“You Can Hear What They Think and Speak…”

So says Leila Fadel, the McClatchy Newspapers’ Lebanese-American-Saudi bureau chief in Baghdad, of the content of her staff’s blog, Inside Iraq. Quoting her in "As Iraqis See It," New York Review of Books (17 Jan 08), writer and journalist Michael Massing surveys the McClatchy chain’s local blogscene. Inside Iraq is an official online extension of the MClatchy mortar and brick office, but it retains the unedited edginess of experiential blogging amidst life lived in hard places. Massing treats us to both the real lives and personalities of the diarists, and their hackle-stiffening accounts of there-but-for-the-grace-of-whoever death-defying ducks and weaves. Working for foreign media doesn’t inhibit their political opinions of the occupation, either. By Massing’s account, Salam Pax’s Where is Raed?  this is not, but Inside Iraq still sounds like it’s worth a read for its reality-bites texture and depth.