The daily miracle

Journalists often refer to a published newspaper as "the daily miracle" -- meaning, of course, that it's a miracle the thing comes out every day. I got to see that concept epitomized last night at The Washington Post's office in Baghdad.

The Post had filed a story around 9:30 p.m. leading with a truck bomb attack on a bridge on the outskirts of Baghdad and also reporting four American soldiers killed in combat and the kidnapping of the country's deputy oil minister in Baghdad. At 11 p.m., they received an e-mail saying five additional troops had died in a helicopter crash in Anbar province. Nine soldiers dead in one day is pretty significant, so the reporter decided to update the story to lead with that information. Around the same time, a stringer up north called to say that 20 people had been killed in a series of car bomb attacks near the village of Sinjar, around the Syrian border. By Iraq standards, 20 is not that many, so the reporter chose to slip in two paragraphs near the middle of the article.

Then all hell broke loose. The first indication that more than 20 people had died in the car bombings came via a TV breaking news alert. Like I've said here before, Iraqi TV stations have a tendency to announce blatantly wrong information, so this wasn't necessarily true, but it was worth checking. But then the phone rang again: at least 175 dead. The reporters, totally unprepared for this, sprang into action.

The villages where these bombings took place, small enclaves of Yazidi people, do their best to be disconnected from the outside world. There is no internet access for 100 miles around and most of the people don't have phones. The nearest Post stringer was in Mosul, the closestlarge city, with no way of getting to the area. The reporters were starting to think they'd have to print a boring, "according to the Iraqi Army" story with no witness quotes. They were working on gathering context and updating death tolls, adrenaline pumping, holding out a glimmer of hope that the stringer might find someone to talk to.

I still don't totally understand how it happened, but around 3 a.m. the stringer called, saying he had gotten in touch with a man in his hospital bed in the nearest town. The man explained what had happened to him and said he didn't know where his family was. The stringer tracked down one other witness who added supporting details. The result was a string of heart-breaking quotes that created a dynamic front-page article. And although the lead byline (and thus most of the credit) went to the American reporter, it was the stringer and a translator who deserve it.

Making it even better, The New York Times, the Post's chief rival on Iraq stories (and everything else) managed to get only the official side of the story -- no witness quotes, no glimpse into what it was like to be there. The Post story is here; the Times' is here -- notice a difference? It prompted a Post editor to e-mail the reporters the following message:

"on a story of global importance you got the best story in the world... congrats. good feeling, huh?"

That, my friends, is the daily miracle. I could get into this whole journalism thing.