At the stroke of midnight, we officially launch.

Welcome to GlobalPost. And welcome to GroundTruth.

This blog is a place where you can come every day to be taken behind the scenes of GlobalPost and hear about what our correspondents are working on and how they managed to unearth great stories.
Here I will be highlighting reporting from the field by our 65 correspondents who live in the countries about which they write. Every day they will be out there finding and reporting the kind of stories that are close to the ground and can enlighten you about the corner of the world they cover.

We call that “GroundTruth.”

Starting tomorrow, I will use the blog to provide you with a guide on how to navigate the site. I want to take you through how it works. There are “Dispatches,” which are our correspondent feeds from the field, and “Latitudes,” which are areas of coverage that cut across national boundaries and connect us all. The “Latitudes” are themes such as global health, climate change, diplomacy, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), cars and their relationship to the world, sports, and more. Each of them has a veteran correspondent assigned to them who you can follow week in and week out.

I also want to draw your eyes to the “Timelines,” which are on most of the country pages. Here we have tried to offer you the historical and current context that is required to understand the news. These ”Timelines” are interactive tools for you to have facts and the sweep of history at the click of a button. We’re very proud of these Timelines and we hope you will explore the world and its history through them. Twenty-five of them are up on the site now and more will be rolled out over the next few months.

I also hope you will take some time to view the “Go there” multimedia player that is located on our homepage. The lead video on the home page for our first day is titled “Afghanistan: An Accordion Journey” by Gregory Warner. Greg, a writer and freelance reporter for NPR whose work has appeared on This American Life and Radio Lab, combined his audio recordings for public radio with video he shot on his own to produce a GlobalPost multimedia essay that is mesmerizing and funny and ultimately a great story about a journey through Afghanistan. It’s exactly the kind of storytelling that we want to do here at GlobalPost.

This video is part of our series “For Which It Stands.” And there is a guide to the “For Which It Stands” series available for you to navigate what is a large body of work focused around a single question: “What does the idea of America mean to the world?” The series begins at launch and will culiminate with the inauguration of President Obama and continue through the first 100 days of his presidency.

In the coming days, I will go deeper into the series and the great writing, photography and videography that has gone into it.

For months, I’ve been blogging about the process of our launch from my journey around the world this fall recruiting correspondents to the count down in the last few days as our web development team and editorial staff worked almost around the clock to be ready for this launch. And we are ready.

We are officially launched as of this moment, but our ace web developer Jason Oliver of Mochila actually pushed the button to transfer over our beta site to go live on Saturday night. It was precisely 11:11 PM EST on January 10. 2009 when he began the propagation of the GlobalPost.com domain name, or URL, to the web.

As a heavy snow fell silently over Boston, the physical act of launching the site was only represented by the clattering of a keyboard and Jason’s announcement, “Okay, I just hit the button. We’re live! Congratulations.”