BuzzMachine

Who says you can’t blog about your own office? Steve Baker tells us about changes at Business Week and what they mean:

The most important change (from a blog perspective) is that one managing editor position has been turned into three–count ’em–executive editor posts. Yet only one of these editors will focus on the paper-and-ink magazine. The other two will direct BW Online and new ventures. That means that two-thirds of the top editing team will be focused away from our paper magazine. Gives you an idea of where the growth is.

Go listen to the latest On The Media to hear a mind-boggling interview with Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Doug Clilfton about his decision not to publish two stories based on leaked government docs in the aftermath of the Judith Miller jailing (sorry but the link to the segment doesn’t work and transcripts aren’t up yet but it’s in the beginning of the MP3 atop this page). I wish I could quote and characterize it to give you a sense of what happens there but you have to listen because it’s just bizarre. Clifton snaps at interview Bob Garfield and at The New York Times for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

Democracy Guy writes about the interview here.

Good on Reuters for supporting the creation of an Iraqi wire service.

The charitable foundation of the Reuters news agency plans to announce this week that it is turning a grass-roots Iraqi news Web site into that nation’s first independent commercial news service.

For the last several months, the Web site, Aswat al-Iraq (Voices of Iraq), has relied on a team of 30 stringers and the help of three of Iraq’s independent newspapers, as well as feeds from the Reuters Arabic-language service, to publish hundreds of stories a month on politics, culture and even the taboo topic of AIDS in Iraq.

Now the site, www.aswataliraq.info, will become a full-fledged newswire, managed and staffed by Iraqi journalists in Baghdad and operated independently of Reuters. It will use $800,000 from the United Nations to create a newsroom and post reporters in each Iraqi province. When the service goes live in a few months, it will feed breaking news to both Iraqi and foreign news outlets.

Yes, I can anticipate the cracks in the comments: Reuters and the U.N., what a team… we’ll never see the word “terrorist” there. But I say give it a chance to prove its journalistic value.