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…)

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.

We touched down at the international airport on Lan Tau island, and our regional editor for Asia, Matt Driskill, was there to pick me up. I knew it was him because it’s hard to miss a tall guy in a Panama hat and wire-rim glasses.

“Welcome to Hong Kong,” he said with a classic Oklahoma twang that still resonates in his voice even though he left his wind-swept home state more than 10 years ago to seek out a life in Asia as a foreign correspondent. He worked for years with the Asia edition of the International Herald Tribune and as a freelancer before joining us as regional editor and a columnist here in Hong Kong.

Matt has been invaluable in helping me plan this trip across Asia to recruit correspondents for Global News. I will begin the journey here in Hong Kong, then onto Beijing and Hanoi and Jakarta and Delhi where I will be meeting with dozens of journalists and government officials as we build our network of correspondents. And I’ll be keeping readers of this blog updated all along the way.

Our taxi whisked us out of the airport up and over the Tsing Yi bridge and then down through the Western Tunnel and then up and alongside the port past the scenic view of the cranes loading and off-loading containers. Finally, we descended down into the city shadows of skyscrapers that seemed too tall to fit on this small island.

I arrived at my room at the Conrad Hotel and turned on the TV and was immediately bombarded by staccato BBC and CNN broadcasts of the economic meltdown in Wall Street that had all gone down while I was flying in the silence across America and the Pacific. The broadcasters were breathless with the big headlines that the once-prodigious Lehman Bros. had declared bankruptcy, and the equally stunning news that Bank of America would take over another failing giant in investment banking, Merrill Lynch.

On the BBC, an economic analyst was comparing the events of this day to the 1929 crash that led to the Great Depression. And just when I thought it was typical British overstatement on the American economy, there on CNN was former Fed Reserve Chairman, the “maestro” himself, Alan Greenspan, calling the collapse of Lehman Bros “a once in a century event,” the worst thing he had ever seen in his long run holding the conductor’s baton of the America’s economy.

The reckoning for the American economy, it seems, had truly arrived.

You could immediately feel the full impact here of the US economic crisis on Wall Street even before the markets opened up in New York.

After 20 hours of flying, I cleaned up a bit and was invited to Matt’s home for dinner with his warm and charming French wife, Emmanuelle, and their 4-year-old son, Louis, at their pleasant home not far from the University of Hong Kong.

The talk this evening was of the economy. And about how we as a news organization would try to cover this story after we launch in January, how we could make our coverage stand apart from the breathless tone of the business reporters. How could you put it in a global context and offer our viewers a different perspective?

The sense of the global economy and how we are all inter-connected was alive and kicking in every conversation no matter how brief on this first day in Hong Kong. Even in the small-talk chat with a Hong Kong taxi driver on my way home, the discussion turned to Wall Street.

The cab driver who spoke with a thick accent, pronouncing the investment firm “Lay-MAN.” He offered this analysis: “You could feel it coming. Bad news for America and bad news for America’s stock market is bad news for the whole world. Wait. You see bad news tomorrow everywhere.”

Backing up the cab driver’s analysis was the news that the London stock market closed down sharply and more tremors were feared across the world. Already the Dow had tumbled 381 points by the time I went to bed.