It’s just after 1am in London, and the lights are still on in Baghdad - though not, it seems for long. The wave of massive airstrikes had yet to appear as the deadline hour for Iraq came and went, leaving the online news media looking for those key stories to indicate the war had started.

As the hour turned, The Guardian’s Iraq Special ran stories on the reported early desertions from the Iraqi army but at midnight had not done much with the news coming out of the New York Times that 17 Iraqi soldiers had crossed the border to surrender in Kuwait, relying mainly on its news feed from AP.

It was an uncharacheristically poor performance from The Independent’s Middle East section, which by 1am had not yet uploaded news stories for Thursday’s edition. And, like the Telegraph, it had no specific Iraq section, but unlike most of the other papers, the Independent has no newswire feed to take the slack.

The Telegraph led with Warplanes hit Iraqi artillery. In its ’Developments at a glance’ section a rather lonely looking list of the latest news could be found, doubtless uploaded by some hapless editor as time ticked by, though they may have dropped off to sleep amid the anti-climax.

Over at The Times, they were making more of a fist of the situation with a good-looking Iraq section, carrying the “Iraqi deserters flee in final countdown” story.

BBC Online’s highly comprehensive and visual Iraq section carried the lead story: Iraq deadline draws near. This was updated on the crucial hour with ’World waits as Iraq deadline expires’.

At the ITV News channel both the troop defections story and the story of Tariq Aziz’s press conference denying that he too had fled the country were up.

But it’s perhaps fair to say that Sky News had the best headlines of the night both at midnight (ONE HOUR AND COUNTING) followed, at 1am, by TIME UP FOR SADDAM. And outside of the BBC and the Guardian, Sky has one of the best interactive sections .

So, as the sand storms die down and a new day dawns, the media stands, waits and watches. As do we.

Mike Butcher is a former editor of New Media Age and now works as a freelance journalist. This article was originally published on his web site mbites (http://www.mbites.co.uk).

Day two of his analysis of news sites can now be seen at http://www.mbites.co.uk/article.php?story=20030321014114731

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