Michael Totten writes;
We have more than a dozen local Iraqi correspondents, at least one in each province, filing daily reports. These reports include news, interviews, quotes, photos, whatever they can get in a day. They aren't professional journalists. They are more or less ordinary Iraqis. Some of them you already know - Omar and Mohammed from Iraq the Model, for example. Others you don't know because they don't speak or write in English. Their reports are translated from Arabic before
they are uploaded to the reports site.My job isn't to edit the reports, exactly (they are published raw on a secondary site), but to run a blog on the main site which summarizes, excerpts, and links to the reports from the field. I'm also going to be excerpting and linking to essays and posts in the Iraqi blogosphere and - on rarer occasions - stories in the mainstream and Middle Eastern media. The idea is to let Iraqis themselves tell their own story of their own first free election.
The site is called "Friends of Democracy: Ground level election news from the people of Iraq." To the best of my knowledge there is nothing else like it anywhere out there, at least not in English. (We also have an Arabic site.)
If you have the time and the inclination, please give us a link.
Let's get this into circulation, folks.
http://www.friendsofdemocracy.info/
