Web Logs Tell War Stories,
Unfiltered and in Real Time
By MATTHEW ROSE and CHRISTOPHER COOPER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The day allied forces began their invasion of Iraq, a Navy lieutenant
based in the Gulf posted some news on his personal Web site: "Saddam
fired a couple of those Scuds that he doesn't have at me." On
another personal Web site someone claiming to be a Baghdad resident wrote
that "there are more Ba'ath people in the streets and they have more
weapons." Kevin Mickey, a Navy lieutenant commander at Camp Patriot,
Kuwait, noted on his site that "we had a minor dust storm
yesterday" and said the camp's missile alarms were going off
repeatedly.
On top of the 500 reporters traveling with the military and the three
cable-TV news channels beaming 24-hour coverage there's a new element in
this war: unfiltered eyewitness accounts online.
Soldiers and citizens in the war zone are publishing in real time on
their own Web sites. Families are posting on the Web the e-mails sent
home by relatives in the service. And free-lance reporters -- not subject
to restrictions by the Pentagon or large media outlets -- are writing
online for a new world-wide audience.
In all, the glut of information from the Gulf -- from the important to
the trivial -- is creating a dizzying panoply of detail, as well as
half-truths. For example, the Iraqis have fired missiles at U.S. forces
but not Scuds.
"Not only reporters, but people on the battle front can communicate
with the world," says Jeff Jarvis, the president of Advance
Publications Inc.'s Internet operations. He is compiling a list of links
to traditional and alternative news sources from the Gulf. "Now I
feel I am getting it faster, even faster than TV because it's coming
through multiple channels," he says.
The information barrage is being driven by Web logs, commonly known as
blogs, the term for constantly updated personal Web sites that are much
like online journals. An inexpensive and relatively simple form of
technology, they have been a growing phenomenon in the U.S. for several
years, and first cropped up in the military during the battle in
Afghanistan. However, because many of their authors are anonymous, it's
difficult to verify the information they supply.
Among the most popular blogs from the front, L.T. Smash takes its name
from a character who is both a Navy lieutenant and record producer on the
TV show "The Simpsons." On Friday, the author wrote of
"eight or nine" missile alerts and the next day reported
hearing "distant jet engines, high up in the night sky."
The site is full of details about life in camp, including a clash with an
officer called "The Dragon Lady," but there's little way of
knowing if the author really is in the Gulf or is really in the Navy. He
didn't respond to e-mails. Lt. Cmdr. Mickey says he has helped with some
of the technical aspects of "L.T. Smash's" site and that L.T.
is a real lieutenant.
In a question-and-answer section on the site, "L.T. Smash"
says, "This is an anonymous journal. I'm being intentionally vague
about who I am and what I'm doing."
Such uncertainty apparently hasn't bothered the site's fans. The site is
so popular it recently announced it was moved to new computer servers to
accommodate the traffic.
Lt. Cmdr. Mickey, a 39-year-old reservist, says in an e-mail that he runs
his own Web log, The Primary Main Objective, on his camp's computer
network. On it he has posted pictures, news of missile alerts and a
recent trip in the Iraqi desert. Certain parts of the camp are off-limits
for photography and Lt. Cmdr. Mickey says he doesn't write about
"where we are [exactly], details about what's going on." His
immediate boss knows about the blog but hasn't seen it, he says. "He
trusts me not to do anything stupid," Lt. Cmdr. Mickey says.
It's not hard to run this kind of Web site from the front. The armed
services don't have centralized rules governing troops' Internet use,
beyond restricting such obvious things as pornography and disclosure of
military operational details. Each branch of the military has its own set
of general guidelines, but typically delegates decisions about e-mail and
Internet access to commanders in the field. There, soldiers can use the
military's nonofficial network, the Nonsecure Internet Protocol Network,
or Nippernet. Enlisted troops often have access to makeshift Internet
cafés in the larger camps.
Maj. C.J. Wallington, team leader for the Army's secure intranet system,
Army Knowledge Online, says because of the volume, the Army "can't
spend a lot of time" checking soldiers' e-mail. "We put a lot
of faith in soldiers to do the right thing," and apply the same
discretion to their Internet communications that they'd use in personal
conversations, he says.
The Army is considering incorporating blogging into its secure network
where troops communicate with each other and their families. If such a
system were put into place, the general public would no longer have
access to such blogs.
One needn't run a Web site from the front to publish war news. Julia
Hayden, an office manager in San Antonio, posts e-mails from her daughter
in the Marines, on a Web site named Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing. Her
Camp Guam-based daughter, whom Ms. Hayden nicknamed Cpl. Blondie, was one
of the first to report in mid-March that some Iraqi troops had tried to
surrender near the Kuwait-Iraq border.
Someone running a blog under the pseudonym "Salam Pax," (which
translates as "Peace Peace") who didn't respond to e-mailed
questions, has been posting news from Baghdad, detailing food shortages,
the impact of the bombing and news of air-raid sirens. To the people who
have raised doubts about "Salam's" legitimacy,
"Salam" posted this message: "don't belive [sic] it? then
don't read it."
Free-lancers making greater use of the Web are sometimes scooping the
publications that otherwise pay their bills. In a piece dated March 20 on
Time magazine's Web site, free-lance reporter Joshua Kucera, based in the
Kurdish part of northern Iraq, reported on the rising price of gasoline
and plastic sheeting -- items he already had posted on his blog. A
spokeswoman for Time magazine said, "Time.com only asks that Kucera
file to Time first, then he can blog away." Mr. Kucera says his site
doesn't compete: It's "a sort of B-sides collection, the stuff than
can't really fit into a normal news story."
Curiously, unlike the military, traditional media outlets have been
trying to quash their personnel's blogging efforts. Kevin Sites, a CNN
correspondent in northern Iraq, had been posting photographs, short
accounts and audio reports on his Web log until CNN pressured him to
stop. "Covering a war for CNN ... is a full-time job and we asked
Kevin to concentrate only on that for the time being," a CNN
spokeswoman says. Mr. Sites wrote on his site that he hoped to reach an
agreement with CNN. The day his site went quiet, it registered a total of
33,285 visitors, up from 4,307 people a week earlier.
Write to Matthew Rose at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and Christopher
Cooper at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB104854599843896800,00.html
