"Live from an Israeli Bunker" ... it's Eugene. Who?
Seventeen-year-old Eugene, blogging at www.israelibunker.blogspot.com from a bunker in Haifa, is one of several bloggers featured by Pajamas Media (PJM) writing firsthand experience from the Middle East.
Finding the teen's blog, PJM's CEO and co-founder Roger L. Simon jumped at the opportunity to conduct a podcast interview with him via Skype.
And that is the focus of media blog company PJM, which aggregates content from some 90 high-trafficked blogs and scans mainstream media news - to extend political and world coverage like the Israel-Hizbullah conflict within the blogosphere using converging media including commentary, video, and podcasting.
"We're an alternative to mainstream media," Simon said. "We have editors in Sydney and Barcelona and Los Angeles who are all online at different hours, so we're covering events 24 hours - better than the 'Drudge Report'."
Eugene's blog is one of several blogs providing a continuous commentary on the conflict, which also includes "Atlas Shrugs," "Instapundit," and writer Allison Kaplan Sommer's "An Unsealed Room" among others, as well as "Truth Laid Bear," which is providing a breakdown of links to Israeli bloggers, Lebanese bloggers, Palestinian, as well as outside perspectives.
In fact, readers can view the front page of www.pajamasmedia.com, which has a live chronology of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hizbullah.
"This chronology's intention is to give the public moment-to-moment access to the vicissitudes of the war and ultimately to provide historians with a record of the evolving struggle," says Simon.
And Eugene's podcast interview on the conflict will not be the only one; in a day or two, PJM will roll out with podcast interviews featuring panel discussions with Middle Eastern bloggers and citizens from Israel and Lebanon.
"Hopefully, there won't be a lot of yelling and screaming at each other," said Simon, "but I don't think there will be."
Undeniably, more Internet enthusiasts are reading blogs, with some 57 million American adults or 39 percent of the online population who are blog readers, according to the latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And sites like PJM are likely to see more readers as they transform the blogosphere with multimedia content.
As Simon has described, "when the Middle East conflict started to expand we wanted to get access to an Israeli official. We weren't sure we could, but we tried and were able to land an interview with the Israeli US Ambassador Daniel Ayalon. Our interview lasted 14 minutes compared to cable news organizations of perhaps 3 to 4 minutes. This flexible timeframe is one of our advantages compared to the more sound bite oriented mainstream media approach."
In addition to expanding coverage of the Middle East, PJM also launched its new initiative "Politics Central" - which features blogs as well as exclusive podcast interviews covering 2006 and 2008 elections, world and politic issues, media and research.
Podcast interviews include US Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and through "Instapundit's" Glenn and Helen Show, with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "The podcast interviews are different, they go for as long or as short and are not sound-bite oriented," Simon added.
"It's the twenty-first century media," Simon said. "We're on the cusp of something we don't understand, the technology is changing. And we're using citizen journalists to break down the borderline between professionals and amateurs. How will you do it - not who you are - and how will you stick to the facts. Some people will slaughter you online if you don't keep with the facts."
Pajamas Media on the live edge
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