BABYLON & BEYOND: One year anniversary!
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Happy birthday to us!
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Babylon & Beyond, the Los Angeles Times’ Middle East blog.
When we first started the blog, we weren’t sure what Babylon would end up being.
The blog was unique. Times correspondents in Baghdad, Jerusalem, Cairo, Beirut and Tehran and even the U.S. would write about people and events in the Middle East that don’t get much coverage in the newspapers. They would put it all into one forum.
In the end, it would concentrate on tensions between the West and Islam, between secular aspirations and the call of religion, as well as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, human rights and the war in Iraq.
In less than a year, Babylon joined the ranks of the top 5,000 blogs in the world, according to Technorati, the blog search engine and ranking service.
Babylon has been cited on blogs run by media outlets ranging from the Huffington Post to the Hollywood Reporter, from Wired to Foreign Policy, as well as National Public Radio.
It’s been a praised as an ‘excellent’ blog by Susan MacDougall, a Middle East expert at the Foreign Policy Association, a New York think tank.
And even erstwhile critics praise it for covering ‘myriad topics that rarely receive any coverage’ and ‘taking notice’ of controversial events that others ignore.
It’s even been gently lampooned (at right) by a website making fun of the Los Angeles Times.
We’ve tried to increase our use of original video and photos. We’ve also built a blog roll that’s not just an afterthought, but a regularly updated compendium of some of the best sources of commentary and news from and about the Middle East.
We’ve received thousands of comments from you, our readers, and always want more. Please keep posting your thoughts and reactions to the blog posts, and send along any ideas for improving the blog, what you’d like to see less of or more, to latimesmiddleeast@gmail.com.
— The Reporters And Editors of Babylon & Beyond