Thursday, August 10, 2006

The blogs of war

The MEN's foray into blogging continues, with the surprising addition of newspaper-sponsored blogs based in Lebanon and Israel. This sort of news-responsive hotspot blogging has been done before, probably best and most famously by the Guardian in Iraq, who enlisted Salam Pax to write a column. Still, it's a great idea, and it's nice to see the MEN being more ambitious on both the blogging and international news fronts.

The View From Lebanon is written by Wassim Kabbani, a recruitment consultant who moved to Beirut from Cheadle a few years back. His pieces provide a clear and unabashedly opinionated perspective on the situation in Lebanon. And Mancunian Sharon Healy is writing The View from Israel from her home near Haifa, which so far has centered mostly on the difficulties of carrying on with your life in a war zone. It's really weird to read about her buying cornflakes in the supermarket and missing out on her community drama group meeting because of bombing. I hope they both continue to write regularly, and stay safe.

The rest of the MEN blog stable is off to a somewhat variable start, with online director Sarah Hartley's food blog seeming the strongest of the lot.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's getting there, though still a bit introverted and newspaper-y. They should be pushing the blogs more if they've got faith in them - feeding back into the community.