Inside Baghdad, via South Philly
A couple of days ago, when tensions with Turkey and promises to rein in private contractors filled the headlines from Iraq, Brian Conley was on the phone to his correspondent, wondering how that piece on nightlife in Baghdad was going.From his crowded office in a South Philadelphia rowhouse, the editor of Small World News probed cub reporter Omar Abdullah, a 23-year-old Palestinian Iraqi who had learned English from Metallica songs.
“In the ’70s, it was a very Western place,” Conley says of the Iraqi capital. “Now most of the liquor stores have been bombed or closed by threats.”
Not surprisingly, Abdullah was having trouble getting good footage of the club scene.
Real life itself is what Conley and colleague Steven Wyshywaniuk are going for each week for their Web-based Alive in Baghdad reports.
The name is a dig at those “Live From . . . ” stand-ups on network TV, in which correspondents move too fast to absorb the nuances of a place where 119 journalists have been killed since the war began.
So Conley, a documentary filmmaker by training, has handed cheap digital cameras to a team of locals to tell stories that haven’t been told, or to tell them from a personal perspective – that, say, of a neighbor or brother.
Which is how he and Wyshywaniuk have landed interviews with a distraught woman whose house was bombed, a masked insurgent, and an Iraqi who, in flawless English, calmly told how he had wound up imprisoned at Abu Ghraib.
Trial by fire
Two years ago Conley, then 25, traveled to Baghdad to recruit correspondents for his Citizen Journalism project. A friend of a friend had told him about Abdullah, who had been a translator for Christian Peacemaker Teams, a human-rights organization.A few days in, car bombs ravaged the nearby Palestine Hotel. “My entire apartment building shook,” Conley recalls. “I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into? This isn’t just some pipe dream.’ ”
After he got his bearings, he started filming, and when the head of a new Internet video site called Blip.tv came upon Conley’s footage on the Web, Alive in Baghdad found an audience.
Since then, the team has expanded to four correspondents in Iraq and two in Mexico, where a project on gritty topics south of the border is starting up. And the report has deepened, moving from Iraqi talking heads addressing U.S. audiences to more sophisticated, multi-sourced accounts from various perspectives.
Conley, who studied Arabic at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, is proud of his show’s journalistic independence. While comments left on the aliveinbaghdad.org site occasionally allege bias, the show has been accused both of being a communist stooge and a CIA front. That makes Conley happy.
There have been great highs – licensing deals last spring with the BBC and Sky News, which funded the project for months, and the six Vloggies lining Conley’s desk, which honor the best video blogging of 2006.
“Incredible,” former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble wrote of Alive in Baghdad’s work, which drew the only standing ovation at the award show.
Occupational hazards
But working in a war zone brings plunging lows, too. Correspondent Marwan Ghassan was so eager to get started that he began filming before Conley provided him with journalist credentials. A militia grabbed the young man for 72 hours. He was released, beaten up and with a broken arm. Another correspondent’s assistant was killed by a sniper’s bullet.Despite the laurels and license deals, Alive in Baghdad finds itself nearly broke, again. Neither Conley nor Wyshywaniuk has been able to pay himself his $2,500 salary for October. No idea what will happen next month.
The two are telling this bitter truth over breakfast at the Melrose Diner, which is two blocks from their office and a world away from their thoughts.
“It’s really bizarre when I go and hang out with my friends,” says Wyshywaniuk, a tall, rail-thin redhead wearing a tiny brown cap that suggests the student-Bolsheviks in Dr. Zhivago.
“One’s a software designer, and the other’s got a desk job. They’re twentysomethings with twentysomething problems. They have a nice dog. They want to buy a house.
“They were telling me some story about a dog. I said, ‘You think that’s bad? One of our correspondents was saying how this 8-year-old boy was sitting in his living room in Baghdad when a head went flying by. He said, ‘Daddy, we need to leave Iraq.’
“My friends said, ‘Thanks, Steve. Thanks for bumming us out.’ You walk around with this on your mind.”
staff writer Daniel Rubin
I can now say I’ve been compared to characters in Doctor Zhivago. Ridiculous.
Original Link: Inside Baghdad, via South Philly
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