PressEthic

There are 10,000 girls like me in New York City. In Bushwick alone, where I live, there are chicks with my stats--upper middle class white females owning way too many nebulous pieces of fabric with American Apparel labels--dotting the sidewalks, usurping all the coffee shop electrical outlets and combing the bodegas for soy products. There are so many of us, and we all think such similar things, that we deserve, at best, one collective blog. Maybe two. What am I writing about anyway?

Until I had to do it, I had never written a blog, and had only just come to appreciate the existence of blogs. What I am doing now is what I always thought was so silly about blogs. Blowing off steam, spitting one more opinion into a murky sea of them that was already drowning readers--I never got the point.

Then, late this past April, Egyptian security forces arrested protesters at a rally in Cairo. The prisoners, who had been demonstrating peacfully in support of Egyptian judges punished for their rulings on the legality of the most recent round of elections, included 'Alaa Seif al-Islam, a well-known Egyptian blogger .

Read the coverage of the incident on The Arabist, another excellent political blog coming out of Egypt. Some of its writers are the reporters from the former, revered English language publication, the Cairo Times, which closed down a couple of years ago. The writers on this blog add their own reporting to whatever story they create, and it goes without saying that the blog is the only forum in which they could relate stories like this one , about the beatings of two people in a Sinai town. It is accompanied by photogaphs of one of the victim's bruises.

Last week a Russian journalist was murdered. Journalists in Egypt face routine intimidation and the possibility of arrest and fines for what they write. Blogs in these environments are the blogs that matter the most. They make me want to stop writing and just listen.