COM 209, 150: Blogging Iraq to Alaska

Here's something else I want you to keep up with. The Anchorage Daily News has assigned veteran reporter Rich Mauer to Baghdad, where he will focus on the troops from Fort Richardson, just outside Anchorage, who are deployed in Iraq. Mauer started blogging about a week ago, before he left the United States. So far it's been one of the best things I've seen about what it's like to be a reporter in Iraq. To be a reporter anywhere, in fact. He kind of takes us behind the scenes, tagging along to interviews, talking with news sources. Much of the routine is familiar to anyone who's ever covered a city council meeting, which makes his description of the violence all the more graphic. Anyway, the blog has the kind of personal touch that gets filtered out of hard news.

Mauer is good writer, too. Here's the lede to his first post:

ON AN AMTRAK TRAIN TO NEW YORK, Jan. 19 — One of the senior editors in the McClatchy Washington bureau waved me into his office from across the big newsroom yesterday afternoon. Thus summoned, I sat down in a comfortable chair. He was the last editor I needed to speak to before I left for Baghdad.

“What are you expectations for me in Iraq?” I asked.

“Do you know how to shoot?” he asked. “Paul or Kevin will want to know that.”

Those were the names of our British security detail, but I wasn’t thinking about them. I was thinking that I had just heard the most unexpected question I’d ever been asked by an editor.

“I don’t know pistols, but I’m a decent shot with a rifle,” I answered. It was an automatic answer. I was still rolling around his question in my mind.

“They’ll be happy to hear that. Though with an A-K, being a good shot may not make much of a difference.”

“This is in case the hotel comes under attack, right?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Now that got my attention.

It's as good example of a Newsweek-style soft lede (sometimes known as a "Jell-O lede") as you'll ever find.

To keep reading the blog, you'll probably have to register for the ADN website. When you get to Mauer's pages, surf around and catch up with his reporting. Like most blogs, the earliest entries are farther down on the page. Also look under the heading MORE BLOGS for the link to "Inside Iraq." It's a blog written mainly by Iraqi correspondents who work for the McClatchy newspaper group's bureau in Bagdhad. Their English isn't the best, but their posts give you a feel for what it's like to report -- and live -- in a society that is literally tearing itself apart that again gets filtered out of the news that reaches us in the United States.