GroundTruth

By C.M. Sennott

We are now just five days away from the launch of GlobalPost.

The editing team here in Boston has been working around the clock writing headlines and fact checking a host of great stories from every corner of the world by a stellar team of GlobalPost correspondents.

At the latest count, we have 65 correspondents who have filed a total of more than 100 stories for us to share with you as we go live on Monday, January 12.

We have this beautiful office here on the waterfront and the conference room overlooks Boston harbor. It’s a particularly gray, cold afternoon with an icy rain falling. But inside we see nothing but blue skies as we look up to a huge white board that our Managing Editor for Correspondents, Thomas Mucha, has filled with a long list stories from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, The Americas and from our beat writers who are covering the auto industry, climate change, global health and other issues that connect us all.

Every time we finish editing one of these stories we are putting next to it a green check with a dry-erase marker. We’re blazing though copy so fast that our green marker ran out of ink! Our Managing Editor for the Web, Barbara Martinez, is handling all of the details of working out kinks in the web development and helping us all gain proficiency in the Content Management System (CMS.) She’s amazing. In fact, the whole team in here is amazing and over time I will be introducing each one of them to you as we go forward.

FIELD GUIDE

Right now while there is a short break in the action to order some take-out Thai food, I just want to live up to a promise made in my last post to continue sharing with you GROUNDTRUTH: GlobalPost’s Field Guide for Correspondents. This is a statement of principles and standards that I have written for our correspondents, editors and contributors. And in a spirit of transparency and inviting you in here behind the scenes, we thought we’d share it with the readers of this blog:

So here are two more chapters from the GlobalPost’s Field Guide:

CHAPTER TWO:

Stay safe.

We recognize that the world has never been a more dangerous place for reporters to practice the principle of ground truth.

More than 1,000 members of news organizations, including journalists, translators, and fixers have been killed in the last ten years, according to the International News Safety Institute which is tracking the data. These journalists have been killed in the cross fires of conflict, they have been targeted for murder for reporting stories that someone did not want told, and they’ve died just like countless thousands of other innocent victims of conflict from random shelling or road side bombs or for driving too fast in a dangerous setting.

Aware of these perils to reporting, we want to have a clear set of guidelines for how to operate in the field. To that end, we are including in this Field Guide a set of documents by various organizations which offer sound advice on covering conflict and reporting in potentially dangerous situations.

They include the following: On Assignment: Covering Conflict Safely by the Committee to Protect Journalists; Killing the Messenger by the International News Safety Institute; A Survival Guide for Journalists by the International Federation of Journalists and Tragedies and Journalists by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. I strongly encourage you to print out and save these documents and read through them carefully. They are great references. They offer the kind of practical advice that can save your life and save the lives of colleagues and support staff around you. They do a better job than we could in spelling out how to work in hostile environments and we expect you to heed their recommendations. A primary recommendation that each of these organizations make is for clear communication with editors about your whereabouts and to never enter into a story without a game plan for staying in touch. We want to be clear that no GlobalPost correspondent should ever go on an assignment – particularly a dangerous assignment – without prior approval from a senior GlobalPost editor. And when on such an assignment, constant contact is required.

Virtually all of these organizations also recommend hostile environment training for reporters covering conflict. We are listening to these specific recommendations as well and implementing them as policy. (Please see the attachment to this document titled “GlobalPost Policy on Conflict Reporting” for more details.)

CHAPTER THREE:

Listen.

We believe strongly that the greatest correspondents hear as many sides of an issue as possible before they begin writing or produce multimedia. The most memorable stories are the ones that surprise us, that contravene our preconceptions. And we believe those stories come from listening carefully to the community you are covering. They come from being fair and reporting without bias.

We encourage you to give voice to the voiceless. There is a big world out there and too often our news is shaped by politicians and diplomats and officials. Of course, their pronouncements from press conferences and embassy briefings matter and affect lives and we need them in our stories. But the best reporting is the kind of reporting that comes up from the street that includes the voices of the people who stand to be affected by the decisions of the powerful.

It’s pretty cliché these days, but back in the early 1960s when the legendary New York City columnist Jimmy Breslin was writing for the New York Daily News he broke new ground when he covered the 1963 state funeral of John F. Kennedy. Amid the dignitaries, the heads of state, and the somber weight of the moment in history, Breslin interviewed the man whose job it was to dig the ditch where the fallen president’s casket would be lowered into the earth.

This may feel old hat to a reporter who has worked in a newsroom in the last 20 years. But we are aware at GlobalPost that there is a new generation of international correspondents coming of age who have not always had that experience. And if a young journalist were to listen to television network coverage of many issues today they may not understand these values at all. So apologies to veterans here and a plea to correspondents who are newer to the craft to bring this spirit of listening to your work.

(CHAPTERS 3 AND 4 TO BE POSTED, TOMORROW…)