GroundTruth

By C.M. Sennott

Seven days until we launch GlobalPost! Wildly exciting and incredibly busy at our offices in Boston, but I am going to do my best to keep you updated daily and even hourly about the countdown until the site goes live on January 12.

Today, we got the Field Manual for Correspondents out to all 65 of our correspondents in some 45 countries. In the spirit of full transparency, we thought we’d share this statement of our principles and journalistic standards with you over the next week. I am going to post here the Introduction and the first of seven short rules of great foreign reporting. (If some of the first chapter seems familiar, that is because the idea originated here in an earlier blog post I did on GroundTruth.) In the coming days and weeks, I will keep posting chapters and eventually I will also post some incredible essays written by foreign correspondents connected to GlobalPost, including Sebastian Junger, Matt McAllester, Jane Arraf, Simon Wilson, HDS Greenway and others who will be sharing advice and insights about working in the field.

Here’s the introduction and chapter one on “being there.”

GLOBALPOST’S FIELD GUIDE FOR CORRESPONDENTS

BY CHARLES M. SENNOTT

GlobalPost is setting out to redefine international reporting in the digital age, but we are old school when it comes to journalistic standards.

GroundTruth: A Field Guide for International Correspondents is dedicated to putting some of these standards in writing and sharing policies and practical information with our reporters, columnists and contributors in the field.

This is a working document, the same way your dispatches from the field are a rough draft of history. There is a revolution going on in media right now. And we are in its tumult and we love being there. It’s truly an exciting time. So we believe it smart and necessary to keep our eyes wide open to new and perhaps better ways of carrying out the craft of reporting and the art of story telling.

We want to create a community of correspondents – decorated veterans, mid-career professionals and younger reporters looking for their first shot at a foreign posting – who share their insights and stories and learn from each other in this changing environment for journalism.

To that end, we have collected essays from veteran correspondents connected to GlobalPost. In this collection, GlobalPost columnist HDS Greenway weighs in on nearly 50 years of work in foreign news; GlobalPost editor-at-large Sebastian Junger writes of the practical advice that keeps you alive covering conflict; GlobalPost Senior Editor Andrew Meldrum reflects on covering and living the story of Zimbabwe for 23 years; the BBC’s Simon Wilson shares what he learned from the Gaza kidnapping of a colleague; GlobalPost’s Jane Arraf provides a woman’s perspective on covering the war in Iraq; and GlobalPost’s Matt McAllester takes a self-effacing look back on his reporting from Fallujah.

These essays each tell a story from the field that offers a teaching moment. In the coming weeks, they will be posted on my blog which you can link to from GlobalPost.com. Eventually, the manual and the essays will be bound together as a hard copy and sent to you.

Later this year, we will also be creating an intranet site, a sort-of virtual water cooler where you, our correspondents, can communicate directly with each other. On the GlobalPost intranet, we hope you will share practical advice about everything from how you managed to get a great story to low rates on a hotel in London to tips on obtaining health insurance as a freelancer. It will be a place to track inside information about journalism grants and fellowships or the latest technology and new opportunities for freelance work.

We recognize that GlobalPost correspondents are freelancers and we want to encourage and foster a sense of community, a feeling of camaraderie that is too often missing from the wonderfully independent but sometimes isolating life of a freelancer.

We want to invite you to write essays from the field on this intranet site and then we plan to republish them every year into this Field Guide. So as we go along, please let us know if you have ideas.

We want to hear from those of you in the field about how we can work together to create a new voice in international news, a voice that is consciously attentive to an American audience. We do not mean that we will be in any way jingoistic or nationalistic. Nor do we want to imply that our stories will only focus on issues that affect America or involve American interests. The world is much bigger than that.

We are looking for reporters who can tell the kinds of stories that resonate with an American audience. We want writing, photography and videography that has a good ear for the music of America – an ear that ranges in its appreciation from Miles Davis to Johnny Cash to Yoyo Ma. A sense of writing about the world that seeks to emulate great American truth tellers, including Mark Twain, Langston Hughes and Edward R. Murrow. We want stories that ultimately enlighten all of us about the world in which we live. But we are particularly attentive to an American audience because we believe America, despites its tremendous exertion of military and economic power in the world that is dramatically under-served in international news. We believe the paucity of American venues for international news is a dangerous blind spot for America, and one that often has a wider impact on the world. We need look no further than the war in Iraq for proof of that.

We are consciously setting out to try our best to fill the void left by so many American mainstream newspapers, magazines and television networks who’ve chosen to cut back and in many cases abandon the mission to cover international news.

While we consider this Field Guide a work in progress and we are eager to gain new insights from those of you in the field, we also want to be clear about the simple, time-tested values in which we believe and which we expect to see carried out by our correspondents.

That is, we believe in fairness. We believe in accuracy. We believe the best reporting comes from good old-fashioned shoe leather. We believe in listening and allowing yourself to be convinced by a point of view you may not have considered before. We believe good reporters do more than merely present two sides of an issue, they unearth facts and then consider all sides in a way that helps create a new understanding of the kinds of complex issues that we face globally.

We believe in giving voice to the voiceless. We believe in respect for different faiths and cultures and ways of seeing the world. We believe humor is a good way to get at truth, but we have less time for laughs at someone else’s expense. We believe in connecting the dots and saying something important without resorting to the kind of rabidly opinionated reporting that is cluttering too much of the airwaves and the internet.
In the end of the day, we have faith in you, our team in the field to embrace these standards and to go out and find the great stories that make for great journalism.

ONE:

Be there.

It’s all about being there.

There is no value that GlobalPost holds higher than having correspondents who live in the place about which they write, who know its language and its culture.

Many of you are native speakers or fluent already. And for those of you who are not, we eagerly encourage you to study the language of the places in which you are reporting. We believe foreign reporting requires you to be a first-hand observer of the events unfolding in the country you cover. We believe that the strength of GlobalPost will be having a breadth of coverage by reporters with an ear to the ground. We are looking for the kind of authoritative reporting that can only come from a reporter who is living the story. We call this ground truth. It’s an important idea at GlobalPost and “GroundTruth” is the name of my weekly column and regular blog that will highlight your daily reporting from the field.

So what does “GroundTruth” mean?

It has a pretty obvious and intuitive meaning. You may have heard it in a military context. But its origin, as best we can tell, is a precise phrase used in digital technology that was coined by NASA. This is how NASA defines it on its website:

“Ground truth (n) … one part of the calibration process. This is where a person on the ground makes a measurement of the same thing a satellite is trying to measure at the same time the satellite is measuring it. The two answers are then compared to help evaluate how well the satellite instrument is performing. Usually we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

In other words, Ground Truth is a scientific belief that the greatest calibration of what is happening in a far-off place is best achieved by being there on the ground to witness it and record it.

As a web-based news organization, we recognize that even in the digital age when we have access to information from all over the world at our fingertips and satellite transmissions that can focus on images thousands of miles away, the most trusted reading is still made by those human beings who are there witnessing the events and measuring history live.

It sounds like a simple idea. But it’s not so easy when the ground you are on is a shifting, complex story that requires knowledge about and a deep background on the forces shaping the news. We have reporters who do this in the places where there is ongoing conflict like Iraq and Afghanistan; in places where there is a contradictory mix of poverty and opportunity like India and Brazil; where there are ancient cultures to understand in a modern context from China to the Andes. Our correspondents will be there on the ground equipped with the knowledge that is needed to interpret the events in a way that allow you to truly see and understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what it means to viewers of our site.

This is not a new idea by any means. It’s just good old fashioned reporting.

But these days we believe there is too much distant analysis — not only at news organizations but also at international businesses and even in military and national security organizations — by those who are too far removed from the ground.

Those who analyze from on high are only one part of the calibration process in understanding a complex world. They are like the satellite viewing the image from afar, and we want to be that optic on the ground telling you what it really looks like.

NASA states in its own definition, “we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

So do we.