Blogging Across the Front Lines

Lisa Makes the Wall Street Journal

My friend (and fellow Blogware blogger) Lisa Goldman, who blogs at On the Face, is the most prominently featured of several Israeli and Lebanese bloggers covered in an article on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal: In the Midst of War, Bloggers are Talking Across the Front Lines. Here’s an excerpt:

Most of the bloggers in this small group are Western-educated. Some attended the same universities but communicated for the first time in a comment thread on one another’s blogs. Of course, on a blog, it is hard to tell whether a given contributor is in a bombed-out neighborhood in Beirut or an apartment in the U.S. In recent days, many of the Lebanese bloggers in this small community have fled the country, to Syria or Europe or the U.S.

The future of this odd new cross-border community is being tested by the current conflict. Some bloggers have stopped their exchanges. Others are still talking.

The Internet has made it possible “to have a Beirut-Tel Aviv online IM chat in real time,” Ms. Goldman wrote, on her On the Face blog. “That’s what happened to me and this blogger a few nights ago. We chatted while he was sitting on the roof of his apartment building in Beirut watching missiles from Israeli planes fall on his city and describing it to me. He was carrying on an online conversation with another Israeli at the same time.”

The Lebanese blogger, who runs the Lebanese Political Journal blog, won’t disclose his identity because he believes his online chats with Israelis could be considered an act of disloyalty. He says in an email: “Chatting with Israelis from Lebanon during war is very awkward.” But, he says, “One remembers that we are still humans regardless of where the borders lie.”

The Wall Street Journal article is behind a subscription wall, but Lisa’s copied the text of the article and put it on her blog here. The WSJ often syndicates its articles in other papers; the story also appears in the Birmingham News, a newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama.

On the Covers of Time Out

If you’re a suave world traveller like Yours Truly, you’re probably familiar with Time Out magazine, the “what’s hip and happening in the city” magazine that publishes versions for several cities around the world. Two of the cities in Time Out roster are Tel Aviv (where Lisa lives) and Beirut. Lisa has a story about the editors of Time Out’s Tel Aviv and Time Out Beirut. It begins like this:

This is the story of two men, one from Beirut and one from Tel Aviv, who met less than four months ago and formed an instant friendship. They believed that the things they had in common were far more significant than politics – until the twisted reality of the Middle East interfered with that conviction.

In case you hadn’t already seen the covers when Boing Boing linked to them, I’ve posted them below.

Here’s the cover of Time Out Beirut, which was prepared before the war:

Click the image to see the original on Flickr.

And here’s the July 20th cover of Time Out Tel Aviv, which is based on the classic New Yorker cover that depicted a New Yorker’s view of the world:

Click the image to see the original on Flickr.