomber. Do you sometimes have to defend Alive in Baghdad from people accusing it of giving terrorists a platform?

Conley: Yeah, it’s definitely been a huge issue. Do I think that larger news organizations should be reporting on the military issues and interviewing politicians, and government officials? Yes, I certainly do. Right now CNN does that, MSNBC and other organizations do that fairly well.

I think that we are doing something very different. We are trying very hard to have a mixture of stories about the direct impact of the war, whether it’s about someone whose son was killed fighting the Americans, or a family whose home was smashed up during a raid by the U.S. forces. We are producing pieces that are just daily life in wartime stories. We try to get a variety of stories–from a piece about a house that was hit by a rocket to a story about a guy trying to figure out how to get electricity.

OJR: Do you have a sense of who is watching these videos globally?

Conley: It’s primarily the coastal areas of the United States, with some from the middle of the country. And Europe. There are some dedicated viewers in Japan with a surprisingly large upsurge in Brazil.

OJR: Specifically Brazil?

Conley: Yeah. We didn’t have a very big penetration in South America until some an article came out the press in Brazil in January or February. Since then the audience in Brazil has ballooned.

OJR: What about from Iraq itself?

Conley: Some, but not a lot.

OJR: Do you see a time when traditional media might rely on Alive in Baghdad to get the type coverage that they are currently not getting… somewhat of a symbiotic relationship in which you provide content and they funnel their massive following to your site?

Conley: I think a large part of this is just having more people be aware that the project exists and that they can find alternative coverage from Iraq. The larger media corporations won’t be able to get away with just saying, “sorry but this is the best coverage we can do,” because people can see the coverage we are doing.

The BBC and Sky News as well other media companies have approached us about doing work with them. I will pretty soon have a short documentary for BBC News and the licensing of five of our stories from Alive in Baghdad to Sky News for use during the anniversary of the war.

We are hoping to create a relationship where one of these media companies would air each week a weekly episode or one episode a month or something. And it still remains to be seen how we are going to work it out.

OJR: How are you financially supporting Alive in Baghdad?

Conley: We have pretty lucrative contracts with Sky News and BBC. We are also about to sign a contract with a company called Next News Network and that will finally let us pay a regular salary to Steve Wyshywaniuk, our editor and myself. Because of these deal, we can continue to produce for the next six or seven months as well as a probably hire a third correspondent.

OJR: If and when the U.S. forces leave Iraq, what role will Alive in Baghdad play?

Conley: That’s something I was thinking about a lot this summer when it was looking as though a withdrawal might even come sooner than first expected. What I realized is that once the American troops leave, so will the rest of the media. We have to scramble to get as much out of this as possible at that time so people will still keep their eyes on Iraq. That’s really important.

The Internet has proven to be a vast resource of information and knowledge, but it only takes one hyperlink to get from the profound to the profane. When reading an Egyptian blog a few weeks ago, I stumbled onto a bulletin board site called NowThatsFuckedUp.com (NTFU), which started out as a place for people to trade amateur pornography of wives and girlfriends.

According to the site’s owner, Chris Wilson, who lives in Lakeland, Fla., but hosts the site out of Amsterdam, the site was launched in August 2004 and soon became popular with soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. When female soldiers started to appear in the nude on the site, the Pentagon blocked access to the site from military computers in the field, according to the New York Post.

But the story gets more twisted. Wilson said that soldiers were having trouble using their credit cards in Iraq to access the paid pornographic content on the site, so he offered them free access if they could show that they were actually soldiers. As proof, some sent in G-rated photos of traffic signs in Baghdad or of a day in the life of a soldier abroad. Others sent in what appear to be Iraqi civilians and insurgents who were killed by suicide bombs or soldiers’ fire.

Now there’s an entire forum on the site titled “Pictures from Iraq and Afghanistan – Gory,” where these bloody photos show body parts, exploded heads and guts falling out of people. Along with the photos is a running commentary of people celebrating the kills, cracking jokes and arguing over what kind of weaponry was used to kill them. But the moderators will also step in when the talk gets too heated, and sometimes a more serious discussion about the Iraq war and its aims will break out.

Wilson told me in a phone interview that he is “not very” political and considers NTFU as a community site.

“People say, ‘This is a porn site so why are you talking politics?’ ” Wilson said. “But it’s actually a porn community, and any time you have a community with shared interests there’s going to be other interests. Just because somebody looks at porn doesn’t mean that they have a below-60 IQ and don’t know anything. I have doctors and lawyers and police officers and teachers, and it doesn’t surprise me that there are educated people who want to discuss things. It’s interesting, and I love reading it.”

Wilson has no qualms about running the gory photos of war in open forums that don’t require registration or payment.

“I enjoy seeing the photos from the soldiers themselves,” Wilson said. “I see pictures taken by CNN and the mainstream media, and they all put their own slant on what they report and what they show. To me, this is from the soldier’s slant. This is directly from them. They can take the digital cameras and take a picture and send it to me, and that’s the most raw you can get it. I like to see it from their point of view, and I think it’s newsworthy.”

Wilson says it’s a judgment call on whether the photos he gets are really from soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. After months of sifting through photos, Wilson has an idea of the quality of the digital cameras soldiers use and what the terrain is like in those areas of the world.

I couldn’t verify whether these gory photos were taken recently in Iraq by soldiers. But the U.S. military is currently looking into the site and trying to authenticate the photos — and take appropriate action if soldiers are involved. “We do have people who are specifically looking at that website, and I will talk to my colleagues and my bosses here and get back to you,” said Staff Sgt. Don Dees, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command (Centcom) in Baghdad.

Two people posting gory photos to the site responded to my e-mail query into their motivations for doing it.

“I access [NTFU] from my personal computer, the government computers are strictly monitored,” one person wrote to me. “I would never try to use this site or anything like it on a government computer. To answer your question about posting the gory pictures on this site: What about the beheadings filmed and then put on world wide news? I have seen video of insurgents shooting American soldiers in plain day and thanking God for what they have done. I wouldn’t be too concerned what I am doing on a private Web site. I’m more concerned of what my fellow soldiers and I are experiencing in combat.”

Another person whose e-mail identified him as David Burke was defiant about posting gory photos and said it was a tradition of all wars.

“Yes I have posted kill photos on other forum sites,” Burke wrote me in his e-mail. “The computers are military financed if not owned by the military. I think that with all the service members who are over here it was obvious that photos of dead insurgents would surface as time went on and it is not a new occurrence. There have been pics from all wars of the fighters standing over the bodies of the enemy. The insurgents are more than willing to showcase our dead and wounded so if people have issues with what’s shown on this site then they need to stay away and quit bitching about things they know nothing about.

“I made it real clear in most if not all of my posts how I feel about the Iraqi people in general and that feeling has not changed a bit in my time here. I [put] a good friend of mine [in a body bag] just a week ago and that really clinched it for me and my teammates. We will always shoot first and ask no questions, period. The military brass will always try to sanitize the effects of war, no matter when or where, and yes if it was possible they would censor all media coming out of this country, pics and stories.”

Condemnation for site swift

The story of NTFU and its unusual exchange of free porn for gory war photos was first picked up by an Italian blogger named Staib, and then the Italian news agency ANSA. Blogger/journalist Helena Cobban, who pens a column for the Christian Science Monitor, asked her blog readers for an English translation of the ANSA article and quickly received many versions that clarified what the site was about.

Cobban was horrified by the gory photos, but tried to make sense of the motivation of people who posted them — and tried hard to grasp the idea of a serious discussion of war on a porn site. She told me that taking and posting “trophy” photos of dead Iraqis was a gross show of disrespect and a violation of the Geneva Conventions. But she put the blame on the direction of military leadership.

“The important thing is for the U.S. military and political leadership at the highest levels to recommit the nation to the norms of war including the Geneva Conventions, and to be held accountable for the many violations that have taken place so far,” Cobban said via e-mail. “What I don’t think would be helpful would be further punitive actions that are still limited to the grunts and the foot soldiers, who already have the worst of it.”

The Geneva Conventions include Protocol 1, added in 1977 but not ratified by the U.S., Iraq or Afghanistan. It mentions that all parties in a conflict must respect victims’ remains, though doesn’t mention the photographing of dead bodies. This could well be a judgment call, and the celebratory and derogatory comments added on NTFU make the case more clear.

When I contacted military public affairs people in the U.S. and Iraq, they didn’t seem aware of the site and initially couldn’t access the site from their own government computers. Eventually, they told me that if soldiers were indeed posting photos of dead Iraqis on the site, then it’s not an action that’s condoned in any way by the military.

“The glorification of casualties goes against our training and is strongly discouraged,” said Todd Vician, a U.S. Defense Department spokesman. “It is our policy that images taken with government equipment or due to access because of a military position must be cleared before released. While I haven’t seen these images, I doubt they would be cleared for release. Improper treatment of captured and those killed does not help our mission, is discouraged, investigated when known, and punished appropriately.”

Capt. Chris Karns, a Centcom spokesman, told me that there are Department of Defense regulations and Geneva Conventions against mutilating and degrading dead bodies, but that he wasn’t sure about regulations concerning photos of dead bodies. He noted that the Bush administration did release graphic photos of the dead bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein to the media.

Karns said that commanders in the field do have latitude to make their rules more stringent than overarching military regulations, but he didn’t expect that cameras would be banned in the field.

“I don’t think it will get to that point [where cameras would be banned],” Karns said. “All it takes is one or two individuals to do things like this that cast everyone in a negative light. The vast majority of soldiers are acting responsibly with cameras in the field. But on the Internet there aren’t a whole lot of safeguards and the average citizen can create their own site.”

Karns did say that if soldiers were posting these photos online, that it would have a negative strategic impact, especially when the enemy relies so heavily on the media to win the battle of perception.

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, saw the gory photos as another black eye for the U.S. military after the Abu Ghraib prison torture photos.

“This is just another form of pornography,” Hooper told me. “I think this is something that should be strongly discouraged by military authorities. It’s going to give military personnel a bad name, it’s going to harm America’s image in the Muslim world and it’s just plain wrong. You have to wonder what this says about our military personnel, if first of all they’re dealing with pornography and why they would be reveling in the deaths of individuals in Iraq.”

Respected media outlets?

NTFU site proprietor Wilson says that the military blocking of his site upset him, but that traffic actually went up after it was blocked. He told me that if the military brass did get in touch with him, and had a good reason for him to remove the gory photos, he would.

“I get many requests for removal,” Wilson said. “I get 30 to 40 requests per day for removal for everything across the board on the site. I take each on a case-by-case basis. If [the military] wants something deleted because they think it’s a threat to national security or it’s showing too much, then obviously, yes, I’m going to get that out of there. But if they’re asking me to remove it because they just don’t like it, then no.”

Wilson says he supported Bush in sending troops to Iraq, but thinks it’s long past time that they need to be brought back home. He says he supports the soldiers, and thinks they are pretty split on whether they should be brought home or kept on the job in Iraq. Wilson has tried to obtain a less profane domain name for the site, NTFU.com, but that the domain’s owner was asking for way more money than it was worth.

Of course, the NTFU community is not alone in its fascination with the darker, more grotesque side of life. The site Ogrish.com has been around for six years, and includes photos and video of murders, cannibalism, and war kills. The owners of the site explain in the FAQ that they do not enjoy seeing this violent material, but that they are trying to provide an uncensored view of reality.

“Ogrish does not provide a sugar-coated version of the world,” the FAQ says. “We feel that people are often unaware of what really goes on around us. Everything you see on Ogrish.com is reality, it’s part of our life, whether we like it or not. We are publishing this material to give everyone the opportunity to see things as they are so they can come to their own conclusions rather than settling for biased versions of world events as handed out by the mainstream media.”

The site’s goal is pretty ambitious: “to become a respected media outlet for uncensored, unbiased news… [with] much more background and educational value to our content.” The site uses citizen correspondents in law enforcement and in medicine, much the way that NTFU depends on soldiers in the field who are armed with digital cameras.

Dan Klinker, who formerly was a co-owner of Ogrish.com and now handles PR, told me via e-mail that the site is not about glorifying violence, unlike NTFU.

“As far as I know Ogrish is one of the only sites in this niche that have been focusing on the facts rather than presenting things in a glorifying way like a lot of other sites do (including NowThatsFuckedUp),” Klinker said. “Just the name of that site makes it clear that there’s only one goal, which is to shock, glorify and entertain. The combination with bloody pictures in return for naked girls makes them lose all credibility.”

While it was difficult for me to ascertain the motivation for people who were posting gory photos to NTFU, I did talk to Steven Most, a psychology postdoctoral fellow at Yale University who has studied the effects of violent and sexual images. He helped explain what these horribly violent images had in common with the nude photographs of women.

“They both seem to be particularly arousing in an emotional way,” Most said. “Emotional stimuli can be rated in different ways. You could see something and rate how positive or negative it is. But separate from that is how arousing the image is. A positive picture of a cute puppy dog could be positive but not that arousing, whereas a picture of an opposite sex nude could be just as positive but be rated as extremely arousing. And a picture of a mutilation could be rated as extremely negative but highly arousing. Lately there’s been a lot of theories saying that what we’re drawn to is the arousing nature of an image regardless of whether we see it as negative or positive.”

An online collection, “Digital Warriors,” aims to present the culmination of the work produced by these soldiers. The project is supervised by Kim Newton, a veteran photojournalist who has edited coverage of the wars in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia for Reuters and also served as Knight Ridder’s senior photo editor for international news.

Online Journalism Review questioned Newton, who currently teaches photojournalism at the Brooks Institute of Photography, about these “Digital Warriors,” the double-edged sword of embedded journalism, and the ways that emerging technology challenges and expands the industry’s steadfast ethical standards.

Online Journalism Review: How has this war differed from previous U.S. wars in terms of access?

Kim Newton: It’s better than the Gulf War where nobody had access, but it’s still not as good as Vietnam, where there was pretty much complete access. I think for the most part, the embedding situation in Iraq has been a good thing.

However, I don’t think that embedding allows for complete story or a balanced view. I think [the media] are restricted to a certain degree to the relationships that they’ve developed to the units that they’re with. I think that even though they’re told they have complete access, if something was published they really didn’t like, the [embeds]would be moved out. Unfortunately, the danger of this war is such that having complete access is probably unrealistic.

OJR: How has the fact that so many soldiers have digital cameras changed the practice of photojournalism?

Newton: Since the Civil War when photography really became an influence in war time, soldiers have been writing stories or taking pictures of the war. The difference is now they can publish instantaneously on the Internet by sending it to their family members who post on web sites, or they post themselves. So, I can do Internet searches for photography from the Iraq war, and I’ll come up with thousands of images and hundreds of web sites that have been created by soldiers and soldiers’ families.

Granted, it’s not like being published in The New York Times or The Washington Post or your local paper or a magazine where it has a national audience. But if you do take the time to seek it out, I think there are opportunities out there to find a more personalized view of the war than we’ve ever seen before.

OJR: Describe your current project, Digital Warriors.

Newton: While I was thinking about all these soldiers having digitial cameras and trying to figure out a way to collect images and set up a web site, the Los Angeles Times came out with a story that basically discussed the Iraq war and the uncensored view of the front lines. I wanted to go beyond the Abu Ghraib prison photos and not just find sensational pictures that would cause a national uproar of some kind. I wanted to find images that were of a journalistic level and that told a personal side of this war that I felt we weren’t seeing from traditional media. The intent is to edit a large body of work from these soldiers that will produce a personal view that I don’t think we’ve seen from this war.

My expectations were high in the beginning and they’re lower now, but I haven’t given up. I will continue to plug away, and I hope that I can maybe find a connection within the military where I can get the word out and find a way to collect the images. I think maybe my original method might have failed because I just wasn’t reaching the core group that I needed. And also it may be that it’s too early, and that a lot of the images I’m thinking are out there, maybe people haven’t posted or they’re afraid to post.

OJR: How has the U.S. administration’s attempt to censor wartime images affected the flow of images from Iraq?

Newton: This is the first time in my memory where it’s been so blatant and obvious. The best example of that is the picture The Seattle Times published of coffins coming back flag-draped. The administration and the U.S. Department of Defense were furious because they had established a policy that there would be no pictures of dead soldiers coming home. But I really can’t speak to how culpable the media is in participating with the administration’s censoring.

I know that when I worked for wire services like Reuters and Knight Ridder, we pretty much published everything that came across. I remember covering a lot of the Middle East conflict, and I would get pictures every day of blown apart bodies of suicide bombers and heads of people, and I would publish those [photos] on the wire. Rarely would they ever be published in U.S. publications.

Having worked in both American publications and foreign media, I found that the foreign media, especially in Britain, and most of Europe and the Middle East, are more likely to publish what we would call sensational images in this country. But, I think they’re images that tell the truth and the reality of what’s going on in those places. I think there is a censorship among American publications when it comes to controversial images or images that are going to make people squirm a little bit, and I don’t think they get published in this country maybe as often as they should.

OJR: How do you find that an online audience responds to images produced in the current war? Is this audience more adaptable or accepting of a wider range of images?

Newton: It’s not like Life magazine, which would come out every week and you pretty much knew who your audience and demographic were. And politicians or people would react to stories in those magazines. If it was a political issue, it would get to your congressman or senator.

With the Internet, it’s much more fragmented and you have to do a lot more searching. There is a lot of room for error, and I think it’s too early to tell where it’s all going. I have a lot of hope that it’s going to be a good place for visual journalists and for photography.

OJR: How does the time you spent covering wars in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia compare with the current coverage of the war in Iraq?

Newton: In Bosnia and Kosovo, I think that for the most part the coverage was one-sided and we weren’t really seeing the other side. In many ways that’s similar to the coverage we’re getting now. Although, I think then, the photographers weren’t embedded with any group of soldiers, so they had more access to developing relationships with rebel units or what would be the enemy to the Western side of the conflict.

It’s very rare that photographers from Western news agencies will develop a relationship with a side that is fighting what we would call the friendly side. In the Iraq war, there are very few images coming out from the insurgent side. It’s all coverage of the Americans or British fighting the insurgents.

That happens pretty regularly in war time. It wasn’t until years later that you get to see both sides in the Second World War. The Germans took a lot of still pictures of the concentration camps and their side of the war, so now we can go back and look at those images and get their point of view.

OJR: How did digital photography evolve during your tenure at Reuters in terms of new ethical issues?

Newton: When I started at Reuters, they were transitioning to digitial imaging and that’s what excited me. There has always been a strong ethical foundation at the places that I’ve worked and that foundation never changed. We adapted to the new technologies, in a lot of ways at the edge of our seats. As things happened, we would create new rules, but the basic foundation of not manipulating photographs remained.

I remember one day, being on the desk when some photographer sent in a picture that he had put all these jet planes in. We all saw right away that it was manipulated image, and even in the caption it said that it was a manipulated image, but right away it became a “fireable” offence because if you even sent in a joke it wasn’t to be tolerated.

OJR: What new ethical standards are involved in teaching photojournalism at the Brooks Institute of Photography?

Newton: That’s an ongoing issue and an ongoing question. We are continually having discussions and students are raising ethical questions concerning technology, Photoshop or approaching people to be photographed. I think it’s really important for students to be aware of the problems in the industry.

Brian Walski at the L.A. Times is an obvious example that we can use to visually show how one person used the technology to manipulate a situation. I think our personal accounts also add to the ethical question and how to deal with issues students encounter as a photojournalist on a daily basis, and it’s at the forefront of our education here.

OJR: In an age where anyone with a computer program can crop or transpose photos easily, how have ethics adapted in photojournalism?

Newton: I think that for the most part, most large news organizations understand the issue, but not all of them have policies, which sort of amazes me. I think every organization has to sit down with their staff and draw out how to deal with ethical issues before they come up.

I think the technology in Photoshop is pretty amazing and things can be done that can’t be noticed by the average eye. Yet, new technologies are coming online that can tell if images have been manipulated, and I think that’s one area that editors will probably utilize in the future.

OJR: Who or what have been your greatest influences?

Newton: One of my greatest influences is a photographer named Dan Budnik, who was a photographer for Life Magazine and Time/Life. He photographed the Civil Rights movement and he also photographed a lot of the abstract expressionist artists during the 50s and 60s in New York. I was an assistant to him for a lot of the 70s.

W. Eugene Smith was one of the photojournalists who had a great influence on me in terms of photographing something that would lead to a positive change in society. His essay on Minamata in Japan was a major influence when I moved to Japan in the early 1980s.

OJR: Any advice you’d like to share with aspiring photojournalists?

Newton: I think you’ve got to have a real passion for what you’re doing and a real stick-with-it ness and a real ability to communicate visually. It’s harder now than it’s ever been because the publications just aren’t there, so you really have to have a lot of passion to follow through and do this job. But I think there is still a much needed place for photojournalism in the world and in our society.

OJR: What about citizen or amateur journalists using digital cameras? Any ground rules they can follow to adhere to journalistic standards?

Newton: If they’re trying to get their images published in the mainstream media or anywhere, I think they have to stick to the same ethical standards that we’ve all abided by, which is to give an honest representation of what they’re looking at and not manipulating the scene beyond its natural viewpoint. By that I mean adding or removing elements of an image to change the content and its point of view.

OJR: Do you have any other final thoughts or comments?

Newton: Technology has allowed us to view things that we might not have been able to see in the past. The average soldier has access to this instantaneous technology, even though the quality may not be up to that of a professional photojournalist. And I think that’s a unique point of view that we’ve never had before, not just in war, but in society.

Where it’s going to end up is sort of anybody’s guess right now, but it fascinates me that it’s out there, and I’ll continue to be fascinated by it and try to do research on it or just be a part of viewing it like everybody else.