Cleverness, skill and luck collided to create the Web site Back to Iraq. Now in its third iteration, Christopher Allbritton’s site for war dispatches continues to display cleverness and skill.

And the luck will have to continue, too, as he heads to Iraq for his third reporting excursion this week.

History

Inspiration for Back to Iraq hit Allbritton in 2002. The former New York Daily News and Associated Press reporter financed a trip to the Middle East.

“I went to Iraq originally in 2002 basically as a fishing expedition for commercial freelance. And when I got back, I came up empty, and I wasn’t really getting anything. So I decided to put it up on a Web site.”

Blogspot.com hosted the first humble version of the site. Before long, Allbritton decided to take independent reporting further - to reader sponsorship. He drew inspiration from such sites as savekaryn.com, which a New York woman used to raise money to pay credit card debt.

“I thought, well I can do better than that,” Allbritton said. “I’ll have people donate, and I’ll actually report for them. I’ll actually give them something more than warm and fuzzies.”

Back to Iraq 2.0 was born. His fund raising proved meager at first. But a Wired News article in mid-March 2003 spurred donations, and he headed to Iraq just in time for the war.

Method

Allbritton’s novel form of journalism may prove an important facet of the profession’s future. The basics, however, stay the same.

“I’m a reporter,” he said. “I’m a journalist; I just use blogging the same way that people use laptops. It’s just the easiest tool to get the job done.”

By most measures, that job is a success. His current trip’s fund-raising total is more than $11,000. The site’s donor list numbers in the hundreds. On Technorati, a site that monitors connections among weblogs, a recent check showed Back to Iraq 3.0 is linked to by nearly 500 other sites (mine among them), a sign of respect in the Web world.

Though he publishes his work electronically, the way Allbritton works compares with any print correspondent.

On this trip, he’s taking two small laptops, a pair of cellular phones, a satellite phone, a GPS unit, a voice recorder, a Web camera and a digital camera. He also packs an extra hard drive, for backups.

These items, and uplinks via Internet café, allow him to publish Back to Iraq from the country. They also help him provide extra services for donors. Paid donors get a private listserv, see extra photographs and read additional posts, and have direct email access and participate in hosted chats.

“I’ve always wanted to be a foreign correspondent,” he said. “I got kind of sidetracked for a while covering technology, but this is what I really want to do and this is my way of getting to do it.”