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.
