Gulf War One was the first war reported from cable TV. The Iraq War was the first war in which the internet was a communication tool taken for granted.
From March 2003:Hours before the United States attacked Baghdad yesterday, CNN debuted the Internet's first all-news streaming radio station . . . . ABC News created the Internet's first live video news channel, a $5-a-month service that will test people's willingness to pay for live news on their PCs. CBS News and MSNBC.com, meanwhile, boosted the amount of free video they offer online. . . . Reporters across the Gulf -- including hundreds "embedded" with American troops -- planned to file stories using laptops hooked up wirelessly to the Internet. Foreign correspondents for The Washington Post and the New York Times are using the Internet to answer questions submitted electronically by readers.Looking back in 2006, we know that the Iraq War did turn into an "internet war."All of which sets the stage for a new kind of war coverage, one that combines the immediacy of television with the depth of newspapers and adds the public participation unique to the Internet. . . . It's probably too early to tell whether the second Gulf War will turn into an "Internet war" in the same way that radio shaped perceptions of World War II, television shaped views of Vietnam and cable TV dominated coverage of the 1991 Gulf War.
Now the Israeli-Hizbullah War is the first war being reported from blogs.
The blogosphere has played a significant role during the reconstruction after the Iraq War, as journalists began to report via blogs, and the unfiltered voices of individuals from US Marines to Iraqi citizens began to influence local politics and news. But in that hazy distant past of early 2003, almost all blogs were in the Anglosphere, most people had never heard of them, and their influence in reporting and shaping news grew slowly. (The Persian blogosphere was also blossoming, but invisible to world newsgathering, or even the Anglosphere blogosphere, at the time.)
In 2003, we were amazed to read - unfiltered and daily fresh - the observations of an anonymous citizen half a world away, in a war zone. But Salam Pax was a dissident in a totalitarian country, communicating clandestinely. We didn't know if he was real or who he was. If real, we knew that he had some kind of special privileges to be able to blog. He was sui generis.
One of the early results of the downfall of Saddam was an explosion of interconnectivity in Iraq. Within weeks, almost everyone had a cellphone, and anyone who could read could log onto the web in an internet cafe. One of the early projects of Spirit of America was to help more blogs in the Arab world get started. The Fadhil brothers started Iraq the Model and they and other Iraqi bloggers became a curiosity to journalists covering the war, but not a relied-upon source.
The idea of collecting local news from personal blogs took off in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as American journalists discovered that reporting and video and photos from local blogs complemented their on-the-scene reporting. By the end of 2005, blogs were credible contributors to news gathering and analysis in the United States.
As of July 2006, blogs play the same role in the Middle East as they did in New Orleans and Iraq. Now global news media know that that every country has bloggers writing about their daily lives and current events, that many of them blog in English, that aggregators like Global Voices Online and Pajamas Media do much of the work of collecting and arranging them for perusal, and that they are an easy way to get a range of "man in the street" opinions.
Local blogs are a taken-for-granted news and opinion source on an international scale. This latest war is the first one in which mainstream media immediately go to local bloggers, in many countries, for recent news and local color, and they will be seamlessly integrated into news reporting anywhere in the world from now on.
Here's one example.
Here's another.
(I have seen more examples but I didn't bookmark them. As I come across more I'll add them to the end of this post.)
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