You may have heard of Chris Albritton. He's the former AP reporter who set up Back-to-Iraq some years ago, and convinced readers to send him cash to go to the sandbox, and report.
Really the first blogger to get that kind of business model up and running
He did a pretty good job of it, IMHO (full disclosure -- he is a friend), and in the process became a Time Magazine regular.
He's based in Beirut these day, covered the recent conflict. And in the course of it all was firmly placed in the cross-hairs of the pajamahadeen bloggers who think they know what war is all about, because they read the internets.
Chris has had enough.
His last post pretty much sums up much the state of the blogosphere these days:
Subtlety doesn’t seem to have much place in the blogosphere anymore, where you get the most attention and the most hits by putting out whatever half-assed opinion one can muster. You only have to shout loudly enough and play to whatever audience you want to get the attention. Blogging these days seems to resemble bad vaudeville rather than thoughtful commentary.
For the week of 9/11, The Washington Post's PostGlobal and Oxford International Review (OIR) are sponsoring exclusive blog commentary from Baghdad on the security situation in Iraq. Click here
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/debate/ for comments from Baha al-Araji, primary spokesman for the movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Members of the Sadrist Movement eschew contact with western media, but al-Araji agreed to speak exclusively to OIR. Join the conversation and pose questions
to our panel. OIR and PostGlobal would love your input.
http://www.oir.org.uk
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/
Posted by: Oxford International Review | Monday, September 11, 2006 at 04:29 PM