Site pulls together best work

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CORRECTION

Executive editor Melanie Sill's "From the Editor" column in Sunday's Q section gave an incorrect name for Dion Nissenbaum's Mideast reporting blog on the new Web site news.mcclatchy.com. The blog is called "Checkpoint Jerusalem."

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This is what it was like for Dion Nissenbaum, who covers the Mideast for The News & Observer and other McClatchy newspapers, to be in the Gaza Strip during Hamas' overthrow of Palestinian rival party Fatah:

"You know you've crossed into a different reality when you start judging the risk to your life not from whether or not there is gunfire, but how close it is -- and which way the bullets are whizzing," Nissenbaum wrote last week in "Checkpoint Journalism," his new online journal, or blog.

Nissenbaum's blog is one of several on the new McClatchy Web site, news.mcclatchy.com. On another blog, humor columnist Dave Barry is answering reader questions about his "presidential campaign." On the "Inside Iraq" blog, Iraqi staffers and journalists describe life in their war-torn home.

It went live less than a week ago, but news.mcclatchy.com stands out already for its mix of "trusted voices" and its potential to pull together the best journalism from a 31-newspaper company, the nation's third largest.

One of those assets is the Washington bureau, with 38 reporters split between regional reporting for newspapers and national and international coverage.

McClatchy's original reporting is prominent on the new site, along with question-and-answer features, editorial cartoons and video interviews that soon will expand to include opinion pieces contributed by ordinary people.

Howard Weaver, McClatchy's vice president for news, says the site differs from many competitors in a significant way: Our focus is on public affairs journalism.

"We are trying to do value-added reporting that other people are not doing," he said. "The Internet is the perfect opportunity for us to make that kind of reporting available to everybody in the country who's interested."

Instead of headlines and tidbits, news.mcclatchy.com offers meaty slices of journalism. For instance, N&O readers could read the extended version of McClatchy's story outlining political influence in the selection of U.S. attorneys. (The N&O ran a condensed version in print on Tuesday.)

David Westphal, Washington bureau chief, says he and the site's other editors are looking forward to adding more material and expanding the reach of McClatchy reporting through a content and linking deal with Yahoo! that will take effect soon.

"We want to build the part that draws in McClatchy's great reporting from around the country," Westphal said. "We're going to stake out territory that we think is interesting and rely on enterprise reporting for our niche in the Web world."

Early on, he said, the blogs from Nissenbaum and other McClatchy foreign correspondents seem to "have extra elements of truthfulness to them that's hard to achieve in what we think of as the model reported story."

He added: "We realize that it's only a modest start compared to the potential."