These are all individuals for the most part who are writing their views of what’s happening in their countries on the Web. It’s one person’s opinion. It’s one person’s perspective. Should that replace your diet from mainstream news sources? No. Is it a very interesting and useful supplement that helps you get a sense of what its like to be an Iraqi? For instance, there was a blog post we pointed to from a couple weeks ago from an Iraqi that described the bomb that went off down the street and how her cousin was nearly killed and how her family reacted. This is a granular look at people’s lives that you are not going to get from newspapers. This is something that blogs can do that can enable people to circumvent the filter of whoever is choosing the sound bite and just hear directly from individuals in other countries. I think that is valuable.

TL: You mentioned that journalists are enthusiastic about the project. What type of feedback have you gotten?

RM: They use it a source … as background. A major news organization — the BBC — somebody there was telling me they have it bookmarked and they check it regularly to get tips on international stories that they may or may not be getting off the wires, that they may want to go look into.

I’ve also found that journalists are finding bloggers in various countries to be very useful interviewees to talk about issues that are in the news in those countries. They’re taking blogs as sources. Nobody is using blogs [the same way they use] a Reuters news report. And if they are, they are really dumb to be doing that. [The] best way that journalists should approach blogs is as a really valuable set of insights into what locals or sometimes experts in a country are thinking.

TL: In an interview last year on NPR you discussed the difficulty of getting first-hand reporting from North Korea. Has your North Korea Zone blog helped draw out any first-person accounts from North Korea?

RM: A little bit here and there. There is no opportunity or possibility for actual North Koreans to do anything like that. The site does receive emails from time to time from people who are traveling in North Korea or working in North Korea.

TL: Such as NGOs?

RM: Yeah, NGOs and business people. … There are also tour groups that go through pretty regularly — non-Americans. Americans have trouble going, but actually there are Europeans going to North Korea all the time as tourists. Sometimes people will have interesting material that they’ll bring out. They might post it on their own personal Web sites and they want to share it more widely and they’ll let us know and we’ll link to it.

TL: You spent most of your time as a reporter in Eastern Asia. Is their one big international story, specifically in that region, that the American media is missing?

RM: Since 9/11 events in Northeast Asia, in general, have just really not gotten much attention. Because of the way TV works, especially, but I think newspapers and radio also, to a certain extent, is Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, a bit of Israel-Palestine, every once in a while Afghanistan — “Oh, we forgot about that.” And then something about the latest trade spat with China. And then if North Korea rattles its saber, then a brief mention of that.

But, basically the complexities of the change going on in Northeast Asia — and when I say Northeast Asia [I mean] greater China, Japan, the Korean peninsula primarily — there is a tremendous amount of change going on there. The geo-political tectonic plates are shifting with China’s rise. Japan is basically remilitarizing. Korea is an incredibly unstable situation with the North, plus you’ve got South Korea headed very quickly to a divorce with the United States, in terms of the alliance. You’ve got China rising in power and credibility amongst the countries in the region. You’ve got a lot going on that is going to have a tremendous amount of impact on the future of American power in Asia, and the coverage of the events there is very unsophisticated.

TL: Specific to CNN, do you think that when you joined the network in the early 1990s that international coverage was that much better that it is now?

RM: CNN, in 1992, when I joined, was part of Ted Turner’s family company, basically. In 1992 we had just come out of the Gulf War. It hadn’t been that long since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. CNN’s big cause had been big international stories that the competition completely didn’t hold a candle to in terms of coverage. There was this real feeling that if a story mattered, we should cover it. If you had a strong argument to that effect and you could pitch that to Ted Turner, the funds would be there, because he viewed CNN as something other than a product that you just sell on the market for profit maximization. He saw it as something more socially significant than that.