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.

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.