As United States and British forces push through Iraq towards Baghdad, another kind of war is in progress: a battle between TV, radio, newspapers and websites to be the first to bring their audience breaking news on Iraq.
Never before has a war been covered in such pervasive, explicit detail, on so many media platforms. It was the Gulf War in the early 1990s that put CNN on the map. But since then a new kid on the block has arrived: the Internet.
The fight to attract online audiences has been just as intense as the TV networks’. As a result of the Iraq war, many are saying the Net as a news publisher will come into its own, in the same way Gulf War I made television.
News websites across the world have been reporting massive traffic increases since the war’s start. According to an international news agency, the war has even toppled sex, the Net’s long-time winner, as the most popular search term on top search engines.
South Africa’s major news sites are attracting huge chunks of the country’s 3,2-million Web users. News24’s publisher Cobus Heyl says the website has seen between 50 000 and 100 000 extra readers as a result of the war. Independent Online’s content manager Babs Abba Omar says the website’s traffic has been up by about 10% to 15%. The Mail & Guardian Online has seen a 33% increase in its daily readership. Its weekend readership almost doubled. Sunday Times website manager Elan Lohman, says there has been “a lot of interest” in the site.
Websites were caught with their pants down after the September 11 attacks. It was one of the first events where the world turned to the Web en masse for news. Servers buckled under the flood of readers and the bigger sites were forced to create lighter, alternative emergency homepages to cope.
But this time international sites like CNN.com and BBC.i were ready for the war. CNN’s homepage has been transformed into a special, streamlined version of the normal site, almost solely focusing on the war.
The war has also put the spotlight on a relatively recent Internet phenomenon called “blogs” — personal online diaries or newsletters published by individual users on the Web. An article on Poynter Online reports Web geeks touting these blogs as a “new form of journalism and the wave of the future”.
Various newspapers and websites picked up on a blog of a 29-year-old, man somewhere in the suburbs of the Iraqi capital. It has become one of the most intriguing stories of the Net. Known simply as Salam Pax, his online diary is fascinating users with its observations of the war.
South African news sites have been slow to capitalise on the Net’s multi-media and interactive capabilities. The international Web is full of interactive guides, video and audio reports on the war. Even traditional newspaper websites such as the Guardian Unlimited dabbles in audio and video reports — once the exclusive domain of TV and radio. Interactive guides on Iraq provide day-by-day graphic explanations of the war’s progress, charting the advance of US troops over Iraqi territory.
South African Web analyst Arthur Goldstuck notes that readers tend to visit the Internet to get depth, analysis, alternative viewpoints and background on the war — something that TV is not geared to deliver.
Says Goldstuck: “The war in Iraq is another chapter since the September 11 saga. The Web came into its own with September 11. What we are seeing now is just an extension or follow-on … when the world turns to the Web for minute-by-minute info.”
Matthew Buckland is the editor of Mail & Guardian Online.