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.

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.

GlobalPost began a beta test by about 100 site evaluators today. And so we welcomed the first small community on to the site in advance of our live launch on January 12, which is just four days away and counting.

Today was an incredibly productive day. We moved onto the test site almost 90 stories — well-reported, well-written, well-crafted pieces of journalism from every corner of the world.

Today a few of the stories I edited that we look forward to sharing with you on Monday came from our correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan, Jean MacKenzie and our Washington writer and long-time colleague Jack Farrell and an incredible essay and photo gallery that we are putting together from acclaimed photographer Seamus Murphy. We also loaded to the site a multimedia journey by Greg Warner through Afghanistan. I don’t want to give away what these stories are about. You’ll find out on Monday.

But I will tell you the journalism that is flowing onto our site is world class.

I am incredibly proud of the journalists out there who have joined our team and who are unearthing the kinds of stories that we call GroundTruth. We still have a lot of work to do to get ready for you to come to the site live. So I need to get back to it.

But before I do I need to get to the task at hand which is to continue to publish GROUNDTRUTH: GlobalPost’s Field Guide for Correspondents. This guide which is being published on the blog is a statement of purpose, a field guide for correspondents about the values of journalism that we hold to be true. Here are the next two chapters, four and five. Tomorrow, I will post the last two chapters.

GROUNDTRUTH: GLOBALPOST’S FIELD GUIDE FOR CORRESPONDENTS

FOUR:

Be fair and accurate.

Out of careful listening comes fair, truthful reporting. And truth is always the best defense against libel.

Check the facts all the time. Check spelling, particularly the spelling of names and be sure you have the proper title of a source. We are employing the AP style book. GlobalPost is also developing a policy for corrections and clarifications on the site. And any correspondent whose work requires persistent corrections on issues of material fact, will be warned that their relationship with GlobalPost will be terminated if a pattern of inaccurate reporting continues to occur.

Accuracy matters and our reputation as a news organization and your reputation as a correspondent rely on getting it right. There is a great axiom of deadline reporting: When in doubt, leave it out. Live by that. Only write about the things you know, the things you’ve seen with your own eyes and be sure you have clear and accurate attribution on everything else. If you live by these relatively simple and straightforward rules, you will always be on solid footing.

We discourage the use of unnamed sources. We believe it is far better to get a comment on the record. We encourage correspondents to always try their best to get a name attached to a comment. Sometimes it requires asking more than once, but persistence is better than accepting a blind quote and finding out later it is unusable.

We understand that there are circumstances in which anonymity is necessary to protect the life or livelihood of a source, but that is the only occasion in which unnamed sources should be used. GlobalPost retains the right to request a reporter to share with a senior editor any unnamed source of a story. GlobalPost also forbids any reporter from writing on a story in which they have a vested economic interest or a clear political bias. The spirit of full disclosure matters in reporting and we request that you let us know if you believe there is any potential line that might be crossed during the course of your reporting.

We are aware that our correspondents operate in many corners of the world where there are different legal standards for journalism and different ideas about what constitutes fairness. But we hold to a very American tradition of journalism in this regard and one that we believe is a proud tradition.

Our research shows legal precedent is being established that online news organizations will be held to the legal standards of reporting in the country from which they originate. As the United States has perhaps the most fierce protections of freedom of the press of any country in the world, we believe that good, honest, accurate and fair reporting from any place in the world will always put us on solid legal ground. (GlobalPost has a libel insurance policy which offers protections for the organization and those reporting for it. If anyone has questions about the policy, we will make ourselves available.) If you are ever working on a story that you believe is potentially libelous or if any one you are reporting on threatens any legal action, you are obliged to get in touch with me promptly and directly.

FIVE:

Be honest.

Be sure you are accredited as a journalist and work within the guidelines set by the press office in your respective country. Always identify yourself as a reporter when you are working in the field.

Any fabrication of quotes or made-up reporting will not be tolerated and will be considered grounds for GlobalPost to immediately end its relationship with a correspondent. The same prohibitions on fabrication hold true for multimedia. And GlobalPost forbids the manipulation of any photos, audio or video in a manner that distorts reality or misrepresents any facts or quotes.

Plagiarism of any kind will also be grounds for terminating a contract with GlobalPost. Plagiarism includes not only directly copying someone else’s words, but also borrowing quotes, ideas, images and insights without proper attribution.

GlobalPost reporters should not accept gifts or any payment from a source involved in a story, nor should they offer any gifts or payment in return for getting a story.

Any time a correspondent or columnists is provided travel or lodging as part of a reporting trip, this should be discussed in advance with an editor. Typically, we will not permit such trips. But there are exceptions when GlobalPost believes it wise and sometimes necessary to accept free flights on international aid and trade missions or military flights. We may also, for example, allow our global health or auto writers to take an expense-paid trip by an industry group as long as the correspondent has clearly established with his or her host that none of the services-in-kind will influence the outcome of the reporting. If GlobalPost does accept such a trip, we will let the viewers of the site know so they have full transparency and can judge for themselves if any undue influence has crept in to the coverage as a result. We the editors will be working very hard to be sure it does not.

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.

We’re at nine months.

And like any expecting father, I am sleep deprived, nervous, vigilant, thrilled, happy, worried and most of all just waiting for the delivery.

Nine months. That’s how long it’s been since I walked out of my old job at The Boston Globe to join my co-founder and CEO Phil Balboni in our effort to bring life to a new international news organization for the digital age. And now we are less than two weeks away from our January 12 launch of the site.

I was thinking back to the very first days in the spring of 2008 here at our headquarters on the Boston waterfront. We began in those early days by sketching on white boards what the site might look like and we talked about what we hoped to achieve with GlobalPost. The scribbling on the white boards was the crude, first draft of our editorial vision. We began thinking about how best to redefine international news in the digital age by combing the written word, powerful video and riveting photography all on one website. We knew we wanted it to be all about great storytelling by top correspondents who live in the countries about which they write.

And our excellent web developer Jason Oliver and his team listened to these ideas and tried to decipher our sketches and then quietly turned them into “wire frames.” “Wire frames” are to web development what blue prints are to real estate development. The black-and-white wire frames might also be compared to the cloudy images of a newborn from a sonogram. You need an expert to point out exactly where the body parts are and how you can see a small heart beating in there. From the wire frames, we worked with a design firm to build out the vision further and put flesh on the bone. We mulled over every detail from the big ones like which servers to use (we went with the best from Akamai Technologies) to the smaller matters like the selection of fonts. So much of the last nine months has been spent working through this detailed process of site development. It’s been a great learning experience for a newspaper correspondent who’s spent far more time in the field covering international news than in front of the computer screen clicking away on the unbelievable amount of technical details involved in developing a web site. But now we are putting the finishing touches on that process and very excited about sharing the results with you. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on how it all turned out.

During these months of labor, much of my time has also been spent traveling and calling all over the world as we pulled together a truly amazing constellation of talent. We now have 65 correspondents in about 50 countries who are starting to file their stories. After starting in on the editing of written stories and producing multimedia packages, I can say that this GlobalPost team is producing some of the most enlightening and creative international news coverage I have seen anywhere.

It’s too early to be lighting any cigars and you will be the ultimate judge of the work of our correspondents and how our site looks. But for sure this baby is kicking. And the due date is approaching.

At GlobalPost, we know 2009 is pregnant with possibility.

I will use this blog to highlight the work of GlobalPost’s far-flung team of 70 correspondents in some 50 countries around the world.

They are a stellar team of great reporters and skilled storytellers who every day are there on the ground reporting and writing about the places where they live.

They will offer you the kind of news, insight and knowledge you can only get from “being there.”

When GlobalPost.com launches on January 12, these correspondents will be our GroundTruth. And we hope they will become yours as well.

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 they define it on their 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.

GroundTruth is all about being there.

At GlobalPost, there is nothing we hold in greater value.

The best international reporting is achieved by those who live and work in the places about which they report and write. Our team of correspondents will all be practicing GroundTruth. 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 of the local language 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 like China and Iran. 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 you.

This is not a new idea by any means. It’s just good old fashioned reporting. But it is an idea we want to revitalize at a time when too many news organizations are cutting back on or abandoning their mission to cover the world.

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 are the guy 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.

In the early morning yesterday on my first day on the ground, I awoke to a city that was calm and quiet. It was Gandhi’s birthday – a national holiday here in India.

It is a day of contemplation and family time, a chance to step away from the wild kinetic chaos of New Delhi. That relentless pace of day-to-day Delhi, is replaced on this national day of remembrance by a slow, languid rhythm that held through the morning.

I met at the hotel with a steady stream of prospective correspondents for Global News, an unbelievably talented and passionate group of aspiring freelance, foreign correspondents. India is an extremely important country for us to cover and one where we expect to assign at least three correspondents. China is the only other country where we will have this many reporters finding the stories we believe our viewers of the website will need to know to understand these two Asian behemoths who are shifting the tectonics of the global economy.

In the afternoon, one of the reporters who I had met with, Sonyah Fatah, and her husband, Rajiv, offered to drive me around the city in their old, battered but soulful orange Fiat. They were great guides to my first glimpse of the city.

We stopped at the India Gate, a towering testament to British colonial architecture that now stands as the gateway to the modern India. This is the India that Gandhi forged through his independence movement 60 years ago, and you can’t help but wonder what would Gandhi think of India today.

There at the foot of the India Gate, families were gathered on the wide, well-groomed lawn that stretches on acre after of open public space. The families gathered on blankets and ate grilled corn on the cob and “pan pouri,” delicious small puffed pastries seasoned with tamarind and coriander and mint. The crazy flow of traffic and car horns and bicycles and motorized rickshaws were the backdrop of sound, as always in this city. But in the forefront was the more pleasant and gleeful sound of a flute player. Children played with simple red balls and kites. Gandhi’s ideal of “simplicity” was right here among these families observing his birthday. His dream of India as a strong, independent country was right here flickering with life like the eternal flame that burns at the base of the India Gate. And the families gathered here were the living evidence of Gandhi’s tremendous vision and the country’s stunning success as a modern economic, political and military force in the world.

Gandhi’s birthday seemed the perfect day on which the US Senate would vote to approve an historic — and crucial — deal for India to be able to access the US civil nuclear fuel and technology. It will provide India with a more affordable form of energy which it will need to continue its stunning pace of growth. The more than three years of diplomacy that went into forging the deal was a definitive moment for India’s Prime Minister Singh. He had staked his political career on achieving the deal, and yesterday succeeded.

But on this day when India remembers Gandhi, Rajiv shared some insights with me about modern India and how Gandhi might feel about where it is today. A filmmaker and journalist, Rajiv has an eye for his country. And he said there were certainly aspects of modern India that Gandhi would question and almost certainly disapprove of, including a crass “culture of consumerism” and “an abandoning of the simplicity of village life” for a country that has flooded its urban centers with migrant workers who live in abject poverty. The caste system remains in place in many aspect of life in India, and ethnic and religious conflict is not a thing of the past but very much a part of the present as a spate of recent bombings proves. India remains plagued by a failing education system, a crumbling infrastructure and a vast and widening gulf between the rich and poor.

Today, there is so much Gandhi would be proud of, but for sure there are many challenges that Gandhi would push India to face.

I gave a speech at the Foreign Correspondents

I gave a speech last week (Sept. 17) to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong, hosted by one of our new freelance regional editors and correspondents, Matt Driskill.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

To watch the video, click here or or click on the picture above.

HONG KONG – In the bleak morning light of my first full day here, the stock markets in Hong Kong and on mainland China began reeling the moment they opened. News of the Monday meltdown on Wall Street hit hard and hit fast.

Monday had been a banking holiday here, a day to worship ancestors. So while the crisis ensued in New York, the people of Hong Kong and China were taking a long weekend and celebrating the mid-harvest festival by lighting candles to remember the spirit of their loved ones who’ve passed on.

The lights could be seen flickering in lanterns in some homes the night before. But in the glaring light of this Tuesday morning, the future of Asia’s economy — the stunning collapse of two iconic firms on Wall Street — was in sharp focus. And it was the topic of just about every conversation in Hong Kong.

I am here to meet with our Asia editor Matt Driskill and to begin a recruitment drive of a dozen correspondents across Asia for Global News Enterprises, our new, web-based international news organization that is set to launch in January of next year.

Of course, it dawned on me that these are dark days for the global economy and that that may perhaps not bode well for our little start-up. We are a destination site, which means we will be a free site relying on on-line advertising as one of our key revenue streams.

Our concerns represent a drop in the ocean compared to the tidal wave of economic crisis sweeping the world, leaving thousands of people without jobs and tens of thousands more with uncertain futures. Jittery investors were left worried that if a firm as iconic as Lehman Brothers can fall, than anyone can. In the big picture, our concerns were miniscule.

But, like all entrepreneurs, I am tightly focused on what all this might mean for us. We are by global standards a small company with a business plan that calls for $10 million in investment. That will allow us to hire the team we need in Boston and 70 correspondents in 50 countries.

Approximately $8.5 million of that money is already raised, and we have a short list of other investors who are extremely interested in what we are doing. The short answer to the question of whether we should be worried, my co-founder and our CEO Phil Balboni, assured me is this: “We’ll be fine.”

“Of course, I’ve thought about it and we should think about it. But the truth is I am not worried. We are very fortunate to have solid individual investors who can withstand a downturn in the market,” added Balboni, calling me from our offices on the Boston waterfront.

And from an editorial standpoint, this turmoil in the world markets only seemed to underscore the urgency of our mission at Global News. With events like these, Americans need a new kind of web-based international news organization like ours that is seeking to build a stellar team of correspondents focused on global news and how the stories they cover are interconnected.

This is exactly the kind of crisis upon which we hope to shed light through our correspondents hard work as reporters and storytellers going out in the world to unravel the complex stories that affect us all. We will have stories that go deeper than the alternately dry and shrill and always pat standups of business reporters. They cover the economy like its a sports match with clear winners and losers when it is infinitely more complex and more layered.

Nothing proved the inter-connectedness of our global economy — the delicate economic web that holds us all together — than the news rocking the world markets.

As the markets opened, Matt Driskill and I headed for the office of the former Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China. We had scheduled a meeting with the former Chief Executive, Tung Chee Hwa, and as it turned out it was an interesting morning to hear his views on the economy and the future of China – US relations.

Bank of China in Hong Kong (Wikipedia Photo)

We climbed the stairs of the grand Colonial style building where he has his offices. Perched on a hill, its wide terrace once looked out at the harbor. But now the view is obstructed by the towering Bank of China and other shiny, new steel skyscrapers sprouting across Hong Kong.

At age 71, Mr. Tung Chee Hwa, or “C.H.,” as he is known by friends, has the grand bearing of a shipping tycoon which is exactly what he was before he got involved in politics and became the first Chief Executive of Hong Kong and was caught in the frothy cross-current of the 1997 handover from British rule to Chinese rule.

The SAR is an arrangement that was put in place to give Hong Kong limited autonomy and some independent governance from the central government in China. The balancing act between the central government and the unique and entrepreneurial spirit of Hong Kong has been more and more difficult to maintain in the decade since the Chinese took over.

Over a cup of Chinese tea, we jumped into the conversation by asking Mr. Tung about the economic turmoil on Wall Street and what it would mean for China.

“Export is very important for China. And so the bad news in America will definitely have an impact on China. The two economies are interconnected,” he said.

But he then carefully spelled out that they are less connected then they used to be, that China has carefully developed a domestic economy for its goods as well which is a balance of trade that is a big part of what makes it such a superpower.

“In the old days, they used to say when America sneezes, the world catches a cold… If you sneeze once now, well, it will be alright in the world economy … But you yourself America, don’t go catching a cold,” he said.

Very quickly, Mr. Tung offered a list of complex problems the US, China and the world are facing beyond the perils of the financial markets. He listed climate change, limited water resources, the spread of disease, the rising inequality in income across the world, the food crisis and energy demands.

“All of the issues we face are connected. The issues are really complex. We don’t have solutions immediately. We need to work together. We are in this thing together, the US and China. We need to work together to find the solutions,” he said.

He now heads up a new China-United States Foundation that seeks to promote better understanding between the two countries. He offered a long and candid assessment of China – U.S. relations, but explained that he prefers to keep a low profile and asked that most of it be on background. We agreed. And he promised to provide an in-depth interview with us down the road and Matt plans on following up on that.

After walking down the hill from the mansion, we went back to the hotel. There we met Anson Chan Fang On Sang. She is a woman whose elegance and sophistication and passion and love for order and the rule of law seems to embody the personality of Hong Kong.

She was eight years old when her parents moved from Shanghai in 1948 to Hong Kong. She was a member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong and before that was the head of Hong Kong’s civil service. She is out of politics these days, but still an active agent of reform and constantly challenging the status quo in the central government on mainland China and trying to help Hong Kong keep its edge, and some sense of its independence.

She too sees the chaos of Wall Street as directly connected to the economic health of China. But she saw something else that is not as openly discussed among the pundits analyzing the impact of the fallout in the stock market from the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

“There is a political impact to this in China as well,” she said.

She said the crisis occurs at a time when there are literally hundreds of small civil protests across China which go largely uncovered by the media. She says small villages are fed up with the collusion between government and big business.

She also cited the protests by outraged parents who lost their children in the earthquake. They have spoken out passionately about the corruption that led to the collapse of shoddily built schools and killed their children during the hurricane. She says if an economic downturn coincides with this unrest, that there could be an unpredictable result.

“This is inherently very destabilizing,” she said.

“These are very uncertain times,” she added.