The blogosphere has played a significant role during the reconstruction after the Iraq War, as journalists began to report via blogs, and the unfiltered voices of individuals from US Marines to Iraqi citizens began to influence local politics and news. But in that hazy distant past of early 2003, almost all blogs were in the Anglosphere, most people had never heard of them, and their influence in reporting and shaping news grew slowly. (The Persian blogosphere was also blossoming, but invisible to world newsgathering, or even the Anglosphere blogosphere, at the time.)

In 2003, we were amazed to read - unfiltered and daily fresh - the observations of an anonymous citizen half a world away, in a war zone. But Salam Pax was a dissident in a totalitarian country, communicating clandestinely. We didn't know if he was real or who he was. If real, we knew that he had some kind of special privileges to be able to blog. He was sui generis.

One of the early results of the downfall of Saddam was an explosion of interconnectivity in Iraq. Within weeks, almost everyone had a cellphone, and anyone who could read could log onto the web in an internet cafe. One of the early projects of Spirit of America was to help more blogs in the Arab world get started. The Fadhil brothers started Iraq the Model and they and other Iraqi bloggers became a curiosity to journalists covering the war, but not a relied-upon source.

The idea of collecting local news from personal blogs took off in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as American journalists discovered that reporting and video and photos from local blogs complemented their on-the-scene reporting. By the end of 2005, blogs were credible contributors to news gathering and analysis in the United States.

As of July 2006, blogs play the same role in the Middle East as they did in New Orleans and Iraq. Now global news media know that that every country has bloggers writing about their daily lives and current events, that many of them blog in English, that aggregators like Global Voices Online and Pajamas Media do much of the work of collecting and arranging them for perusal, and that they are an easy way to get a range of "man in the street" opinions.

Local blogs are a taken-for-granted news and opinion source on an international scale. This latest war is the first one in which mainstream media immediately go to local bloggers, in many countries, for recent news and local color, and they will be seamlessly integrated into news reporting anywhere in the world from now on. Examples:
Dallas Morning News.
CBS News.
Aussie Dave says that either or both CNN and MSNBC mentioned his liveblogging in a news story.
UK Times.
CNN.
The Age, in Australia.
Frankfurter Rundschau Online.
Beliefnet.
Westchester Journal News.
Jerusalem Post.

Lisa has more examples to show this is the first war to be blogged since Day One.

A comment at a Lebanese blog:

Anonymous said...
I am at the Washington Post and wanted to chat with you. I sent you an email as well.

Look at our coverage of Lebanon at blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal. We would love input from Lebanese and Israelis on the ground there, to share with our readers what it feels like to be on the ground - what you see and hear. Just a paragraph or two would be great.

Please post to our site at blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal. We would be delighted to feature your work.

Wed Jul 19, 09:36:20 PM PDT

(I have seen more examples but I didn't bookmark them. As I come across more I'll add them to the end of this post.)