We are live!

It’s the end of the first day and it’s grown quiet again here at GlobalPost headquarters here in Boston after a day of hard work and some celebration. There are sticky Champagne stains on the conference table where we have our news meetings. Just a great day to see the site come alive. All that hard work by our correspondents in the field and our editors here in Boston came together to give rise to a new voice in international reporting. And this is the first minute I have had time to post.

The feedback has been positive. I did an interview which aired today on NPR’s Here and Now. Co-founder and CEO Phil Balboni and I were guests on the Emily Rooney show “Greater Boston” out of WGBH in Boston. We also had The New Republic in our office for most of the morning observing our first day. We had a story on TechCrunch that was favorable and generated a lot of buzz.

We really want to hear your comments so please keep them coming.

I hope you had a chance to read the exclusive story we offer today on Mugage by our own Senior Editor Andrew Meldrum who lived in and covered Zimbabwe for most of the last 25 years. His story documents a mounting case against Mugabe for a war crimes tribunal. And Andrew will be following the story up tomorrow so stay tuned.

Also, hope you had a chance to read our Jerusalem correspondent Matt Rees on the situation in Gaza and see the kind of narrative reporting he brings to a hard news daily story in southern Israel where Israeli bomb sappers can pick up the shrapnel from Hamas rockets, but they can’t take away the fear. From the other side of Gaza at the Egyptian checkpoint, take a look at Theo May’s gripping account of the Palestinian wounded who are being rushed across the border for medical treatment.

These stories are all promoted on the home page but they are also archived on the country page and on the correspondents’ bio page. You can get to the bio pages by clicking on a correspondent’s byline or photo or by going to the navigation bar and clicking on correspondents. On these correspondent bio pages you will also have access to their “reporter’s notebooks,” which are essentially reporting blogs. There is lots of great stuff in every corner of the site. We invite you to keep checking it out and keep sending the feedback.

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.

REFLECTIONS ON A BIG WEEK FOR GLOBAL NEWS AND A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF 9-11 IN NEW YORK.

I wanted to take some time before the trip to Hong Kong to reflect on what was a pivotal week in the formation of Global News Enterprises. The team is truly starting to come together now.

We brought on board two key editors. After a job search that attracted a flood of great candidates for the senior editing positions, we are thrilled to announce that we have hired Barbara Martinez and Thomas Mucha to serve as Managing Editors.

Barbara comes to us from the Politico where she was a Deputy Managing Editor. For us, she will serve as Managing Editor – Web. She was a strong asset at Politico and one of the driving forces that helped make the website for political junkies the excellent news source that it is today. We look forward to having her strong skill set and her passion for web-based news organizations and breaking new ground in new media to our team. She honed her skills as executive editor of the Harvard Crimson and worked for three years as a reporter at The Washington Post.

Thomas will be Managing Editor – Correspondents. He comes to us after working at Crain’s in Chicago where he headed up a multimedia team that focused on covering globalization. Thomas is a 17-year veteran of journalism and brings a unique blend of television and print experience to the table. He worked for 8 years at CNN mostly on the business desk and has worked for the last 7 years in print, mostly at Crain’s. He also has a master’s degree in international relations and economics from the University of Chicago where he studied the emerging markets of China and India. He has a great eye for a story and a keen interest in unraveling the complex themes of globalization.

We are also thrilled to announce that we have hired Andrew Meldrum as a Senior Editor and Regional Editor for Africa. For those who follow news in Africa, Andrew is well known for his courage and insight through more than 25 years as a reporter on the continent. He has worked in Africa for both the Economist and the Guardian and other publications. Most of his work has been in Zimbabwe where he has courageously uncovered and challenged the injustices of the Mugabe dictatorship. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University last year.

We have had some other stellar hires on the editorial team, including Amy Jeffries who worked for many years in public radio and recently graduated from University of California at Berkeley in its News21 program, which is seeking to train a new generation for the skills they’ll need to break new ground in multimedia journalism. She will be our Web master. And Sarah Liebowitz will be joining us as a Deputy Editor. She worked most recently as a political reporter for the Concord Monitor. Before that, she worked with me in London as a bureau manager and then as a correspondent who played a crucial role in our coverage of the London bombings in July of 2005.

For me, this big week ended with a a trip on Thursday, September 11th and Friday, September 12th to New York for the Service Nation forum which brought together presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. On the seventh anniversary of 9-11, the two senators vying for the White House put aside the petty political bickering that too often marks our national politics and joined together to offer their ideas on how the country might raise a call for public service among young people.

Both men noted that seven years ago, President George W. Bush missed an opportunity to call the country to service in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11. If you remember, in the days immediately following 9-11 when the country and the world were still in shock, Bush delivered a speech where he literally encouraged Americans to “go shopping” and to go back to doing what they were doing.

Both candidates criticized Bush for that response and said their presidency would be very different. They said they would face the tremendous challenges that lie ahead — from terrorism to climate change and from the after effects of Katrina in New Orleans and the slow slide of standards in too many public schools — by calling on the skill and energy of young people in this country. And they would ask them to serve their country. Not only in the military.

But both candidates urged them to join Teach for America or City Year or the foreign service to help the country in a time of tremendous challenges. The forum was a tremendous success and was organized by a dear friend of mine, Alan Khazei, the co-founder of City Year and now of a new organization called “Be The Change.”

You might ask what a conference on national service has to do with our venture at Global News Enterprises. GNE is not a public service institution, it’s a for-profit media company. But still it is our great hope that our correspondents work in the field of international journalism will be of service to the country.

At Global News Enterprises, we want to give young reporters a chance to take up the calling to be foreign correspondents, to go out in the world and cover it. We want them to pursue a passion for international reporting and help bring stories to light that are currently going uncovered in so many corners of the world. We think our mission fits in with the goals of Service Nation and the call to action that the forum highlighted.

I was in New York for two days for the forum, and it was great to be back. I worked as a reporter in New York City for many years for the New York Daily News before I landed at The Boston Globe. And on this trip on this somber and sacred anniversary, I went to Ground Zero and felt the powerful emotions that are still there for all Americans when they think about what happened that day.

For me, September 11th opened a long 7-year journey of reporting in Afganistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and then in Madrid for the train bombings and in London for the underground bombings. I reflected back on that reporting journey and I thought about how many of my colleagues who worked — or are still working — in Afghanistan and Iraq are now struggling to find work as foreign correspondents.

So many news organizations have cut back on or in many cases abandoned their mission to cover the world. And it makes me realize that Global News Enterprises has an incredible opportunity to fill a void in international news coverage for Americans that is glaring. The challenges before us in creating a new web-based international news organization are extraordinary, but we are pulled along by the feeling that what we are trying to do is important.

And the team we are building is all passionately dedicated to making it a success. It won’t be easy, but I feel a hell of a lot better trying than I did at a newspaper where every day you could feel the energy draining from the mission. It’s a big decision to have left my life in newspapers and to have taken on this new startup, but it is also exciting as hell. I think we have a real chance to radically redefine international reporting in the digital age. There is a revolution going on and I guess I just want to be out there — and want to build a team that wants to be out there — whipping molotov cocktails and storming ramparts for the cause. (Not literally, of course.)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

THE LAST DAY OF A GREAT RIDE IN NEWSPAPERS …

I guess the first post on this blog should be about the last day of what I call one of the “last great rides in newspapers.”

On my last day in the newsroom of The Boston Globe, the huge rolls of newsprint pounded off the trucks onto the loading docks down in the press room as they always do at the end of the week before the big Sunday run. The thud shakes the newsroom. I always loved that sound. It represented the heft of a big city newspaper. The weight of the organization and the importance of what it does.

But on that last day in March of 2008, that thud sounded more like distant thunder. It sounded ominous. And there are indeed dark clouds on the horizon for the newspaper industry, and an ominous feeling is setting in in far too many newsroom. It is a pervasive feeling from the highest realms of management to the cubicles of reporters in the newsroom that the current economic model simply cannot sustain the level of excellence in journalism that it always has. I hope that is not the case, but the feeling in newsrooms like the Globe is palpable. It is felt most intensely at going away parties for veterans. And at the Globe there had been far too many of them in recent years. They usually are a congregation in the middle of the newsroom of editors and reporters huddled around a sheet cake and coffee where stories are told — funny, touching, heartfelt stories — about the work of a great reporter. Lots of talk of the good old days. They felt like Irish wakes without the drinking. The metro editor Brian McGrory said the rectangular sheetcakes had in his mind come to resemble “tiny coffins.” I didn’t want to have one of these maudlin gatherings and I , like just about everyone at the Globe, had grown to hate sheetcake. So instead we gathered at Doyle’s, a great old pub in Jamaica Plain, and raised pints of Guinness and I listened to my editors and colleagues rip me apart with great humor. Some of them were true.

When I joined the Globe in early 1994, the paper was flush with cash. It was truly in the heyday of newspapers which had soared in revenue and circulation throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. They had come of age out of big cities like Boston with a brash confidence. The newsrooms had swagger, and they had solid revenue to back it up. I grew up in Massachusetts and the Globe was a part of my daily life. In many ways, my family was the core of its readership. Every morning, the Globe was on the breakfast table and there was push and pull over the sports page. We were a typical Boston Irish family that through one generation after the next had drifted out to the suburbs. And in so doing we mirrored the demographic sprawl of the paper and we embodied the solid readership that the paper sought for its advertisers.

I came to the Boston Globe from the New York Daily News and for me it was truly a homecoming. It was the paper I had always wanted to work for. And a big part of the draw to the Globe — beyond the obvious hometown pull — was that it was a news organization that had foreign bureaus and where I could live out a long-held dream to become a foreign correspondent. I got the chance in 1997 when the Globe named me the Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem. My wife, Julie, and I went to Jerusalem together with our newborn son, Will. he was only three months old when we left in the summer of 1997 to move into an old stone home in Jerusalem. The title “Bureau Chief” looks good on a business card, but it’s a preposterously grand title considering I was the only Globe correspondent in the Middle East. My wife, Julie, would tease me about this. She’d say, “Whoa! You’re the bureau chief … and (pause for ironic effect) you’re the entire bureau!” Or she would call me in the office and quip, “Is this the bureau chief? Sorry, am I interrupting you in the middle of a meeting with all of your personalities?”

Behind the humor was , of course, truth. The Globe was a small paper to have seven foreign bureaus. But I loved that it aspired to be a paper that covered the world for its readers. And in doing so, it punched above its weight class. We had a tradition of great foreign correspondents form Curtis Wilke and David Greenway to Ethan Bronner and David Filipov. Often, our correspondents were known as the best reporters and most talented writers in their patch. I was very proud to be part of that tradition.

I was the Globe’s Middle East “bureau chief” for four years and covered the Israeli-Palestinian peace process through the height of its greatest hopes and good intentions. And I was there when it all came crashing down and the two sides descended back into violence. I covered the intifada on the frontlines from the moment it began. And through it all our family was growing. We had two children born in the Holy Land. Riley was born in Jerusalem in 1999. And Gabriel was born in Bethlehem in 2000. When Palestinian suicide bombers would strikes Israeli buses or the Israeli tanks would pound a Palestinian village, we would hear the carnage in our garden. The bombings in particular would rattle the windows they were so close. When this happened, birds that would congregate in a lemon tree in our yard would flutter up out of the three and fly away. And our oldest son, Will, would ask, “What’s that Dad?” We would always tell him it was thunder. One day after a bombing and the usual question and the answer which was a lie, he asked, “Dad, if that’s thunder how come it never rains?”

That moment underscored a growing and undeniable feeling that Julie and I shared that having a family in Jerusalem was becoming untenable for us. We felt great sadness and great guilt at the idea of leaving a city we loved and friends on both sides of the conflict behind as we prepared to leave. We arrived in London in early September of 2001. Our moving truck dropped our boxes on September 11, 2001. I was unpacking my office when the news came on the radio that changed the world forever.

I spent most of the next five years covering the dramatically unfolding events of September 11 and its aftermath through the start of the US air strikes in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the Qala-i-Jangi unprising in Mazar-e-Sharif which was probably one of the most wild battles of the first war of the 21st century. That was the place where hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda being held in prison, rose up and seized the prison and fought against US and British special forces for several days. It was the battle where the American Taliban John Walker Lindt emerged from a basement of the fortress to tell a tale of how a California kid ended up taking part in a “jihad” against America.

After Afghanistan, I covered the trans-Atlantic divide that led up to the war in Iraq and then I covered the war itself. I was in the north waiting for the war to begin and covered it from the north down as Baghdad fell and the front lines pushed from Kirkuk and the Mosul and Tikrit and finally the entire regime of Saddam Hussein. For the next several years, I would be in and out of Iraq and covering a spate of bombings in Madrid and London and then looking back and realizing that I had become a war correspondent. I never thought of myself that way, but indeed that was we were covering.

By 2005, I was fairly burned out and was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, which is an extraordinary opportunity to have one year to explore literature and history and art and music and to throw open all the doors of learning that Harvard has to offer. It was a great year.

But in the spring of 2006 I returned to the Globe and could feel that it was a changed place. It was battered by the economic realities of running a big city newspaper and was struggling to find its way. Within a year, the Globe made the decision to cut its entire foreign staff After 22 years in the daily newspaper business and 14 years at the Globe, I have left traditional media and set out on a new venture.

And so now, as you know if you have been reading this blog, we are starting the first fully web-based international news agency. The company is called Global News Enterprises and we will announce the domain name of the website closer to the launch which is set for February 2009.