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Sunday, May 16, 2004

Iraq assignment desk: The rebuilding beat

BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis
If I were in charge of a bureau of reporters in Iraq -- are you listening NY Times, Washington Post, FoxNews, NBC, CBS, ABC, Reuters, BBC? -- I would assign one reporter, just one, to the rebuilding beat.

There are plenty of reporters -- hell, every reporter in the country -- assigned to the police beat, the blood-and-guts beat, the who-shot-whom today beat. When I worked in Chicago and San Francisco and New York, we had one or two reporters in the cop shop covering all that. We had hundreds of reporters covering the rest of life.

I see no reporters covering the rest of life in Iraq. The stories would be easy to get; all you have to do is read a few of the Iraqi weblogs. Read Zeyad or read Omar...Or read posts like this from Mohammad:...
I expect that one the reasons they don't do this is that the reporters don't speak the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. To get a feel for what people really think you can't use a translator, you have to speak the language.

Solution: Hire English-speaking Iraqis to report on non-security issues.
Posted by: Zayphar / 5/16/2004 05:53:00 PM
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