The hour is upon us.
At the stroke of midnight, we officially launch.
Welcome to GlobalPost. And welcome to GroundTruth.
This blog is a place where you can come every day to be taken behind the scenes of GlobalPost and hear about what our correspondents are working on and how they managed to unearth great stories.
Here I will be highlighting reporting from the field by our 65 correspondents who live in the countries about which they write. Every day they will be out there finding and reporting the kind of stories that are close to the ground and can enlighten you about the corner of the world they cover.
We call that “GroundTruth.”
Starting tomorrow, I will use the blog to provide you with a guide on how to navigate the site. I want to take you through how it works. There are “Dispatches,” which are our correspondent feeds from the field, and “Latitudes,” which are areas of coverage that cut across national boundaries and connect us all. The “Latitudes” are themes such as global health, climate change, diplomacy, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), cars and their relationship to the world, sports, and more. Each of them has a veteran correspondent assigned to them who you can follow week in and week out.
I also want to draw your eyes to the “Timelines,” which are on most of the country pages. Here we have tried to offer you the historical and current context that is required to understand the news. These ”Timelines” are interactive tools for you to have facts and the sweep of history at the click of a button. We’re very proud of these Timelines and we hope you will explore the world and its history through them. Twenty-five of them are up on the site now and more will be rolled out over the next few months.
I also hope you will take some time to view the “Go there” multimedia player that is located on our homepage. The lead video on the home page for our first day is titled “Afghanistan: An Accordion Journey” by Gregory Warner. Greg, a writer and freelance reporter for NPR whose work has appeared on This American Life and Radio Lab, combined his audio recordings for public radio with video he shot on his own to produce a GlobalPost multimedia essay that is mesmerizing and funny and ultimately a great story about a journey through Afghanistan. It’s exactly the kind of storytelling that we want to do here at GlobalPost.
This video is part of our series “For Which It Stands.” And there is a guide to the “For Which It Stands” series available for you to navigate what is a large body of work focused around a single question: “What does the idea of America mean to the world?” The series begins at launch and will culiminate with the inauguration of President Obama and continue through the first 100 days of his presidency.
In the coming days, I will go deeper into the series and the great writing, photography and videography that has gone into it.
For months, I’ve been blogging about the process of our launch from my journey around the world this fall recruiting correspondents to the count down in the last few days as our web development team and editorial staff worked almost around the clock to be ready for this launch. And we are ready.
We are officially launched as of this moment, but our ace web developer Jason Oliver of Mochila actually pushed the button to transfer over our beta site to go live on Saturday night. It was precisely 11:11 PM EST on January 10. 2009 when he began the propagation of the GlobalPost.com domain name, or URL, to the web.
As a heavy snow fell silently over Boston, the physical act of launching the site was only represented by the clattering of a keyboard and Jason’s announcement, “Okay, I just hit the button. We’re live! Congratulations.”
GroundTruth is written by Charles Sennott, the Executive Editor and co-founder of GlobalPost. The blog is a way for GlobalPost to let you know what our correspondents all over the world are covering every day. It is a place where Sennott highlights the best work in the field by a stellar team of correspondents . 
13 Comments
1 chip wrote:
congrats! looks pretty great so far…
2 Alex wrote:
The new GlobalPost site looks great! So is the content.
Congratulations to you and everyone else behind it!
I love the video reports. The Afghanistan report was fascinating – I never knew there used to be an Afghan Elvis! A shame the poor guy came to a sticky end. Very sad. At least he lives in through his music.
All the best from Italy,
Alex
3 Letícia wrote:
Many congratulations for your initiative to rescue international journalism. I really thrilled to see a new form of media being born. I wish you and all the correspondents all the best.
4 HalSF wrote:
Congratulations on the launch – it’s great to see a resurgence in international journalism in the U.S., and I’ll be following your progress with high hopes. Good luck and break a leg!
5 Laura VanderBurgh wrote:
Heard you on NPR today. Immediately checked in when I got home. Thank you so much. I know this will be a great site. I will spread the word. I am a nurse and will soon be a Nurse Practitioner. It has been a dream of mine to work in under served and oppressed areas when I retire. Hope to live long enough to do a freelance from some remote outpost for your web site upon retirement.
6 Donna S. wrote:
This is a very exciting and much-needed endeavor! How great to have a site devoted to substantive international news. Best of luck!
7 D B Westwater Jr wrote:
BRAVO–A bold and much needed step which I heard about on NPR today!
8 Robert Butler wrote:
Congratulations on a great idea! As a former reader of the International Guardian Weekly I miss in depth informative news that is not US centric.
I wish you many years of success.
9 Lee Wright wrote:
Congrats to you and your colleagues in Boston and around the world on your launch.
Two areas of feedback:
(1) Achieving your larger goal
After looking around the site, I’m struck by the somewhat dark view. Part of this is a function of the graphic design, part the IA and UI, and part the editorial decisions. If anything, it seems that Global Post has a great opportunity to bring the insights into the wonderful diversity of the world through the news of the day as well as background information.
While many feel that we here in the States are not sufficiently engaged in understand the world around us, the site seems to take something of an “Eat your spinach!” approach to addressing this. There’s surely a market for that approach, but it’s far smaller than is needed to deliver on the vision I understand you have for your venture.
(2) Implementing your vision
In terms of implementation, three surprises: (1) The content is not denser, especially given all of the third-party sources; (2) there are not more/better linkages between stories and other resources; and (3) there are not better tools for engaging with readers, including accepting their submissions.
My sense is that all of these were considered, directly or indirectly, and the site today is the result of the vision that the management team had from early on.
I’m keen to see you succeed, but concerned that too little consideration has been paid to the positive aspects of the Web as a platform that goes beyond one-way publishing.
If anything, the proliferation online of new sources of all types underscores the value of editing, curating, and moderating.
Other sites seem to have struck a good balance–RealClearPolitics and Politico come to mind as examples–and they seem to be well on their way to building meaningful brands with strong readership (and consequently advertising potential).
Given the stakes, at a minimum you may wish to consider identifying more and better ways to receive feedback, both general, such as this, and specific. (That I’m the first to comment on your launch post, and that relatively few comments have been received on earlier posts, should be indications of the problem.)
Good luck to you and your team around the world in the months ahead.
10 Toni Stearns wrote:
Hello, Mr. Sennott – My husband, Monty, and I met (and heard you speak) at a FARNE (Foreign Affairs Retirees of New England) luncheon at Tufts University a year ago. We spoke, among other things, of our mutual friend, Ulla Morris Carter. Anyway, this is just to say that as a former foreign service couple, dismayed by the decline in international news coverage in major American newspapers,we will follow Global Post with great interest, and wish you every success in this venture. (I write as you are being interviewed on Emily Rooney – hope it promotes more viewers!) Sincerely, Toni Stearns
11 carol wrote:
This looks just great! Something that’s been sorely needed by those who care what’s going on. The “Timeline” element is a good idea.
12 Frederick Greene wrote:
Good Luck Charlie
You already have an avid reader and believer of your work. We worked at the Globe together and I look forward to following your future success.
Missing painting at United Way functions without you
Fred
13 Lee Wright wrote:
Tip: Moderated comments, unless reviewed and approved very, very quickly, don’t give your readers an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue.
Consider instead some of the simple solutions to handling blog post comments that you’ll find elsewhere. You’ll see that they handle abuse and spam pretty well without the demands of moderation.