Georgia: Regional Reporters

The conflict between Georgia and Russia over the breakway territory of South Ossetia were accompanied by cyber-attacks on several Georgian official government and independent media sites. But rather than prevent journalists from utilizing the Internet to report on the war, it achieved the opposite. Many Georgians — media professionals and citizen journalists alike — set up blogs to report or comment on the conflict.

Global Voices Online’s Caucasus Regional Editor Onnik Krikorian spoke to The Institute for War & Peace Reporting’s Country Director, Shorena Ratiani, and Web Editor, Giorgi Kupatadze, on their own blog which covers the Georgia-Russian conflict: Regional Reporters [RU].

Onnik Krikorian: When was the Regional Reporters blog set up and why?

Giorgi Kupatadze: It was set up on 8 August when most of the local Georgian web sites were hacked and breiught down. We decided to create a blog although not in the classical sense. We just posted news with no comments from our journalists participating in our projects throughout the region. We received news from from reporters in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and so on.during this period about the conflict.

As we found it later — yesterday, in fact, our blog was the 12th most popular of all the blogs hosted by Wordpress.com. Page views are not very clear statistics, of course, but when we set up the blog in the afternoon, we had almost 30,000 page views in the evening and that was just for the first day. However, we had to turn comments off after many obscenities were left by the “other side,” shall we say.

The full post is available on Global Voices Online.