With its coverage of Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991, the Cable News Network, or CNN, went from being derided as the "Chicken Noodle Network" to a global news power – on to the same stage as the network news broadcasters. During the initial bombing of the city, CNN reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett were the only Western reporters with a phone connection, over which they sent live audio reports from al-Rashid Hotel. The reports aired over the grainy night-vision shots of U.S. and Iraqi artillery lighting up the Baghdad skyline. That well may have been the highlight of media coverage of the war to repel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In virtually all other circumstances, the U.S. military tightly controlled all media coverage, herding reporters into orchestrated briefings and allowing only censored interviews with military personnel.

By the time the tanks rolled into Baghdad during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Internet was entrenched globally as a mainstream communications and entertainment system and had triggered seismic shifts in the way news is gathered and presented. This war spurred a new breed of Web-based independent projects to produce news not only from a different perspective but in a radically different form. Their reach is simultaneously limited (they don't have the mass audience reach of television) and unlimited (the content is accessible on the Web at all times). These video reports of life inside Iraq are posted to independent websites or YouTube.com.

AliveinBaghdad.org is a leading example of this new generation of news services built on showcasing the war's impact on the daily lives of the ordinary Iraqis.

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