“He’s old school,” as his brother in Boston described him.

Photography by: Tomas Munita/New York Times

And that is an understatement. David is one of the most talented and humble reporters I have ever met. He is quiet and unassuming and nothing short of heroic. He has taken extraordinary risks as a reporter from his Pulitzer-Prize-winning dispatches from the war in Bosnia, where he was also detained, to his reporting in Afghanistan, where he also won a Pulitzer Prize for excellent work. He was picked up on November 10 by captors while inerviewing a Taliban commander and he was held for the last seven months, just two months after he had been married. He escaped last week and the story of his release was broken on Sunday in the New York Times and a detailed account of the escape appears in today’s editions. David is fearless, but never reckless. He is not a cowboy, just one hell of a great reporter. He’s old school indeed.

I’ve known David from the field for the better part of a decade and I have been worried sick about him for every day of the last seven months. Those of us who knew about his capture were sworn to silence at the request of his family.

One of his signatures as a reporter was a faded, old Boston Red Sox cap and, when we crossed paths, he and I often shared news from Fenway and our shared hometown. I was traveling in Pakistan and Afghanistan for most of this month and thinking of David at every turn. The story of his capture in Logar Province, just outside of Kabul, was very much on my mind when I took the decision not to go there in pursuit of a story. I know he would have approved of the caution. And when I was meeting with former officials in the now deposed Taliban government, I took each step carefully and tried to think the way David would think about the reporting. He holds important lessons for all of us who do this kind of work in the field, lessons about the need to be careful, of course, but also the need to have courage. There are some other colleagues who I work with and admire who are still being held and whose details have to remain secret for now. All I can say is we are being constantly vigilant about their situation and working quietly toward their release. They share David’s courage and sense of importance for geting the story in the field.

The kind of reporting David has done his whole life is the best of foreign reporting. And when you are dropping a row of quarters for a newspaper as great as the New York Times remember the quality and the courage of some of the people behind those bylines.

I was at Fenway yesterday watching the Red Sox win a great game with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth. I was there with my boys in field boxes near the Pesky pole in a swirling mist of rain and thinking of David’s father and about fate. I was hoping David was watching the game with his family. What a great father’s day present for David’s Dad to have his son safely returned. Welcome home, David.

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.

The Honorable Barack Hussein Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW

Washington, DC 20520

Paris, February 17, 2009

Dear Mr. President:

Dear Madam Secretary of State

Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization, would like to draw your attention to the situation of journalists in a number of countries now ranked as diplomatic priorities for the U.S. government. Mr. President, you appointed yourself to be the spokesperson in the fight for the right to inform and to be informed while visiting the Sudan in 2006, when you stated: “Press freedom is like tending a garden, it’s never done.” These words are somewhat reminiscent of those spoken by President Thomas Jefferson: “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that limited without danger of losing it.”

We consider it essential that the country of the First Amendment actively participate in promoting human rights within the international community, and especially in those regions of the planet in which these rights are being repeatedly violated. The executive order signed on January 22, 2009, which was aimed at putting an end to the humanitarian and legal scandal represented by the Guantanamo detention camp sent, in our opinion, an important signal. Moreover, we are expecting the new Congress to finally approve a “shield law” guaranteeing journalists federal protection for the privilege of source confidentiality, thus sparing the latter from prison terms like those handed down under the previous administration-a period characterized by a decline in public freedoms. What is at stake is not only the preservation of a basic principle of investigative journalism, but also of the quality of information that the American public has a right to expect.

The fact that the United States of America is speaking on behalf of human rights obviously implies that you must keep a particularly close watch in regions where you have established a military presence. The war that began in Iraq in 2003 has been the bloodiest of all time for local and foreign journalists, and the U.S. Army bears the heavy burden of responsibility for some of these tragedies. The necessary withdrawal of the troops that you plan to successfully carry out by 2011 must be accompanied by guarantees essential to peace. In Afghanistan, too, the U.S. Army has too often hindered journalists’ work, and Bagram Prison remains closed to the media. As a Reporters Without Borders’ delegation realized during an on-site mission there in January 2009, American support of early efforts to further a democratic process have in no way prevented violations of the freedom to inform and to be informed by Afghan courts. Case in point: Perwiz Kambakhsh’s 20-year prison sentence, upheld on appeal, for having downloaded “blasphemous” material on the condition of women in the country.

Your decision to promote dialogue with certain powers cannot fail to take into account this necessity, either. In China, the Olympic Games did very little to further the progress of freedom of expression. We hope, Madam Secretary of State, that your next visit to the country, February 20 to 22, will induce Chinese authorities to release prisoners of conscience. The “comprehensive dialogue” that you wish to initiate must keep its promises by venturing beyond economic and trade considerations. In the world’s biggest prison for freelance journalists and cyberdissidents, it is nearly impossible to pick up broadcasts from such stations as Radio Free Asia or Voice of America, and websites of American daily newspapers like The New York Times are still blocked. Your “extended hand” to Iran, whose Internet connection capacities rely upon U.S. companies, calls for a relaxation of the filtering now being imposed on foreign media websites and an end to the legal harassment of human rights and gender equity activists such as lawyer Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Founder of the Circle for the Defenders of Human Rights.

History has shown it, and you have understood it: placing a ban on countries subject to the most repressive regimes has often exacerbated their isolation without changing the attitude of their leaders. That is why we are particularly focusing on the State Department’s desire to mediate in favor of a genuine sharing of power between the political forces present in Zimbabwe. The participation of Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC in the government is an essential precondition for reinstating freedoms, for an in-depth reform of press laws and for foreign journalists to gain access to a country in chaos. Although Western chanceries have spoken out against Robert Mugabe and his regime, their silence in the face of the tyranny prevailing in Eritrea is all the more incomprehensible.

Moreover, being aware of your personal attachment to East Africa, Mr. President, you cannot tolerate the fact that the Asmara government, some members of which also possess American citizenship, is targeting Eritrean exiles – of whom there are many in the United States – for extortion and threatening them with reprisals against their friends and relatives remaining in the homeland, who are already being terrorized. For many years, Reporters Without Borders has been urging that the assets of certain identified leaders be frozen, that they be prohibited from entering the U.S., and that the Eritrean Ambassador to the United States be summoned without delay. The same sort of pressure needs to be placed on the Gambian government, which continues to ignore appeals from the international community, and the injunctions issued by the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) concerning the disappearance, in July 2007, of “Chief” Ebrima Manneh, a reporter for the Daily Observer. Pursuing this logic, it would be in the best interest of U.S. intelligence services to make public the information they have on the circumstances surrounding the murder, in 2004, of Deyda Hydara, editor-in-chief of Gambia’s private daily newspaper, The Point. Our organization, which had conducted two in-depth investigations on this matter, has certain details that placing the security services surrounding President Yahya Jammeh under strong suspicion.

Worldwide, there are too many of these closed-off States adept at double talk and ready to exchange a strategic position in return for impunity. How can any serious diplomatic relations-ones which truly promote peace and security-be established with regimes that are exercising draconian control over information? Syria cannot claim that it should be considered a reliable negotiating partner in the Middle East if, at the same time, it continues to violate the principles that this ambition demands. It must provide proof by releasing cyberdissidents Homam Hassan Haddad, Habib Saleh, Tariq Biasi, Kareem Arabji, Firas Saad, Muhened Abdulrahman and journalist Michel Kilo, who are being held arbitrarily. This requirement also applies to Myanmar, where dozens of recently arrested journalists and political opponents are serving their sentences under disgraceful conditions. The United States has everything to gain by strengthening the UN mandate in this country, without which contacts with the ruling junta may be permanently broken off. A dangerous isolationism, conducive to the worst kinds of human rights violations, is also at work in the strategic region of the Central Asian Republics, where Russia has regained its influence, to the detriment of that of Western countries.

The consistency and credibility of U.S. foreign policy will depend upon the ability of your administration to demonstrate the same vigilance in relations with your partners and allies. As a member of the UN Security Council and a key actor in what has become a multipolar world, Russia merits special attention. Disarmament constitutes a necessary yet inadequate step to ensure that the Kremlin can inspire confidence in the international community. The rejection of transparency by Moscow’s leaders can be seen in the troubling repression against civil society and the opposition. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006, undoubtedly paid with her life for having informed the world of the horrors committed by Russian troops in Chechnya. No democracy can withstand the scrutiny of the international community and its media when it yields to the temptation to act for the worst. The Israeli offensive in Gaza, which led you to appoint a new U.S. envoy in the person of George Mitchell, reminded us of this.

Like other countries whose populations have grown mainly as a result of immigration, the United States must prepare itself to accommodate journalists fleeing oppression and terror, and grant them asylum. Afghans, Iranians, Eritreans-they are also coming in from neighboring countries, like Mexican Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, unjustly detained for seven months by the immigration services in El Paso, Texas, merely for having sought to save his own life and that of his young son. This case is the consequence of the deadly drug cartel war, intensified by the violence of the authorities, which is grieving Mexico. As you promised, Mr. President, during a meeting with President Felipe Calderón prior to your inauguration, the American and Mexican governments need to join forces if they are to secure the border between the two countries, without which no Rule of Law can exist there.

Elsewhere in Latin America, the havoc wrought by the drug traffic and paramilitarism are draining all sense from the constitutional principles previously taken for granted. In this respect, like certain members of the U.S. Congress, we would ask that Plan Colombia’s funding – so costly for the American taxpayer – be reviewed in proportion to the actual efforts being made by Bogota authorities on behalf of human rights. President Alvaro Uribe has too often connived and made irresponsible statements that have placed in jeopardy journalists of whom he did not approve, or forced them into exile. Finally, your willingness to relax the clauses of the embargo imposed since 1962 on Cuba -the only country of the continent with no free press, and in which there are 23 journalists listed among its 200 political prisoners – may persuade Havana authorities to comply more closely with the international community’s expectations. The embargo, challenged in its principle by virtually all members of the UN’s General Assembly, has done nothing but strengthen the Castrist regime, to the detriment of the Cuban people. It must be raised one day. The island’s future depends upon it.

Mr. President, Madam Secretary of State, we look forward to your response, and thank you for your consideration. I am at your disposal, as is Lucie Morillon, our Washington D.C. bureau director, should you have any questions or desire further clarification regarding the situation of journalists and press freedom around the world.

Yours very respectfully,

Jean-François Julliard

Reporters Without Borders
Secretary-General

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.”

The team here at GlobalPost headquarters has been working around the clock editing the stories from our correspondents around the world, and the site is starting to really get some depth and look sharp. Soon enough, you will get a chance to see for yourself. GlobalPost launches on Monday. So just three days to go!

We are very much a work in progress and for sure there will be glitches and challenges that we will have to face. And we want to hear from you the viewers of the site about what you think and how we’re doing. Today we had a lot of buzz in the media with stories in the Associated Press and the bloggers in the media industry taking some notice of the much-anticipated event. Here are some links:

Associated Press
New Hampshire Public Radio, Interview
PBS MediaShift

As promised, we are publishing the last two chapters of GROUNDTRUTH: GlobalPost’s Field Guide for Correspondents. Check out earlier posts for the introduction and the first few chapters. I also want to remind you that in the coming weeks we will also be publishing a set of essays from our own correspondents and others connected to GlobalPost telling their stories of a life of working in the field covering conflict and climate change and global health. The essays are all meant to offer a teaching moment for our correspondents, but we thought all of you might want to check them out.

The Field Guide is a statement of principle and recording of our values and what we expect from our correspondents in the field. In the spirit of full transparency as a new news organization, we thought we would share this Field Guide with you so you can see where we are coming from. Here are the last two chapters:

SIX:

Stick to deadlines and stay in touch.

We are a small company with a global mission. GlobalPost intends to have 70 correspondents in 53 countries. (At launch we will have about 65 correspondents in approximately 45 countries.) So we have a sprawling enterprise that could easily come undone if our correspondents do not stick to all deadlines.

Correspondents are expected to file four story pitches at the end of every month for the month ahead. These pitches are discussed with an editor and when they are agreed upon they are assigned a deadline for delivery. Stories are to be delivered on time into the Content Management System (CMS) and our Managing Editor for the Web, Barbara Martinez, is the point person for any questions. She will be briefing all of you and offering tutorials in the near future on the CMS. It’s pretty easy and intuitive and nothing to fear.

Making deadline is critical. We accept that reality changes, that stories sometimes don’t pan out, that a better breaking story comes along. This will inevitably happen. But when such circumstances occur, a correspondent must communicate a change in game plan with his or her editor.

Communication is key. GlobalPost understands that freelancing is largely for the free-spirited. We do not expect you to be bound to us or to a daily schedule in the way a staff correspondent is. But we do expect to be able to reach you in the event of an emergency or a significant breaking news story. GlobalPost Newsroom Manager, Kathleen Struck, is the person who should always have your contact details. And she can make sure you have our contact details as well. We do expect that you will let us know when you are planning a vacation. And we expect you will either provide some features that will tie us over in your absence or that you will help us find a suitable correspondent to fill in while you’re gone.

If a correspondent consistently misses deadlines or fails to stay in contact with us, they will be given a warning. If the pattern continues, their relationship with GlobalPost will be terminated.

SEVEN:

Tell great stories.

Experiment with storytelling in the digital age and have some fun with it.

We believe being an international correspondent is one of the greatest vocations in the world. It’s a calling. An invitation to go out to a distant land, to find great stories and to report them back to a home audience. You can be covering serious diplomatic initiatives one day and writing about wine the next. You can cover a fascinating crime story or delve into a story about the environment or a business venture that is breaking new ground. The great thing about being an international correspondent is the freedom.

Put simply, we want you to find the great stories and tell them. And in this digital age, we want you to experiment with how you do that. We want you to think of yourself as a publisher of your own country or beat page. On these pages, we encourage you to help us set up important links and to host interesting blogs. On these pages, your weekly dispatches will appear. And there is also the “reporter’s notebook” which we encourage you to use as a tool of reporting. The future of journalism is about seeing news gathering as a process more than a product. Through the “notebook” you can share what you are working on, you can pose questions to your readers, you can reach out to experts within the community for which you are writing. You can sketch scenes and snatches of conversation that may not fit in a more formal news story but which reveal a truth about the place where you are living and its people.

Our primary focus is on the written dispatches that are short in length, typically no more than 800 words. These are expected to be well-reported, well-crafted, tightly written pieces of reportage. The “notebooks” are to be done at your own convenience, but we think they offer a huge opportunity for a new way of working as a foreign correspondent.

There are many ways to tell a story in the digital age. We don’t expect any of you to be experts. We respect people who prefer to stick to their own field of expertise as a writer or photographer. But we do want to invite all of you to try audio recording and photos and mixing the two into audio slideshows. We want photographers to try their hand at writing. We want you to use the Flip video cameras we are providing to all correspondents and send us back short video vignettes of daily life in the place where you live or short interviews with interesting people. Be creative.
Our Managing Editor for Correspondents Thomas Mucha will soon be sending out a how-to guide for field producing multimedia. Tom and multimedia producer Amy Jeffries are the key contacts for those of you who want to hone your multimedia skills.
In the end of the day, great journalism is about great storytelling. And what we want more than anything is for you to go out and find great stories.

We are now just five days away from the launch of GlobalPost.

The editing team here in Boston has been working around the clock writing headlines and fact checking a host of great stories from every corner of the world by a stellar team of GlobalPost correspondents.

At the latest count, we have 65 correspondents who have filed a total of more than 100 stories for us to share with you as we go live on Monday, January 12.

We have this beautiful office here on the waterfront and the conference room overlooks Boston harbor. It’s a particularly gray, cold afternoon with an icy rain falling. But inside we see nothing but blue skies as we look up to a huge white board that our Managing Editor for Correspondents, Thomas Mucha, has filled with a long list stories from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, The Americas and from our beat writers who are covering the auto industry, climate change, global health and other issues that connect us all.

Every time we finish editing one of these stories we are putting next to it a green check with a dry-erase marker. We’re blazing though copy so fast that our green marker ran out of ink! Our Managing Editor for the Web, Barbara Martinez, is handling all of the details of working out kinks in the web development and helping us all gain proficiency in the Content Management System (CMS.) She’s amazing. In fact, the whole team in here is amazing and over time I will be introducing each one of them to you as we go forward.

FIELD GUIDE

Right now while there is a short break in the action to order some take-out Thai food, I just want to live up to a promise made in my last post to continue sharing with you GROUNDTRUTH: GlobalPost’s Field Guide for Correspondents. This is a statement of principles and standards that I have written for our correspondents, editors and contributors. And in a spirit of transparency and inviting you in here behind the scenes, we thought we’d share it with the readers of this blog:

So here are two more chapters from the GlobalPost’s Field Guide:

CHAPTER TWO:

Stay safe.

We recognize that the world has never been a more dangerous place for reporters to practice the principle of ground truth.

More than 1,000 members of news organizations, including journalists, translators, and fixers have been killed in the last ten years, according to the International News Safety Institute which is tracking the data. These journalists have been killed in the cross fires of conflict, they have been targeted for murder for reporting stories that someone did not want told, and they’ve died just like countless thousands of other innocent victims of conflict from random shelling or road side bombs or for driving too fast in a dangerous setting.

Aware of these perils to reporting, we want to have a clear set of guidelines for how to operate in the field. To that end, we are including in this Field Guide a set of documents by various organizations which offer sound advice on covering conflict and reporting in potentially dangerous situations.

They include the following: On Assignment: Covering Conflict Safely by the Committee to Protect Journalists; Killing the Messenger by the International News Safety Institute; A Survival Guide for Journalists by the International Federation of Journalists and Tragedies and Journalists by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. I strongly encourage you to print out and save these documents and read through them carefully. They are great references. They offer the kind of practical advice that can save your life and save the lives of colleagues and support staff around you. They do a better job than we could in spelling out how to work in hostile environments and we expect you to heed their recommendations. A primary recommendation that each of these organizations make is for clear communication with editors about your whereabouts and to never enter into a story without a game plan for staying in touch. We want to be clear that no GlobalPost correspondent should ever go on an assignment – particularly a dangerous assignment – without prior approval from a senior GlobalPost editor. And when on such an assignment, constant contact is required.

Virtually all of these organizations also recommend hostile environment training for reporters covering conflict. We are listening to these specific recommendations as well and implementing them as policy. (Please see the attachment to this document titled “GlobalPost Policy on Conflict Reporting” for more details.)

CHAPTER THREE:

Listen.

We believe strongly that the greatest correspondents hear as many sides of an issue as possible before they begin writing or produce multimedia. The most memorable stories are the ones that surprise us, that contravene our preconceptions. And we believe those stories come from listening carefully to the community you are covering. They come from being fair and reporting without bias.

We encourage you to give voice to the voiceless. There is a big world out there and too often our news is shaped by politicians and diplomats and officials. Of course, their pronouncements from press conferences and embassy briefings matter and affect lives and we need them in our stories. But the best reporting is the kind of reporting that comes up from the street that includes the voices of the people who stand to be affected by the decisions of the powerful.

It’s pretty cliché these days, but back in the early 1960s when the legendary New York City columnist Jimmy Breslin was writing for the New York Daily News he broke new ground when he covered the 1963 state funeral of John F. Kennedy. Amid the dignitaries, the heads of state, and the somber weight of the moment in history, Breslin interviewed the man whose job it was to dig the ditch where the fallen president’s casket would be lowered into the earth.

This may feel old hat to a reporter who has worked in a newsroom in the last 20 years. But we are aware at GlobalPost that there is a new generation of international correspondents coming of age who have not always had that experience. And if a young journalist were to listen to television network coverage of many issues today they may not understand these values at all. So apologies to veterans here and a plea to correspondents who are newer to the craft to bring this spirit of listening to your work.

(CHAPTERS 3 AND 4 TO BE POSTED, TOMORROW…)

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.

HONG KONG – The Foreign Correspondents Club here is a throwback to the colonial era, an elegant building that dates back to 1917. It carries the weight of history and a colorful past of foreign correspondents who have come and gone through its doors and bellied up to the bar.

I gave a speech here today titled “International News in the Digital Age” as part of my tour of Asia trying to recruit correspondents for
Global News Enterprises
and wave the flag for our mission to radically redefine international reporting. Link to the speech here:

The history of foreign reporting is there on the walls of the club in black-and-white photographs by some of the best shooters in the world who captured history in Vietnam, Cambodia and then in Tienamen Square and during the handover from British to Chinese rule of Hong Kong. The club’s general manager, Gilbert Cheng, has worked there since 1972 and spoke of how the number of foreign correspondents has dwindled dramatically over the decades, and in the last decade in particular. In 1972 he estimated there were as many as 150 American foreign correspondents who worked full time for American news organizations who were members at the club. Today he said there are fewer than ten. Some of that has to do with the fact tht Hong Kong is not the same listening post that it once was. But most of the dwindling population of correspondents has to do with shifts in the industry and the hard economic realities — and misguided choices — of news organizations that have steadily eroded their international coverage.

One of the legends who is still around from the hey day here is Hugh Van Es. The legendary AP and UPI photographer was there tonight leaning against the bar. He took the famous 1975 image of the last Americans on a rooftop in Vietnam on the last chopper out of a war that was doomed. It is a stark statement of failure and hubris. Van Es, who is Dutch by birth, had nothing but contempt for the management of American news organizations that have killed their foreign bureaus.

“They are all accountants — bean counters who didn’t give a damn about the business,” he said.

And there in her reserved corner table was Claire Hollingworth, the legendary British foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph who covered World War II and Vietnam and everything in between. She is, by several estimates, over 100 years old. She famously broke the story of the German invasion of Poland simply by coming home late from a party one night and seeing German tanks lined up. She wrote about a life of reporting in her book, “Captain if Captured.” She was there tonight watching the BBC World news intently as she does on many nights. I asked her what was the difference between being a foreign correspondent today and 50 years ago. She said, “There was more freedom then.” I asked her if she meant governments like China were tougher on journalists now. And she shook her head and yelled in my ear, “It’s not the governments.” She is old and wise and not easy to understand. But I asked her who it was then who was restricting the freedom for foreign correspondents. “It’s just the business today,” she said in my ear.

If the FCC was steeped in the past, my next venue for public speaking — and planting the flag for Global News — was all about excitement for the future. It was a talk with the same title at the University of Hong Kong’s journalism department where I had a chance to meet with young students — many of them from mainland China. I was invited by Ying Chan, the director of the journalism program, and professor Gene Mustain. Both Ying and Gene were great reporters and great colleagues from the New York Daily News. The two of them ended up teaching here and have put together an ambitious and exciting journalism and media studies program. I could feel the energy of their students. They were inspiring, and you could sense the excitement they had about the future of journalism in the digital age. They get it. And they seem eager to hone their skills in multimedia editing and production which they will need to go out and tell great stories in the digital age. And, in the end of the day, telling great stories is what it’s all about.