WP's Howard Kurtz on warblogs, kevinsites.net suspension

Howard Kurtz explores how technology has changed war journalism (and the suspension of kevinsites.net) in today's Washington Post.

For all the saturation coverage of the invasion of Iraq, this has become the first true Internet war, with journalists, analysts, soldiers, a British lawmaker, an Iraqi exile and a Baghdad resident using the medium's lightning speed to cut through the fog of war. The result is idiosyncratic, passionate and often profane, with the sort of intimacy and attitude that are all but impossible in newspapers and on television. Many of these so-called Weblogs eliminate the middleman -- the news outlets whose reach was once needed for a broad audience -- and allow participants to have their say, typos and all, without being run through the media's Cuisinart.

"The most interesting thing about the blog coverage is how far ahead it is of the mainstream media," says University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, whose InstaPundit.com site has seen a surge in traffic as the Iraq crisis has heated up, doubling to 200,000 hits a day. "The first-hand stuff is great. It's unfiltered and unspun. That doesn't mean it's unbiased. But people feel like they know where the bias is coming from. You don't have to spend a lot of time trying to find a hidden agenda."

Link to WP story, Discuss