This week marks two months since the launch of GlobalPost.
The outstanding work by our 65 correspondents in 45 countries has helped us surpass our original goals for traffic in the first sixty days and get off to a great start in making GlobalPost a success. We want to hear from you about how we’re doing. What stories you like, what stories we should be doing.
At our Boston headquarters, we all took a minute to step back and appreciate the GroundTruth that our correspondents have been bringing to you every day. There’s been so much great reporting, writing, photography, videography and good old-fashioned storytelling. We wanted to come up with some examples of the best of GlobalPost. And we found the list was too long. Every editor here kept coming up with more and more dispatches that they loved, more and more “ground truth,” as we’ve come to call it. Some of the top dispatches were memorable for their great writing, others for their keen insight and others for telling a riveting tale. Some provided perspective on hard news and others veered off the path of hard news and took us to a place we have never been before.
We found out it’s hard to define what makes for a perfect GlobalPost story. We’re still a work in progress and that definition is emerging. So rather than providing a long list of stories, we thought it might be productive to provide a shorter list of genres of stories we like and some examples that fit well within them. So here they are:
Enterprise reporting: Shahan Mufti’s story from Pakistan on the the surging black market in stolen US military laptops and how they compromise the US military was a great exclusive. Not surprisingly, it has proven to be one of the most trafficked stories we have had on the site to date. Another great example of this is on the site today. Patrick Winn’s story form Thailand on “The war you never heard of” is the kind of revealing journalism that shows we are all about ground truth.
Pulling back the curtain: Matt Rees’ dispatch from Jerusalem in which he went inside the bubble on Hillary Clinton’s first diplomatic mission and shared an outsider’s view of the isolation of State Department reporters who fly in to complex stories and are chauffeured around in convoys and herded into press conference where very little is said. It was done with great humor and insight.
Life on the ground: Two great examples here. Seth Kugel’s elegantly written take on the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Brazil and what it’s like to have to deal with it. And Jean MacKenzie’s eye-opening story about the simple joys of having the lights come on in war-torn Afghanistan.
Multimedia: Mark Scheffler’s steady eye on the Slum Tours of Mumbai was a complex insight into the gaping void between the street kids of Mumbai who live in abject poverty and the tourists who pay to see their plight.
Using a beat to connect the world: Sports columnist Mark Starr has achieved this time and again. This week he provided a perfect example by combining the story on the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team with Sweden’s bizarre security decision to deny spectators at a tennis match that featured an Israeli. Our Wheels correspondent Royal Ford has also done a great job on his beat. Check out his two-part series on why the world has diesel and America doesn’t.
Narrative inside the news: Kathleen McLaughlin’s well-reported and well-written story about China’s migrant workers. It took readers to one village to see what it looks and feels like to be forced to return home. It brought to life the human toll of the global economic crisis. And Peter Gelling’s dispatch on the perils of the sinking ferries of Indonesia was another great example of this. He took you there to experience what they feel like on a day when one ferry sank causing a huge loss of life.
Storytelling: Greg Warner’s audio slideshow on the life of one coltan miner in the Congo. Warner used rich ambient sound and photographs to take viewers on a journey down into the mines to follow one man from the darkness of the shafts to his home village. Along the way, Warner revealed a country devastated by war and disease and poverty and hardship. And yet, still, in the end it was also about one man and his resiliency.
That’s our list. Now we want to hear from you.
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 . 
3 Comments
1 Helen Barrington wrote:
Wonderful to hear you interviewed on Bob Edwards Weekend!
2 Elliot wrote:
Congratulations on two months. I am a new reader and have read a couple of the highlighted articles, but providing links would be helpful for the rest. Keep it up!
3 cal wrote:
Please add links to the stories you mention, it looks very news-o-saur without them..Unless it means we’re supposed to have remembered and read them all?