In 2003, reporter Christopher Allbritton reported on the war in Iraq as the "Web's first fully reader-funded journalist-blogger." Right now, he's raising money to go Back To Iraq and once again report on the situation as an independent journalist. What a smart and courageous use of the Internet to crack the tower of vertically integrated media.

Not that we can do without the bigger media players, which is why the following worries me: Last night the public television news show Newshour featured an account of how the western media are currently pooling coverage in Iraq. Journalists are being explicitly targeted by some of the combatants, and so the networks and papers are trying to minimize risk to their journalists by sending out a single team at a time, made up of professionals from different networks.

It's easy to understand why they are doing this, but I have to wonder what I'm not hearing about the war as a result.

(Note: Photo above by Allbritton, from his 2003 time in Iraq.)