"Howard Witt is the Southwest Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, based in Houston, Texas. He joined the paper as a summer intern in 1982 and during his 25-year career has been a national correspondent, foreign correspondent and editor . . . Among many stories of international significance, he covered the Lockerbie crash, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ouster of Ceausescu, the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid and the Moscow coups in 1991 and 1993 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union." Chicago Tribube 

In the YouTube interview above, Howard Witt describes the importance and interrelatedness of afrosphere Black bloggers -  "the power of these blogs to organize people and to become activists based on information from the mainstream media."  

Witt says,

I orginally assumed in this kind of attitude that I think a lot of mainstream journalists have about blogs:  I was really dismissive of them, I thought they were these narcissistic exercises.  I still think that to a large extent with regard to what you would call, quote, unquote "white blogs", the liberal blogs like DailyKos and Huffington Post and some of these . . .  Those blogs, as far as I'm concerned, are pretty boring.  They're pretty much people expostulating about what they've seen in the New York Times . . .

But, what I found in the ethnic blogs, in the African American blogs in particular, and to an additional extent Hispanic blogs and Asian blogs, is that those bloggers are organized around much more visceral community issues, around real problems.  They're writing about real issues and uncovering issues um, that effect peoples lives.  And they're organizing around them and creating activism around them.

It's hard to think about the last time the DailyKos actually did something, created something, changed something, whereas the Black blogs can claim to have freed a fourteen year-old girl from prison; they can claim to have drawn 20,000 people to the town of Jena; and that's an incredible power that they are learning to harness and exploit.  So, I have incredible respect for these blogs now, and in fact I view them as essential ways to help distribute the stories I write in the mainstream media.  

Well, I think maybe Howard's onto something.