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

With General David Petraeus taking command on July 4,  the offensive is slowly, grinding to a start as the surge of 30,000 additional troops hits the ground in Afghanistan and the “fighting season” begins. GlobalPost is chronicling this critical turning point in what has become America’s longest war with a stellar team of correspondents in the field. You can follow these reports every day in a new blog we have launched called Dispatches: Afghanistan.

Throughout this summer and into the fall,  GlobalPost will stay on the story. Check, out the outstanding videography and narrative field reporting by Kevin Sites and the excellent photo reportage by Ben Brody. These two correspondents are traveling and working together to bring home the reality of this war. They are both experienced veterans of combat. Sites has reported from dozens of hot spots including Iraq and Afghanistan. And Brody was a U.S. military combat photographer before he joined GlobalPost. Their work is augmented by GlobalPost Kabul correspondent Jean MacKenzie who is writing about the big picture of the war and working with a network of Afghan reporters who are watching the developments and, through MacKenzie’s dispatches,  providing a unique perspective of how this offensive is perceived by the Afghans themselves.

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.

In the Enterprise category we won for our in-depth series “World of Trouble” on the global economic recession. GlobalPost’s Managing Editor Thomas Mucha led the coverage by 20 correspondents in 20 countries who provided what we call “groundtruth.” That is reporting that focuses on how this sprawling crisis affects real people, their lives, jobs and living standards. Not the kind of coverage that relies on talking heads and analysts on Wall Street, but gritty, down-to-earth reporting in the field by correspondents who live in the countries about which they are writing.

GlobalPost also won two awards in the Special Projects category: for our series “Living in the Shadows” about migrant workers in China, reported by correspondents Kathleen McLaughlin, Sharron Lovell and Josh Chin, and by Mucha; and for “Silicon Sweatshops”, a five-part investigation of the supply chains that produce many of the world’s most popular technology products, reported by correspondents Jonathan Adams and Kathleen McLaughlin. And finally we won in Columns, again our Thomas Mucha, for his excellent and insightful columns on global business issues.

From Greece to China and Argentina to India, GlobalPost plans to stay on the story of the swirling economic crisis and the ways in which it affects us all. Stay tuned!

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.

The federal government announced an investigation and congress declared it would hold public hearings this fall on our Kabul correspondent Jean MacKenzie’s investigative piece about how American tax payers’ money is ending up in the hands of the Taliban. You have got to read this piece which was credited on CNN, CBS, Reuters, HuffingtonPost and all over the blogosphere and different websites. It was one of those stories that staggers the mind. The headline says it all: “US taxpayers funding the Taliban?”

MacKenzie’s reporting focuses on what has long been an open secret in Afghanistan, that the Taliban has established what is essentially a protection racket in which it takes a cut of up to 20 percent from contractors receiving hundreds of millions of dollars for development projects in Afghanistan. Twenty percent.

That’s a big cut even for the mafia. The Italian organized crime families traditionally took only 10 percent of the construction industry in the cities in controlled.

I was thinking about that this morning as I walked near our headquarters here on Atlantic Avenue in Boston and saw one of the last great mafia funerals.

The black limos were lined up along the narrow streets of the North End, this city’s Italian neghborhood. And there were flatbed trucks filled with fresh cut flowers. And wise guys in black suits with sunglasses were standing solemnly as the casket of Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo, one of the most powerful mafia figures in New England as his coffin was loaded into the hearse.

Angiulo died a free man, but only after serving 25 years in federal prison on a litany of charges including racketeering, gambling and loansharking. He was 90 years old.

The scene got me thinking about the federal government’s long fight against organized crime in America and what it can teach us about the struggle against the Taliban.

In the end of the day, the Taliban are criminal thugs and the sooner the US treats them that way, the sooner the government will begin to have impact in Afghanistan. After all, it was when the federal government stopped fighting the mafia and starting trying to cut off their money supply that they succeeded in breaking its hold on cities like Chicago and New York and Boston. It’s time for the US State Department to start thinking that way about the Taliban. Go after the money. To his credit, US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke likes this strategy, but Washington has been slow to move on granting him the auditors and investigators he has requested. And meanwhile the Taliban continues to brazenly carry out its protection rackets and pocket what is estimated to be at least tens of millions of dollars in money that was meant to build bridges and roads and other public works.

The Taliban are an armed insurgency for sure, but they are also a corrupt crime family, not unlike the mafia, that uses fear tactics to control its population and fund its organization. Like the mafia, the Taliban is beloved in the local community because it offers security and a sense of belonging. The North End has always been the safest place to live in Boston. And the community have always looked out for each other. After all, “Cosa Nostra,” means “Our Thing,” in Italian.

That really is not that different from the Pashtun villages where the Taliban holds power. It is ‘their thing.” They know the people, they keep the peace, they protect the collective culture and their way of life and they quite simply kill anyone who gets out of line or threatens their hold on power. Angiulo would have understood that. But he never would have understood 20 percent. In the old world of the mafia, that is just not gentlemanly. It’s not honorable.

Jerry Angiulo must be rolling over in his grave.

And yesterday the world mourned the loss of the last surviving son of an Irish-American family from Boston that suffered triumph and tragedy, sometimes scandal, and came to define American politics.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the last of the legendary political dynasty of brothers and one of the most effective legislators in recent history, died Tuesday night.

Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who was known as the “lion” of liberalism, was 77 years old.

The death of Sen. Kennedy, who had been suffering from brain cancer, was announced by the family Wednesday morning from the family compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The news came even as the family was gathering to mourn the loss of the senator’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who died two weeks ago.

GlobalPost will be taking reports from around the world on the Kennedy legacy and GlobalPost Washington correspondent John Aloysius Farrell will be compiling a remembrance of the senator he covered and the legacy the Kennedy family leaves across the globe.

You can check out the interview here.

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.

Seamus Murphy/VII, 1996

The radio series is the first phase of an ambitious multimedia project that we are putting together and which will appear on GlobalPost later in the summer. The series focuses in on the Taliban and how the US troops seeking to confront the religious movement fail to understand it. It will feature the powerful photography of my colleague Seamus Murphy of the photo agency VII and video and audio portraits of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The reporting trip was built around revisiting people and places that Seamus and I know through 15 years of reporting there. And in case you have been wondering, the writing and producing of this multimedia project is what I’ve been doing with my summer. We will keep you posted on when it will appear on GlobalPost. Until then, please check out The World.