GroundTruth

One year ago to the day, we launched GlobalPost and it has been a helluva good year. We’ve built an amazing team of correspondents, columnists and editors and a growing community of visitors to the site. I’d like to thank all of you who make up that loyal community and turn to GlobalPost for stories that enlighten and inform from every corner of the world. We have a lot to celebrate and a lot of challenges ahead in 2010. I invite any and all of you to get in touch and let me know your thoughts about our news organization in its first year and how we might improve our coverage. What are the stories we’re missing, the countries we should be covering, the angles we don’t see. Please feel free to post a comment here on the blog or on GlobalPost.com. I value your input and I will do my best to get back to you.

Here is a first anniversary memo that I sent out today to our team of more than 70 correspondents in 50 countries. In the spirit of transparency and pride over what we have accomplished, I thought I’d share it here:

To all GlobalPost correspondents, columnists and editors,

Thank you for all the great work that made our first year at GlobalPost a spectacular success.

On this day one year ago, we set out on a journey to create a new voice in international news for the digital age. And now one year after launch we’ve achieved that. In fact, we have surpassed all of our goals on the editorial side by making an impact in the field of foreign reporting and in building an audience.

We’ve achieved what many said was impossible: drawing millions of actively engaged readers to our site by offering quality, in-depth coverage of international affairs. We’ve built the foundation of a GlobalPost community that understands that the challenges we face – terrorism, climate change, economic crisis — are global, and therefore require a news organization that is global in reach.

We’ve broken news and been recognized for coverage that takes readers beyond the daily headlines and into virtually every corner of the world. All of you make up a fantastic team of writers, photographers, videographers and editors who’ve provided rigorous journalism and riveting storytelling. To put it simply, we owe our success in this first year to you, our team in the field.

Cheers!

We have many challenges ahead this year. And in many ways 2010 will be the pivotal year for this bold attempt in online journalism. We will need to build on our success and at the same work to protect our brand. We have to keep our standards for quality journalism at the highest level. In that spirit, I am once again attaching our field guide for correspondents and a new correction policy. Please read them both.

We must continue to develop our GlobalPost brand that uniquely blends old-school reporting and a digital-age desire to break new ground in multimedia. We have to continue to seek out “ground truth,” the facts on the ground gotten only by living where you report and analyze. We have to continue to produce special projects, and I invite you to propose ideas through your editor.

In short, we must continue while stepping up our game even more. We need to break news and find stories that matter and get noticed. Along these lines, we welcome any and all ideas for high-impact reports from the field.

We’re now able to amplify this kind of outstanding work by our editorial team through carefully cultivated partnerships. As many of you know, we’ve established key editorial partnerships with CBS News and PBS’ NewsHour. Your reporting and a special series of reports titled “On Location” are regularly featured on these broadcasts.

We’ve established syndication partnerships with some 25 newspapers, including the Newark Star Ledger, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the New York Daily News, the Cambodia Daily News, the Khaleej Times, the South China Morning Post and others around the United States and around the world. Your work is appearing in the pages of these newspapers and being read by a growing and loyal audience who are starting to recognize the brand, GlobalPost.

We’ve developed linking agreements with big players on the web, including the Huffington Post, NewsMax, Reuters, AOL and others. In these agreements, we offer stories from the field so that they can reach a wider audience. In exchange, we receive links back to our site, which has proven to be a steady driver of traffic.

Our audience growth has been outstanding and has far surpassed goals we set last year. We had originally hoped to achieve 600,000 unique visitors per month in our first year. We surged past 500,000 in October, and by November achieved 750,000 unique visitors in a month. That pace of growth has allowed us to feel confident that we can close in on our goal this year of 1 million unique visitors per month.

The 1 million threshold puts us in league with many large news gathering sites and will be critically important for advertisers and our ability to become a self-sustaining enterprise.

As we have built the brand and the audience, we have gathered the support of several national advertising accounts. These sponsors include Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Liberty Mutual and Siemens. With the solid editorial team we have built, the reputation we have earned as a serious news organization, and a rapidly growing and increasingly engaged audience, we feel we are now poised in 2010 to make great strides on the business side. For a detailed picture of where we are in the business plan, please read CEO Phil Balboni’s year-end message.

We are well into this journey now, but we still have a long way to go. I look forward to hearing from all you about your ideas and your feedback on how best to navigate the way forward.

Respectfully,

Charles M. Sennott

Executive Editor and Co-Founder

The Pilot House, Lewis Wharf

Boston, MA