Dateline: Iraq

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Journalists need to "make the little imaginative effort to get into the skin of Iraqis," Packer says. In the '80s, he spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in an African village. Living in a foreign environment where he was the helpless outsider, he "had to learn how [the local people] saw the world just in order to be able to function." Packer has also written two novels, and he thinks this, too, helped his journalism in Iraq. "The effort to get inside a character is an act of empathy -- it just happens to be with someone nonexistent," he says. "The things you have to notice about people as a fiction writer are not just what they say, but more how they say things. Or even what they don't say."

Gal Beckerman is an assistant editor at Columbia Journalism Review, which is published by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Adapted from Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 2004). Subscriptions: $27.95/yr. (6 issues) from 2950 Broadway, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027; www.cjr.org

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