Alive in Baghdad
Encyclopedia
Alive in Baghdad is a weekly news video blog, or vlog
Vlog
Video blogging, sometimes shortened to vlogging or vidding or vidblogging is a form of blogging for which the medium is video, and is a form of Web television. Entries often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text, images, and other metadata. Entries can be recorded in one take...

, based in Baghdad
Baghdad
Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Governorate. The population of Baghdad in 2011 is approximately 7,216,040...

, Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....

, distributed via website and RSS. They employ Iraqi journalists to produce videos covering various topics on daily life in Iraq following the Second Gulf War
Second Gulf War
Different armed conflicts in the Persian Gulf region have been called the Second Gulf War:*Gulf War , a war between Iraq and a coalition of nations led by the United States...

, including a piece on citizens trying to protect their neighborhood from insurgent death squads, another on what it is like to be an Iraqi Police officer, and interviews with car bomb survivors. The footage is shot by Iraqis and edited in the United States.

Alive in Baghdad was founded in 2005 by Brian Conley, a 26-year-old American journalist and filmmaker. After a year of preparation (including learning Arabic and studying Iraqi culture and history), Conley went to Baghdad to equip and train a small team of Iraqis to produce a new short film every week on the subject of daily life in Iraq.

The website has survived on donations from foundations and individuals. Staff in Iraq receive a small salary. US staff are not paid.

Alive in Model

Alive in Baghdad was the first of many websites around the world developed by Brian Conley and the company Small World News. Some of these sites include Alive in Mexico, Alive in Gaza, Alive in Tehran and Alive in Afghanistan among others.

Alive in Afghanistan

Alive in Afghanistan was featured on the Rachael Maddow show for its coverage of the 2009 Afghan Elections which used a combination of citizen journalist reports coupled with reporting from the Pajhwok News Agency. Reports were plotted on a map and could be displayed by category and/or date range. The website was based on a customized version of Ushahidi
Ushahidi
Ushahidi, Inc. is a non-profit software company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping....

 and Wordpress
WordPress
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...

and allowed citizens to contribute reports by email, sms (text message) or web form.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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