While CNN and other broadcast journalists hunkered down on Baghdad rooftops to report this week's bombings, a Web-based news service gave its audience a more immediate, interactive window on the action just hours after it began.
Using satellite phones and America Online's chat system, the journalists relayed questions from a US audience to an Iraqi reporter sitting in the center of the city, amid the bombings.
At approximately 9:00 p.m. EST Wednesday night, the Out There News service started feeding questions to Iraqi journalist Subhy Haddad, who was sitting in the press center building in Baghdad.
The Q&A session lasted a half hour, and about 12,000 people participated in the new media experience, said Paul Eedle, director of Out There News.
"It's entirely for an online audience, and you're getting a constant flow of feedback from the audience you're serving," said Eedle. "You get an instant sense of what people think of the story and what you're saying."
As the building shook around him, Haddad used a satellite phone to talk to Eedle in his London office. Eedle, in turn, was relaying questions from a chat host located at one of AOL's US offices. The chat host screened questions as audience members typed them.
The reports from Haddad had a more immediate impact than most news reports and were based in part on Iraqi citizens' accounts of the bombing.
"Did you see/smell smoke? Any evidence of damage?" one member asked.
"Yes, I did see smoke coming out from areas not far from the press center, white smoke. The anti-aircraft batteries began to hit upwards. One could hear them all over the Iraqi capital," Haddad said.
"An eyewitness told me a couple of hours ago that a supposed Tomahawk missile had fallen on a residential area about five kilometers away from the press center damaging a number of houses and shops. He said the missile fell in the middle of the street but its explosion caused a very strong impact. He saw five or six injured people but he did not see any deaths," he reported.
Out There News hosted chats with Haddad both Wednesday night and early Thursday afternoon. The participants numbered 12,136, with a peak of 3,034 at one time, Eedle said. At times, the audience's questions seemed to rankle Haddad, who offered direct accounts as well as his own perspective on the event.
"So what will it take to topple Saddam? Will the US have to kill him? And if we do, will the people thank us?," asked one AOL member. To which Haddad responded, "This is a strange question. Is it legitimate to say that a country thousands of miles away from the Middle East has the right to topple a regime and kill its President, whatever the identity of this regime might be?
"I want to add a comment on this," he continued. "The bombardment tonight has certainly killed dozens of Iraqis, apart from the vast destruction it has caused. I don't think at all that this will have any harm on the regime or the President. It is the Iraqi people who are suffering.
"The bombardment has started again. This is very strong this time. It is very, very powerful. It must be very close. These are the missiles. This area is surrounded by apartment buildings," he said.
The Out There News service has planned another event on Monday afternoon with an Egyptian journalist who will get reaction from Arabs in Cairo on the bombings.
Out There News has a number of ways to engage its audience with interactive news. In addition to live chats, the site invites readers to fill out a form that automatically creates a Web page where they can proffer their own perspective on events.
"Our approach is interactive, and we get a huge amount of contributions from our audience," said Eedle. "We've gotten 150 personal Web pages set up over the last day from all over the world. It has a bit more zing than the typical 'Post a message here' format." Earlier this year, Eedle himself was in Iraq, reporting from Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra.
Eedle and John West, both former Reuters journalists, started the service in 1996 and now have 13 correspondents in 11 countries across the world. The group's reports and multimedia documentaries are regular features on Internet portals such as AOL, Yahoo, and Excite. The Out There News site is a daily magazine on AOL of raw, unfiltered reporting taken straight from its reporters' notebooks.
