At GlobalPost, we’re proud of the coverage we provided this year particularly in Afghanistan. Our team has done stellar work there and we are thankful to them for it. We’ve had some notable successes in other areas of our reporting, which I have tried to highlight albeit sporadically here in this blog. But we also recognize that we at GlobalPost have much work to do in 2011. We are poised for a year of change and growth, a pivotal year where we will launch a redesign of the site and where we will take on more ambitious , in-depth reporting. I would like to keep you involved in the conversation of how we’re evolving as a news organizations. I’ve tried to do that through the blog, but haven’t always succeeded as the demands of the daily news operation have been relentless in our two years since launch. (One of my New Year’s resolutions is to try to do better tending to this blog! )  In the spirit of  starting fresh and living up to resolutions,  I thought I’d copy you in on a New Year memo I just sent to our correspondents in the field and a link to our new 2011 Field Guide for Correspondents. It’s hot off the presses and dated 1/1/11, which as one of my sons just joked will be a one-derful year! We ask that you not reprint the Field Guide without our permission,  but we invite you to take a look as it contains our news organization’s core values and it also includes our correction policy as well as nine essays written by seven of our correspondents in the field and from our editor-at-large Sebastian Junger as well as the BBC Washington Bureau Chief Simon Wilson. Here it is:

To all correspondents in the field,

BOSTON – Wishing you all the best in 2011. Thinking particularly of those of you in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places in the field where you might be far from family and friends. No matter where you are, I trust you are all resourceful enough foreign correspondents to find a glass of cheer. So, here’s to you.
Happy New Year!

Here’s the 2011 edition of GlobalPost’s Field Guide for Correspondents. This year you will see I have updated some chapters and included nine essays from correspondents in the field which we’ve collected over the last two years. I’ve also made an addendum which includes a tip sheet on social networking and our policy for corrections, which was first sent out to you at the beginning of last year. You can quickly retrieve the full 33-page Field Guide for Correspondents at this link. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8465435/globalpost/field%20guide/2011_fieldGuide3.pdf) (Lower resolution pdf files of the Field Guide are also included as an attachment, but it takes some time to open.)

We hope you will download and save the Field Guide and maybe even be old school enough to print it out. We want you to know it and refer to it when needed. We will have some bound copies here for those of you who might be passing through Boston.

The expectations, standards and policies that are written in the Field Guide shape the core of our relationship with those of you in the field. They have put us in very good stead in the last two years as we’ve worked together to build a news organization which has earned a solid reputation for accuracy and integrity.  That has come through the skill and vigilance of our editing team here in Boston and the solid, balanced reporting you correspondents do every day in the field. Thanks to everyone for all the hard work.

The New Year is shaping up as a very exciting one for GlobalPost with a lot of good changes in the air. We are looking forward to the pending launch of our redesign which looks great. We are also looking forward to the transition in our editorial team as Editor Thomas Mucha takes the reins of daily news operations and I turn my focus to Special Reports and a new initiative for in-depth reporting through non-profit funding. It’s a pivotal year for GlobalPost and Tom and I are both looking forward to working together with you to step up our coverage on all fronts.

We are pleased to share the news with you that we have secured two significant grants for 2011, one for reporting on global health and the other for reporting on human rights. I will soon provide more details about those and other grants and how you can be part of these reporting projects. As previously stated, it is my hope that you will be sending along ground-breaking project ideas and that we might have a chance to work together on these Special Reports. I am looking forward to getting back in the field myself in the coming year. Hope to see you out there.

All best in 2011!

Cheers,
Charlie

Charles M. Sennott
Executive Editor and co-founder

Bogotá-based correspondent Nadja Drost revisited the dark chapters of Colombia through a court case ruling on a 2005 massacre of seven members of a peace community in Northern Colombia. Drost’s investigation used deep reporting, examination of court documents and interviews with military officials to draw out the story of exactly what happened, from U.S. military partner General Montoya down to the local impact of the killings. Where U.S. taxpayers thought they were supporting the fight against narco-terrorism and the FARC, in reality they helped to fund a hidden dirty war in Colombia.

Part one of Drost’s report depicts how the massacre occurred. Part two examines the massacre’s fallout and the court case. On the ground, a quiet monument to the village’s fallen is a reminder of how violence can rip apart such small, innocent communities.

A pile of stones lies in the center of the village of San Jose de Apartado. Each time a community member is murdered, their name is painted on a stone and added to the mound. (Photo courtesy John Lindsay-Poland)

GlobalPost correspondent Kathleen E. McLaughlin contributed three new installments to our “Silicon Sweatshops” series, investigating worker conditions in American electronics factories in China. McLaughlin traced the impact of Apple’s use of n-hexane to clean LCD screens- a substance that has hospitalized workers with nerve damage. Our report also examines the uncertainties of worker compensation. Will injured workers actually receive aid promised by law? McLaughlin talks to a Chinese lawyer familiar with such cases to find out, uncovering the international consequences of American consumption.

GlobalPost Managing Editor Thomas Mucha attended The Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW)’s 47^th annual conference at the University of Arizona’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism this past week, collecting “Best in Business” journalism prizes awarded to GlobalPost for our “Silicon Sweatshops”, “World of Trouble” and “Living in the Shadows” projects, as well as Mucha’s own column.

Consider the events GlobalPost correspondents reported just this week:

In Indonesia, Peter Gelling provided authoritative coverage of the country’s elite counter-terrorism force killing Noordin Top, the leader of Indonesia’s answer to Al Qaeda.

In Somalia, six US attack helicopters swept over a convoy of the Al Qaeda-inspired Al Shabaab fighters and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader who has long been wanted by the US in connection with the 1998 attack two US embassies in East Africa. GlobalPost correspondent Tristan McConnell reported from Kenya on how the attacks reveal a dramatic shift in US policy to confront Al Qaeda in the failed state of Somalia.

In Yemen, GlobalPost’s Laura Kasinof reported on the air strikes that killed scores of civilians fleeing fighting in Northern Yemen where the government forces appear to be succumbing to American pressure to step up the fight against “an increasingly active branch of Al Qaeda in the country,” as she wrote.

The US intelligence community is buzzing about evidence emerging over the summer that Al Qaeda leaders are gathering in Somalia and Yemen and trying to establish a new nexus for operations after Pakistan’s military finally stepped up the pressure on Al Qaeda in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

CIA director Leon E. Panetta publicly revealed this in briefings over the summer.

An early warning about this came from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the Brookings Institute in the late spring, saying, “I am very worried about growing safe havens in both Somalia and Yemen, specifically because we have seen Al Qaeda leadership, some leaders, start to flow to Yemen.”

The concentration of violent jihadist campaigns in Yemen and Somalia illustrate that Al Qaeda is a movement not an organization, and the fact that they are scrambling to move base and being hit even as they do so is a sign that they are greatly weakened now eight years after the September 11th attacks.

In June, I traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to report on the Taliban at a fateful crossroads as the Afghan election looms, the Taliban continues to exert control and the US military escalates its troop deployments in a major offensive in the South. I wanted to revisit the places and the people I have gotten to know through 15 years of reporting there and share some of their stories and insights.

I was joined by photographer and friend Seamus Murphy of VII along the way, who brought me into the circle of a family from Stonecutter Street in Kabul. He first met them in the worst years of the civil war in 1994 and has documented their lives and their struggles and a new sense of hope. The family’s story is told in the lead video on the project landing page. This project also includes strong reporting from GlobalPost correspondents Shahan Mufti in Islamabad and Jean MacKenzie in Kabul.

The idea of the series was to try to unpack the history of the Taliban in all its complexity and historical context so that visitors to the site might get a deeper understanding of a region that has long been a graveyard for empires.

I hope you will check it out and post a comment.

“Old Ironsides,” launched in 1797, is the living evidence that the US has been struggling with pirates since its founding. And our columnist HDS Greenway, a Navy man himself, brings the history of that wood-sided frigate alive in his most recent piece for GlobalPost. We just published it on the site as part of our on-going coverage of the Somali pirates and the American captain they are still holding captive on a small life boat that is out of gas near the Gulf of Aden.

It is a riveting drama that our correspondent in Kenya, Tristan McConnell, has covered with great mastery, providing all of the twists and turns of the still unfolding story. In the end, it seems to be a story of a hero, the Captain Richard Phillips, who had the nobility and old-world understanding of the law of the sea to risk his own life to save his ship and the crew on board. The drama is still unfolding and you can only hope for the best. But if the sketchy facts are accurate about how he put his own life on the line to save his crew, then no matter what turn the story takes it will end in honoring a hero.

Our Senior Editor Andrew Meldrum has done an outstanding job coordinating the coverage from here in Boston. Check out Meldrum’s appearance tonight on the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News.

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.

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.

Caryle Murphy’s piece out of Afghanistan

We have stories from Italy and India and Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Jean MacKenzie’s piece out of Afghanistan offers readers a chance to glimpse life behind the veil and outside the parameters of war and politics. She has four beautifully written vignettes of Love in the time of the Taliban.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Today’s exclusive story is bold and insightful GroundTruth.

Our correspondent in Pakistan, Shahan Mufti, has broken a news story that is a must read. Mufti knows Peshawar, Pakistan well. He’s been in and out of there and has great contacts on the ground in the rugged, ancient Silk Road town that lies near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was there covering the attacks on US military supply routes last month when he stumbled upon a market which is essentially a fencing operation for stolen US military equipment, including computers with restricted information. The theft of this property imperils the US troops in Afghanistan. And so he began to investigate.

We decided to send him into the market with a wad of cash to pose as a buyer. He was sold a US military laptop packed with sensitive information on US military equipment and logistics for about $650. He took photographs of the laptop and studied and in some cases photocopied the material that was on it. He then contacted the military attache at the US Embassy in Islamabad and eventually returned the laptop to its rightful owner: the US government.

The Pentagon tells us it is looking into how it was stolen, but clearly the military has a problem on its hands with a growing black market in Pakistan and Afghanistan for stolen US military goods. It’s supply routes are getting hit regularly. So America is learning what so many empires before it have learned: the Khyber Pass is the Achilles’ heel of armies that dare to invade a terrain as hostile and forbidding as the mountains that lie between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Throughout the ages, from Genghis Kahn, to Alexander the Great, to the British and the Soviets and now the Americans, the lesson of Afghanistan is written in stone: This place is a graveyard for invading empires.

And so today will mark the first truly global inauguration with an estimated 2 to 3 billion people turning their eyes to witness how Obama will capture this moment — more viewers than any World Cup, or Super Bowl, or Olympics or any other event in the history of television.

The world will tune in to hear what words he might choose to begin a presidency that sets out to restore not only the “hope” that Obama spoke of for Americans, but the hope the whole world holds that America might live up to its greatest ideals.

It is a moment that comes with high expectations that Obama can indeed change or “reboot,” as he put it, the way America deals with the world. And there are many observers who believe these expectations for change — from climate change to controlling AIDS in Africa, from terrorism to tariffs on trade — will be virtually impossible for the new president to live up to.

To gauge those expectations, GlobalPost’s 65 correspondents in some 45 countries have set out in this series “For Which It Stands” to listen to people in the countries they cover and to document what this day means for them.

And, based on their reporting, it seems every corner of the earth feels a connection to the new president in a way they have never connected to an American president before.

People across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe all feel Obama is one of their own. And in so many ways, he is.

In Ireland, relations from the village of Monegal on his mother’s side have transformed the spelling of his name to O’Bama and a catchy, new Irish song proclaims, “There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama!”

In Kenya, the country proclaimed a national holiday when he was elected and his extended family is being treated akin to royalty. His paternal step-grandmother, “Granny” Sarah Onyango Obama, 87, will be at the inaugural in the full traditional dress of the Luo tribe. Back home cousins and distant cousins in a small village called Kogelo all claim a connection to the First Family.

In the Arab world, Obama’s Muslim middle name has become the basis for a term of endearment. They call him “Abu Hussein,” a moniker which would roughly translate as “Papa Handsome.”

In Indonesia, school kids giggle with glee before television cameras there to record the same classroom where the next president once sat as a school child and took his lessons in the Koran just as they do now.

In Venezuela, there is a new name for a cup of black coffee mixed with cream, the “Obama.” Such a remark might smack of racism in another country. But in Venezuela, a place of many races and a sophisticated understanding of shades of white, black and brown, it is meant as a compliment to the president, an assertion that he is a kindred soul for Venezuelans.

And yes, in Kansas they celebrate Obama as a native son as well.

His American grounding in Kansas seems almost secondary to his experience in the world.

When Obama is sworn in today, millions of Americans will watch, but the event will be viewed via satellite dishes in small villages in Kenya, on static-filled televisions in crowded alleys in Jakarta, in cafes across Europe and in the sprawling apartment blocks of Beijing.

The world looks on at this event with some sense of what would have to be called envy.

At least that was a theme that came through the powerful reporting of our correspondents who asked one question in the countries where they live: What does the idea of America mean to the world?

Gershom Gorenberg, writing from Jerusalem, wrote how Israelis and Palestinians —once again locked in a brutal conflict — look at the United States on this day with a jealous recognition that America knows how to write its own history. America can redefine itself anew, and Gorenberg wrote how Israelis and Palestinians can only look on and wonder why they cannot seem to do the same.

A similar sentiment — for very different reasons — was also heard among the youth of Italy. Our correspondent Angelica Marin found them longing for a political process that might engage them in the way American youth were in electing Obama, and that they, too, might transform their political landscape in a new way.

Even in France our Paris correspondent Mildrade Cherfils found her neighbors pondering the issue of race in a way they never had before, and it’s not often that the French offer a self-effacing moment of recognition to America for living up to its promise of equality.

In Africa, there is unbridled faith that a president whose father hails from Kenya will embrace the desperate need to not just continue but enhance funding to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar), which was started by President George W. Bush.

In the Middle East, the Arab street holds out hope that a president whose middle name is Arabic and who was clearly opposed to the war in Iraq might finally establish a reputation for America as an even-handed broker in the region and help bring about a lasting and just peace for the Palestinians and Israelis.

But at the end of the day, Obama is the president of the United States, not the world. And that reality will inevitably confront him very soon.

It will no doubt be an extraordinarily difficult task for this administration to manage down the expectations the world holds for Obama.

With an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression, he may not be able to fund Pepfar at the levels that President Bush has proposed.

With a need to turn his attention to Afghanistan and begin his promised draw down of troops in Iraq, it is not certain that he will be able to focus his diplomatic efforts on the boiling tensions of the Israelis and Palestinians anytime soon.

The domestic needs for energy may undercut his promises to address global concerns on climate change.

And so these questions loom large before Obama as he enters the Oval Office: If he truly is the first global president, will his worldwide constituents be patient with his promise for change? And will he ever be able to live up to all that the world expects from the United States of America?