GroundTruth

Posted by C.M. Sennott

We’re at nine months.

And like any expecting father, I am sleep deprived, nervous, vigilant, thrilled, happy, worried and most of all just waiting for the delivery.

Nine months. That’s how long it’s been since I walked out of my old job at The Boston Globe to join my co-founder and CEO Phil Balboni in our effort to bring life to a new international news organization for the digital age. And now we are less than two weeks away from our January 12 launch of the site.

I was thinking back to the very first days in the spring of 2008 here at our headquarters on the Boston waterfront. We began in those early days by sketching on white boards what the site might look like and we talked about what we hoped to achieve with GlobalPost. The scribbling on the white boards was the crude, first draft of our editorial vision. We began thinking about how best to redefine international news in the digital age by combing the written word, powerful video and riveting photography all on one website. We knew we wanted it to be all about great storytelling by top correspondents who live in the countries about which they write.

And our excellent web developer Jason Oliver and his team listened to these ideas and tried to decipher our sketches and then quietly turned them into “wire frames.” “Wire frames” are to web development what blue prints are to real estate development. The black-and-white wire frames might also be compared to the cloudy images of a newborn from a sonogram. You need an expert to point out exactly where the body parts are and how you can see a small heart beating in there. From the wire frames, we worked with a design firm to build out the vision further and put flesh on the bone. We mulled over every detail from the big ones like which servers to use (we went with the best from Akamai Technologies) to the smaller matters like the selection of fonts. So much of the last nine months has been spent working through this detailed process of site development. It’s been a great learning experience for a newspaper correspondent who’s spent far more time in the field covering international news than in front of the computer screen clicking away on the unbelievable amount of technical details involved in developing a web site. But now we are putting the finishing touches on that process and very excited about sharing the results with you. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on how it all turned out.

During these months of labor, much of my time has also been spent traveling and calling all over the world as we pulled together a truly amazing constellation of talent. We now have 65 correspondents in about 50 countries who are starting to file their stories. After starting in on the editing of written stories and producing multimedia packages, I can say that this GlobalPost team is producing some of the most enlightening and creative international news coverage I have seen anywhere.

It’s too early to be lighting any cigars and you will be the ultimate judge of the work of our correspondents and how our site looks. But for sure this baby is kicking. And the due date is approaching.

At GlobalPost, we know 2009 is pregnant with possibility.