alive in baghdad staffer killed

from BaghdadBrian in the twittersphere:

Alive in Baghdad correspondent Ali Shafeya was killed on December 14th, details are still coming in. He was 24, survived by mom and sister.

and:

but is that worth even one human’s life? We are still not 100% sure its not the assignment we gave that killed him.

and:

We’ve raised $90, can anyone else help Ali’s family pay for the funeral? his brothers and father are all dead. survived by one sis & mother

and:

you can make a donation to suport his family to smallworldnews@gmail.com via paypal, please note that it is for Ali’s family.

for more details, see:
* alive in baghdad

UPDATE: Following brian’s posts on twitter over the past 18 hours or so has been pretty intense. Blow-by-blow of a guy both updating as the info comes in, and struggling with the hard reality of death all around the amazing citizen journalism project that he started in a war zone. Further, he’s been wondering whether the investigative assignment that Ali was on may have been the cause of his death (he was shot 31 times by the Iraqi National Guard). He’s considering closing the project down.

I can’t even imagine. I keep thinking about the safe little projects I work on, imagining what it would be like to have a web project where people started dying. It’s so easy to start good web projects. But it takes so much courage to continue in the face of reality this bloody.

I met Brian briefly at Podcamp Boston. I wish I had met him sooner – I was just leaving. I would have loved to talk more with him – of all the projects at that conference, his is – to me – by far the most important. AiB is exactly why the web changes things – even if it has been mostly ignored.