The outstanding work by our 65 correspondents in 45 countries has helped us surpass our original goals for traffic in the first sixty days and get off to a great start in making GlobalPost a success. We want to hear from you about how we’re doing. What stories you like, what stories we should be doing.

At our Boston headquarters, we all took a minute to step back and appreciate the GroundTruth that our correspondents have been bringing to you every day. There’s been so much great reporting, writing, photography, videography and good old-fashioned storytelling. We wanted to come up with some examples of the best of GlobalPost. And we found the list was too long. Every editor here kept coming up with more and more dispatches that they loved, more and more “ground truth,” as we’ve come to call it. Some of the top dispatches were memorable for their great writing, others for their keen insight and others for telling a riveting tale. Some provided perspective on hard news and others veered off the path of hard news and took us to a place we have never been before.

We found out it’s hard to define what makes for a perfect GlobalPost story. We’re still a work in progress and that definition is emerging. So rather than providing a long list of stories, we thought it might be productive to provide a shorter list of genres of stories we like and some examples that fit well within them. So here they are:

Enterprise reporting: Shahan Mufti’s story from Pakistan on the the surging black market in stolen US military laptops and how they compromise the US military was a great exclusive. Not surprisingly, it has proven to be one of the most trafficked stories we have had on the site to date. Another great example of this is on the site today. Patrick Winn’s story form Thailand on “The war you never heard of” is the kind of revealing journalism that shows we are all about ground truth.

Pulling back the curtain: Matt Rees’ dispatch from Jerusalem in which he went inside the bubble on Hillary Clinton’s first diplomatic mission and shared an outsider’s view of the isolation of State Department reporters who fly in to complex stories and are chauffeured around in convoys and herded into press conference where very little is said. It was done with great humor and insight.

Life on the ground: Two great examples here. Seth Kugel’s elegantly written take on the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Brazil and what it’s like to have to deal with it. And Jean MacKenzie’s eye-opening story about the simple joys of having the lights come on in war-torn Afghanistan.

Multimedia: Mark Scheffler’s steady eye on the Slum Tours of Mumbai was a complex insight into the gaping void between the street kids of Mumbai who live in abject poverty and the tourists who pay to see their plight.

Using a beat to connect the world: Sports columnist Mark Starr has achieved this time and again. This week he provided a perfect example by combining the story on the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team with Sweden’s bizarre security decision to deny spectators at a tennis match that featured an Israeli. Our Wheels correspondent Royal Ford has also done a great job on his beat. Check out his two-part series on why the world has diesel and America doesn’t.

Narrative inside the news: Kathleen McLaughlin’s well-reported and well-written story about China’s migrant workers. It took readers to one village to see what it looks and feels like to be forced to return home. It brought to life the human toll of the global economic crisis. And Peter Gelling’s dispatch on the perils of the sinking ferries of Indonesia was another great example of this. He took you there to experience what they feel like on a day when one ferry sank causing a huge loss of life.

Storytelling: Greg Warner’s audio slideshow on the life of one coltan miner in the Congo. Warner used rich ambient sound and photographs to take viewers on a journey down into the mines to follow one man from the darkness of the shafts to his home village. Along the way, Warner revealed a country devastated by war and disease and poverty and hardship. And yet, still, in the end it was also about one man and his resiliency.

That’s our list. Now we want to hear from you.

I’m here to continue the journey through Asia to meet with government officials to establish bureaus for Global News Enterprises and to interview and hire our team of correspondents.

A Starbucks in Beijing (by Austin Knight, on Flickr) CC

I woke up early today and rushed to a meeting at, where else, but Starbucks. The whole way over in the taxi I was clicking away on a Blackberry that was angrily demanding responses for a packed day of meetings that needed to be coordinated. I hardly had time to look up at the marvel of a city where I had yearned to come for years.

It’s my first trip to China and my first day in this wonderful, chaotic city made up of ancient palaces and modern high-rise complexes. And I asked myself what the hell I was doing in a Starbucks on the corner of a strip mall.

But I got in line like everyone else to order a café latte and a blueberry muffin. It felt way too much like home. In fact, it felt like a bad dream.

But when I placed my order it was quickly clear I was in China. They had no milk. Only soy milk

Why?

Another Starbucks in Beijing (by Laurel Fan, on Flickr) CC

Well, the woman serving didn’t have an answer and looked flustered when I asked. But it was clear later in the day when Starbucks put out a press release that it was pulling all milk from its stores after a wave of contamination of dairy products, including infant formula.

China’s latest tainted food crisis has hit dairy products and this time killed four infants in the last few days. You don’t really sip or eat anything here with any degree of confidence. You ponder poisons and pesticides with every bite and wonder if maybe the American culture of corporate accountability isn’t such a bad thing after all.

And then you realize maybe that’s why Starbucks is packed and why there are more than 50 of the coffee houses in Beijing alone.

I am a better person with coffee in me. Lots of it. And I was sufficiently fueled when I finally got talking with my first appointment, David Wolf, founder and CEO of Wolf Group Asia. He’s an American business consultant who I was told would provide a great overview of China’s economic situation and business climate.

But David offers more than that. With a lot of knowledge and humor, he offers a kind of primer on the soul of the place, and he gently forces you to reconsider a lot of American preconceptions and misconceptions about China.

His quick summary of China was this: “Everything is possible, and nothing is easy.”

“And that,” he said, “is the great lure of the place.”

David has a well-trafficked blog and when I told him about my blogging problems he gave a knowing smile. He said there were “work-arounds” for the large community of bloggers in China, and meanwhile I had found one such avenue for writing. So we were back in business. “Everything is possible, and nothing is easy.”

I had a series of meetings and meals with government officials from the State Council Information Office and the Foreign Ministry, all part of an elaborate courtship ritual for a new news organization to succeed in having a bureau set up in China. In the meetings, the officials were warm and open and a bit scolding about what they felt was a bias in the American media toward China.

They urged me to get our reporters to steer clear of the politics and “the big potatoes,” as one of my hosts kept calling the leading politicians. Tell the story of every day people and how they are faring, they suggested.

I took the information in and vowed that we would do our best to hire correspondents who would be fair to China and try to unravel the complexity of the people and their stories. They gave me the instructions for a small mountain of paperwork and informed me that if our news organization is accepted for accreditation that we would be the first fully web-based news organization to register in China.

“Everything is possible, and nothing is easy.”

Tomorrow we begin a full day of interviewing prospective correspondents and building the team that will cover China for us.

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.