This NYT story talks about some of the vivid reporting coming out of the disaster zone around the Indian Ocean as a result of Saturday's earthquake and resulting tsunamis.

An excerpt:

For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.

The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help.

There was the simple photo of a startlingly blue boat smashed against a beachside palm in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, at www.thiswayplease.com/extra.html. "Every house and fishing boat has been smashed, the entire length of the east coast," wrote Fred Robart, who posted the photo. "People who know and respect the sea well now talk of it in shock, dismay and fear."

At sumankumar.com, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: "Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead were dropped and the half alive were carried to safety."

His postings included a photo of a body on a sidewalk with a buffalo walking by. "It now seems prophetic," he wrote, "for according to the Hindu mythology, Lord Yama (the god of death) rides on a buffalo." ...

I found this a tad ironic:

One veteran of the online medium said he was initially "a little disappointed" in the reports he got from the blogs. Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in California, said that with the widespread use of digital cameras and high-speed digital access, he was expecting to see more raw video and analysis.

He said that upon reflection he realized that it was difficult to get information out of hard-hit areas and that putting digital video online is still the domain of "deep geeks" with significant resources. "This brought home to me just how far we have to go," he said.

Addendum

My CTV colleague David Akin sticks up for the story-telling abilities of mainstream journos with this posting on his blog. An excerpt:

Now, I love blogs. I've got one and I read dozens a day.
But read the passage from Kishore's blog above and contrast it with the following passage from Waldman's piece, which describes an Indian man's ordeal as he discovered his dead wife and then was forced to quickly bury her:

In the huge hole in the earth, Muniamma's husband, Mani Natrajan, a 35-year-old fisherman, bent over the mound that now represented his wife and draped a bright red cloth over it. He had found her less than an hour before, in the morgue at the government hospital, where a morbid sweetness cloyed the air and khaki-clad police officers wore white masks over their mouths.

Waldman's piece is terrific writing because it shows and doesn't tell. That makes it different from a lot of blog-reportage which tries to tell the reader what to think and sense. (Or worse, blogs that are long interior monologues that describes what the blogger was thinking and sensing as a situation unfolded.)

We know, even after reading this short passage from Waldman, that "it was a horrible site to see." But Kishore and other amateur bloggers would rather tell us then do the hard work of finding and describing the details that led them to their conclusions.

Moreover, Kishore and other bloggers tells us what was happening to a group of people -- "men and women, old and young" and "relief workers" -- while Waldman gives us two characters -- a gravedigger and a fisherman.

What reaches into your gut more? Waldman's piece does, of course, because in reporting specific details she shows us the site -- even hints at how it smelled -- and it easy with the details she provides to get a powerful sense of how horrible a site it is to see.