GroundTruth

Posted by Charles M. Sennott

HDS Greenway knows GroundTruth. He’s lived it through five decades of reporting and editing.

If you have not yet read Greenway’s 5-part series for GlobalPost on The War Hotels please link now.

The series tells of Greenway’s own journey across five decades of reporting on conflict from Vietnam to Iraq and many war-ravaged points in between from Cambodia to Lebanon. By taking readers inside the legendary hotels where he and so many other journalists have covered these conflicts, David Greenway is unpacking the history of foreign reporting itself. He speaks of a time of great camaraderie among the foreign press corps and brings back to life its gritty reporting, its proud irreverence, its legendary drinking and its acerbic humor. He shares sketches from a time when there were many more foreign reporters than there are today.

From 1962 to 1978, David worked in the field in Southeast Asia and the Middle East for Time-Life and the Washington Post. In 1978, he created the Globe’s foreign desk and as foreign editor established a noble tradition for international reporting at the Globe. Greenway still writes a foreign affairs column for the Globe. He is largely responsible for the Globe’s reputation for punching above its weight class in international reporting. But sadly, that era is over. The Boston Globe no longer has any correspondents posted abroad and no longer has a foreign editor.

There are other great newspapers suffering economically that have been forced to similarly shrink their view of the world and the coverage they provide in it, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and the list goes on. Other great newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, which recently declared bankruptcy, have only a handful of foreign correspondents still on staff. The television networks long ago gave up on serious foreign coverage with a few notable exceptions such as NBC News, where Richard Engel has done outstanding work on Iraq and the Middle East.

There are still a handful of newspapers — The New York Times and the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor among them — who have maintained foreign desks and still have great talent. But who knows how long even the strongest newspapers can survive?

I hope you will take some time to read Greenway’s series and witness a glimpse into the once-great history of newspaper reporting abroad. Between the lines and the great stories, you can also see the history of how so many correspondents have filed. For a younger generation, there is a history time line of technology embedded in the series.

It’s a journey that takes you from the days of the Telex through to the lingering middle ages of ATEX systems where we used to use rubber couplers on phones to file simple text from an analog line. And then it brings you up to more recent years, just before the Boston Globe foreign operation shut down. At the Globe’s old Baghdad bureau we used to file with the BGAN, a mobile satellite phone that can provide a reporter anywhere in the world with broadband quality connections. That Greenway is now writing for America’s first fully web-based international news organizations illustrates how his career is bookended from the great era of newspapers to the digital revolution of today where he is helping bring shape to a new way of delivering international news.

We at GlobalPost feel lucky to have the wisdom and the talent and the voice and the many years of GroundTruth that David Greenway brings to our site every week.