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.

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.

The global economic crisis is the story. And it will be the story for years to come.

By every estimate, we are only seeing the beginning of an historic downturn in the global economy.
And so GlobalPost assigned 20 correspondents to write on the 20 countries in which they live to assess the extent of the damage.

It is ground truth on the global economic crisis.

The project was headed up by GlobalPost’s Thomas Mucha, our Managing Editor for Correspondents and Commerce columnist. His keen insights into the economy and his profound understanding of how to unearth the truths we need to know are right there in every word of this project. Think of the country-by-country graphic as a navigation tool for you to use to get your head around the enormity of what we are facing.

He signed the executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year and shut down secret overseas CIA prisons, a roll back on a national disgrace that had subjected prisoners to years in detention without charge and subjected them to interrogations that human rights groups say is tantamount to torture.

In making that his first official act as president, he told the world that the United States is going to confront the struggle against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.”

And he vowed to prosecute the struggle “vigilantly” and “effectively.”

For Obama, we are in a ”struggle” against terrorism: not a “war on terror,” as Bush has consistently called it. This represents a small shift in terminology, but one that speaks volumes about the approach.

If you try to fight terrorism in a “war” with tanks and troops, you lose. When you define the struggle in purely conventional military terms, it’s over.

It has to be a battle of ideas and street smarts and dogged investigative work and the skill it takes to build up a network of confidential informants. Sometimes a conventional military approach is necessary, but the real struggle for terrorism is a quiet, stealth operation that includes more wire tapping than missile firing.

Obama gets this, Bush didn’t.

Just ask the French or the British who both saw the failures of the conventional approach and saw what happens when they abandoned their own ideals in the struggle. So many Israeli counter-terrorism officials I know would agree, but that does not mean that their elected government officials have always seen it the same way. Certainly, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert doesn’t given the brutal offensive just undertaken in Gaza. What did it accomplish? Did it serve the purpose of destroying Hamas and undercutting its capability to launch rockets into southern Israeli? Time will tell.
But most experts in the region don’t think so.

I have covered terrorism for more than 16 years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.

And in every capital where I have covered terrorism from Belfast to Madrid to London to Jerusalem to Cairo to Paris and beyond there is an understanding that when a country abandons its ideals in the struggle it loses to the terrorists. It loses because it reduces its own moral standing. It falls into the trap of asymmetrical warfare.

The United Kingdom learned this in its struggle against the IRA and applied its lessons in its very sophisticated investigations and prosecutions in the London underground bombings of July 7, 2005.
Spain learned this in its long fight against the Basque separatist group ETA and also applied its lessons against those who carried out the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004.

Did the United States learn this in Iraq – or is it perhaps in the process of the lesson? It is hard to tell right now, but for sure it seems there is now a sharper student of history in the Oval Office.

Our correspondents are closer relations in the family. And we decided to brand our correspondents’ blogs as “Reporter’s Notebook” because we believe they are a chance to glimpse inside the daily scribblings of a journalist who is well trained and talented and edited and living in a far-off corner of the world where they want to share what they know.

So please be sure to check out Jason Overdorf in India and Patrick Winn in Thailand and Royal Ford in his world auto beat called “Wheels” and Seth Kugel in Brazil. Each of these correspondents has been great at contributing to their Notebooks and offering the kind of writing and GroundTruth that you won’t see anywhere else. You can always get to a “Reporter’s Notebook” by clicking on the correspondents name or picture which will take you to their bio page where their Notebook resides. You can also call up any correspondent’s bio through the navigation bar. Let them know what you think. Start the conversation.

We are a work in progress and there are definitely going to be places where we can improve. We value your input and feedback. Please let me know how you think the site is working and what we can do better.

Our goal at GlobalPost is to tell great stories from all over the world.













And in the lead up to the Jan. 20th inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, we are organizing our storytelling around a single question: What does the idea of America mean to the world? The special project is called “For Which It Stands.”

We wanted to find stories in every corner of the globe at a time when new leadership is setting out — at least in the resonant speeches of the campaign — to redefine or “reboot,” as Obama put it, America’s relationship with the world. We do not believe in partisan journalism and we vow to be as tough and fair in our reporting on this president as any other. But we do believe this is a moment in our country that transcends party politics and offers an opportunity for America to engage with the world in a new way. We very much want to be a news organization that taps into that new energy in this new administration.

So please go to the guide to our series For Which It Stands to navigate all of the great stories and multimedia that make up the series. There are more than 50 stories reported by more than 40 reporters as well as a handful of photographers, videographers and multi-media producers.

Today, you will see a lyrical and poignant photo essay accompanied by a strong piece of writing by a friend and colleague, Seamus Murphy. It is titled Seeing America: From Kennedy to Obama and I invite you to see and read his work. He is an extraordinary storyteller. I also hope you have time to read Matt McAllester’s piece on Guantanamo about the former guard and former prisoner who are coming together to try to find some common ground in their anger over what happened there. Matt is also a friend and colleague and an incredibly talented and principled reporter. And there is HDS Greenway comparing Obama to Wilson; Joshua Hammer in Berlin on Kennedy, Reagan and Obama and the historic speeches they made there; Royal Ford introducing his new column Wheels or Jack Farrell on foreign policy in Washington. There are also guest writers including NPR’s acclaimed reporter Deb Amos and the brilliant Israeli author Gershom Gorenberg. The list is just too long. But the guide will serve you well in finding out what’s there, so please use it.

One of the more engaging multimedia stories that I hope you will see has a back story that involves Johnny Cash and I think captures the spirit of GlobalPost. You see, we at GlobalPost want to be the Johnny Cash of international news.

I was joking with a few friends back in the summer about that. Off the cuff, I said how we wanted to be like The Man in Black telling stories in the world that are honest and true and that come from the street and have an ear for the music of America.

But what I didn’t realize then was that there was a great story teller out there named Greg Warner who was playing Johnny Cash on his accordion in Afghanistan. Someone sent me a YouTube video of his performance of “Ring of Fire” in Mazar-e-Sharif and it was a good laugh. But then I heard one of his reports from the Congo on NPR and I immediately called him and now he is doing a few multimedia columns for us. He is on his way to Kenya now.

One of his columns is about his “Accordion Journey” as he calls it through Afghanistan. It’s the kind of story telling we want to do at GlobalPost. And since today is the 50th Anniversary of the release of the Folsom Prison Blues single and the 40th anniversary of his concert inside the prison. I thought it was fitting to do a shout out and invite you to watch the video which has a great tribute to Johnny at the end. It even had a public viewing tonight at the “Cash Bash” at the Milky Way Lounge in Jamaica Plain, Boston in a night celebrating “the Man in Black.”

Seven days until we launch GlobalPost! Wildly exciting and incredibly busy at our offices in Boston, but I am going to do my best to keep you updated daily and even hourly about the countdown until the site goes live on January 12.

Today, we got the Field Manual for Correspondents out to all 65 of our correspondents in some 45 countries. In the spirit of full transparency, we thought we’d share this statement of our principles and journalistic standards with you over the next week. I am going to post here the Introduction and the first of seven short rules of great foreign reporting. (If some of the first chapter seems familiar, that is because the idea originated here in an earlier blog post I did on GroundTruth.) In the coming days and weeks, I will keep posting chapters and eventually I will also post some incredible essays written by foreign correspondents connected to GlobalPost, including Sebastian Junger, Matt McAllester, Jane Arraf, Simon Wilson, HDS Greenway and others who will be sharing advice and insights about working in the field.

Here’s the introduction and chapter one on “being there.”

GLOBALPOST’S FIELD GUIDE FOR CORRESPONDENTS

BY CHARLES M. SENNOTT

GlobalPost is setting out to redefine international reporting in the digital age, but we are old school when it comes to journalistic standards.

GroundTruth: A Field Guide for International Correspondents is dedicated to putting some of these standards in writing and sharing policies and practical information with our reporters, columnists and contributors in the field.

This is a working document, the same way your dispatches from the field are a rough draft of history. There is a revolution going on in media right now. And we are in its tumult and we love being there. It’s truly an exciting time. So we believe it smart and necessary to keep our eyes wide open to new and perhaps better ways of carrying out the craft of reporting and the art of story telling.

We want to create a community of correspondents – decorated veterans, mid-career professionals and younger reporters looking for their first shot at a foreign posting – who share their insights and stories and learn from each other in this changing environment for journalism.

To that end, we have collected essays from veteran correspondents connected to GlobalPost. In this collection, GlobalPost columnist HDS Greenway weighs in on nearly 50 years of work in foreign news; GlobalPost editor-at-large Sebastian Junger writes of the practical advice that keeps you alive covering conflict; GlobalPost Senior Editor Andrew Meldrum reflects on covering and living the story of Zimbabwe for 23 years; the BBC’s Simon Wilson shares what he learned from the Gaza kidnapping of a colleague; GlobalPost’s Jane Arraf provides a woman’s perspective on covering the war in Iraq; and GlobalPost’s Matt McAllester takes a self-effacing look back on his reporting from Fallujah.

These essays each tell a story from the field that offers a teaching moment. In the coming weeks, they will be posted on my blog which you can link to from GlobalPost.com. Eventually, the manual and the essays will be bound together as a hard copy and sent to you.

Later this year, we will also be creating an intranet site, a sort-of virtual water cooler where you, our correspondents, can communicate directly with each other. On the GlobalPost intranet, we hope you will share practical advice about everything from how you managed to get a great story to low rates on a hotel in London to tips on obtaining health insurance as a freelancer. It will be a place to track inside information about journalism grants and fellowships or the latest technology and new opportunities for freelance work.

We recognize that GlobalPost correspondents are freelancers and we want to encourage and foster a sense of community, a feeling of camaraderie that is too often missing from the wonderfully independent but sometimes isolating life of a freelancer.

We want to invite you to write essays from the field on this intranet site and then we plan to republish them every year into this Field Guide. So as we go along, please let us know if you have ideas.

We want to hear from those of you in the field about how we can work together to create a new voice in international news, a voice that is consciously attentive to an American audience. We do not mean that we will be in any way jingoistic or nationalistic. Nor do we want to imply that our stories will only focus on issues that affect America or involve American interests. The world is much bigger than that.

We are looking for reporters who can tell the kinds of stories that resonate with an American audience. We want writing, photography and videography that has a good ear for the music of America – an ear that ranges in its appreciation from Miles Davis to Johnny Cash to Yoyo Ma. A sense of writing about the world that seeks to emulate great American truth tellers, including Mark Twain, Langston Hughes and Edward R. Murrow. We want stories that ultimately enlighten all of us about the world in which we live. But we are particularly attentive to an American audience because we believe America, despites its tremendous exertion of military and economic power in the world that is dramatically under-served in international news. We believe the paucity of American venues for international news is a dangerous blind spot for America, and one that often has a wider impact on the world. We need look no further than the war in Iraq for proof of that.

We are consciously setting out to try our best to fill the void left by so many American mainstream newspapers, magazines and television networks who’ve chosen to cut back and in many cases abandon the mission to cover international news.

While we consider this Field Guide a work in progress and we are eager to gain new insights from those of you in the field, we also want to be clear about the simple, time-tested values in which we believe and which we expect to see carried out by our correspondents.

That is, we believe in fairness. We believe in accuracy. We believe the best reporting comes from good old-fashioned shoe leather. We believe in listening and allowing yourself to be convinced by a point of view you may not have considered before. We believe good reporters do more than merely present two sides of an issue, they unearth facts and then consider all sides in a way that helps create a new understanding of the kinds of complex issues that we face globally.

We believe in giving voice to the voiceless. We believe in respect for different faiths and cultures and ways of seeing the world. We believe humor is a good way to get at truth, but we have less time for laughs at someone else’s expense. We believe in connecting the dots and saying something important without resorting to the kind of rabidly opinionated reporting that is cluttering too much of the airwaves and the internet.
In the end of the day, we have faith in you, our team in the field to embrace these standards and to go out and find the great stories that make for great journalism.

ONE:

Be there.

It’s all about being there.

There is no value that GlobalPost holds higher than having correspondents who live in the place about which they write, who know its language and its culture.

Many of you are native speakers or fluent already. And for those of you who are not, we eagerly encourage you to study the language of the places in which you are reporting. We believe foreign reporting requires you to be a first-hand observer of the events unfolding in the country you cover. We believe that the strength of GlobalPost will be having a breadth of coverage by reporters with an ear to the ground. We are looking for the kind of authoritative reporting that can only come from a reporter who is living the story. We call this ground truth. It’s an important idea at GlobalPost and “GroundTruth” is the name of my weekly column and regular blog that will highlight your daily reporting from the field.

So what does “GroundTruth” mean?

It has a pretty obvious and intuitive meaning. You may have heard it in a military context. But its origin, as best we can tell, is a precise phrase used in digital technology that was coined by NASA. This is how NASA defines it on its website:

“Ground truth (n) … one part of the calibration process. This is where a person on the ground makes a measurement of the same thing a satellite is trying to measure at the same time the satellite is measuring it. The two answers are then compared to help evaluate how well the satellite instrument is performing. Usually we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

In other words, Ground Truth is a scientific belief that the greatest calibration of what is happening in a far-off place is best achieved by being there on the ground to witness it and record it.

As a web-based news organization, we recognize that even in the digital age when we have access to information from all over the world at our fingertips and satellite transmissions that can focus on images thousands of miles away, the most trusted reading is still made by those human beings who are there witnessing the events and measuring history live.

It sounds like a simple idea. But it’s not so easy when the ground you are on is a shifting, complex story that requires knowledge about and a deep background on the forces shaping the news. We have reporters who do this in the places where there is ongoing conflict like Iraq and Afghanistan; in places where there is a contradictory mix of poverty and opportunity like India and Brazil; where there are ancient cultures to understand in a modern context from China to the Andes. Our correspondents will be there on the ground equipped with the knowledge that is needed to interpret the events in a way that allow you to truly see and understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what it means to viewers of our site.

This is not a new idea by any means. It’s just good old fashioned reporting.

But these days we believe there is too much distant analysis — not only at news organizations but also at international businesses and even in military and national security organizations — by those who are too far removed from the ground.

Those who analyze from on high are only one part of the calibration process in understanding a complex world. They are like the satellite viewing the image from afar, and we want to be that optic on the ground telling you what it really looks like.

NASA states in its own definition, “we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

So do we.