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.”

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.

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.