NBC Is “Blogging Baghdad” Everyday

Led by NBC News correspondent Richard Engel, MSNBC.com’s “Blogging Baghdad: The Untold Story” has quickly become a must-read site. The blog serves as “another way of understanding the complexity and the danger of the story” that Engel and his colleagues in Iraq are covering, an e-mailer says.

On On Dec. 30, Engel reflected on Farris Hassan’s trip to Iraq: “I think I can understand more than most people what Farris Hassan was trying to do — what was driving him (after all, I came alone to Baghdad before the war without any support despite the orders of the American government and the misgivings of my family), but he failed to have a plan.”

He continued: “But it dawned on me how badly it could have gone for him. As we were chasing his story today, retracing some of his steps, we almost had an incident that would have certainly ruined our day, if not ended all of them. We saw four men in a car, windows down, eyeballing us. Then, they start pulling on ski masks…and it’s far too early for ski season here.”

The next day, Engel blogged about “horrific daily tragedies” in the Iraqi capital. On Monday, the subject was state gifts to militia commanders. And today producer Babak Behnam filed about some unique get out the vote ads…