Hats off to Eric Black, national and world news writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who is running a feature this week called "The Big Question - Iraq's Election: Is this a turning point?" In addition to well researched articles and interviews with experts on the Iraqi elections, Black provides a blog with a discussion thread for readers to comment at length and get into dialogue with one another.
And you know what? It really works. The discussion is civil in tone, well-informed, and generally less shrill and partisan than what you see in a typical letters to the editor column, or for that matter on a typical editorial page. Thoughtful people weigh in with a variety of perspectives, and there is give and take, with Black occasionally stepping in to clarify or even to take questions back to the panel of experts. One commenter expresses his appreciation as follows:
Eric, you put the major newspapers of this country to shame.
You have brought together not just two sides for the phony balance that is treated as journalism nowadays, but the many sides that every real issue involves.
You have offered to collect questions from your readers to ask the people you interviewed.
It’s all written at a high level, not for sixth graders.
This is the sort of open-mindedness, intellectual integrity, and respect for readers that is so patently missing from our news.
You can bet that I will recommend that everyone I know read this.
Thanks for showing us how journalism is done!
I would definitely second that. This is light years ahead of anything I have ever read in the dead trees edition of the Star Tribune and gives me hope that some of the journalists there are actually interested in journalism and grasp how blogs add a new dimension to the reporting. There are several topic threads going, including "What if the Sunnis lose?", "Are the Iraqis like our Founding Fathers?" and "Does the United States really want democracy in Iraq?" They, and the discussions that follow, are well worth your time.
UPDATE: Eric Black notes in the comments below that he is not an editor at the Star Tribune, "just a reporter/writer" (now corrected above). My bad. Nonetheless, I hope the real editors At the Star Tribune are paying attention to this demonstration on how to involve the readership in a dialogue rather than pushing a simplistic (and distorted) view of events on them. There are many points of view on this story, and the articles, interviews and discussion threads illuminate more of them than I have seen in years of the paper's normal coverage. And I read it daily.
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