Steven Levy takes on blogs, war, and conventional media in Newsweek today. (Minor point, but let's ditch the Newsweek-style spelling "webloger." Y'know: logger ... weblogger ... weblogging. Capiche? Excerpt:

Perhaps it was inevitable that this war would become the breakthrough for blogs. The bigmouths of the so-called Blogosphere have long contended that the form deserves to be seen as a significant component of 21st-century media. And in the months preceding the invasion, blogging about the impending conflict had been feisty and furious. But it wasn't until the bombs hit Baghdad that Weblogs finally found their moment. The arrival of war, and the frustratingly variegated nature of this particular conflict, called for two things: an easy-to-parse overview for news junkies who wanted information from all sides, and a personal insight that bypassed the sanitizing Cuisinart of big-media news editing. ...

Even some of the soldiers have been blogging. An American officer calling himself L.T. Smash presents sharp observations from his bivouac and some misty-eyed patriotism.

The role of professional reporters is another matter. One blogger, freelancer Chris Allbritton, used his site to solicit $10,000 from readers to fund a trip to blog from the northern front. (He's just arrived in Turkey and will be in-country soon.) The BBC has a blog, and a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter has been using a blog to describe her stay on the USS Abraham Lincoln. But when CNN reporter Kevin Sites’s bosses found out he’d been blogging his experiences on an unaffiliated site, they told him to stop.

CNN's response was seen in the Blogosphere as one more sign that the media dinosaurs are determined to stamp out this subversive new form of reporting. But judging from the television and print reports from journalists embedded in military units, there's another way to look at things. Consider the reports from embedded journalists working for media institutions. They’re ad hoc, using quick-and-dirty high-tech tools to pinpoint the reality of a single moment. They are shaped by the personal experience of the creator rather than gathering news from after-the-fact interviewing and document collection. They are delivered in the first person, creating a connection with the viewer that sometimes bulldozes over the deeper realties of the events.

In other words, they’re a hell of a lot like blogs. Not the heavily linked Weblogs like The Agonist or Instapundit but the personal accounts of Salam or the thousands of bloggers who use the technology to keep a running diary of their activities for a small circle of friends’or anyone who cares to listen in.

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