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.

REFLECTIONS ON A BIG WEEK FOR GLOBAL NEWS AND A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF 9-11 IN NEW YORK.

I wanted to take some time before the trip to Hong Kong to reflect on what was a pivotal week in the formation of Global News Enterprises. The team is truly starting to come together now.

We brought on board two key editors. After a job search that attracted a flood of great candidates for the senior editing positions, we are thrilled to announce that we have hired Barbara Martinez and Thomas Mucha to serve as Managing Editors.

Barbara comes to us from the Politico where she was a Deputy Managing Editor. For us, she will serve as Managing Editor – Web. She was a strong asset at Politico and one of the driving forces that helped make the website for political junkies the excellent news source that it is today. We look forward to having her strong skill set and her passion for web-based news organizations and breaking new ground in new media to our team. She honed her skills as executive editor of the Harvard Crimson and worked for three years as a reporter at The Washington Post.

Thomas will be Managing Editor – Correspondents. He comes to us after working at Crain’s in Chicago where he headed up a multimedia team that focused on covering globalization. Thomas is a 17-year veteran of journalism and brings a unique blend of television and print experience to the table. He worked for 8 years at CNN mostly on the business desk and has worked for the last 7 years in print, mostly at Crain’s. He also has a master’s degree in international relations and economics from the University of Chicago where he studied the emerging markets of China and India. He has a great eye for a story and a keen interest in unraveling the complex themes of globalization.

We are also thrilled to announce that we have hired Andrew Meldrum as a Senior Editor and Regional Editor for Africa. For those who follow news in Africa, Andrew is well known for his courage and insight through more than 25 years as a reporter on the continent. He has worked in Africa for both the Economist and the Guardian and other publications. Most of his work has been in Zimbabwe where he has courageously uncovered and challenged the injustices of the Mugabe dictatorship. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University last year.

We have had some other stellar hires on the editorial team, including Amy Jeffries who worked for many years in public radio and recently graduated from University of California at Berkeley in its News21 program, which is seeking to train a new generation for the skills they’ll need to break new ground in multimedia journalism. She will be our Web master. And Sarah Liebowitz will be joining us as a Deputy Editor. She worked most recently as a political reporter for the Concord Monitor. Before that, she worked with me in London as a bureau manager and then as a correspondent who played a crucial role in our coverage of the London bombings in July of 2005.

For me, this big week ended with a a trip on Thursday, September 11th and Friday, September 12th to New York for the Service Nation forum which brought together presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. On the seventh anniversary of 9-11, the two senators vying for the White House put aside the petty political bickering that too often marks our national politics and joined together to offer their ideas on how the country might raise a call for public service among young people.

Both men noted that seven years ago, President George W. Bush missed an opportunity to call the country to service in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11. If you remember, in the days immediately following 9-11 when the country and the world were still in shock, Bush delivered a speech where he literally encouraged Americans to “go shopping” and to go back to doing what they were doing.

Both candidates criticized Bush for that response and said their presidency would be very different. They said they would face the tremendous challenges that lie ahead — from terrorism to climate change and from the after effects of Katrina in New Orleans and the slow slide of standards in too many public schools — by calling on the skill and energy of young people in this country. And they would ask them to serve their country. Not only in the military.

But both candidates urged them to join Teach for America or City Year or the foreign service to help the country in a time of tremendous challenges. The forum was a tremendous success and was organized by a dear friend of mine, Alan Khazei, the co-founder of City Year and now of a new organization called “Be The Change.”

You might ask what a conference on national service has to do with our venture at Global News Enterprises. GNE is not a public service institution, it’s a for-profit media company. But still it is our great hope that our correspondents work in the field of international journalism will be of service to the country.

At Global News Enterprises, we want to give young reporters a chance to take up the calling to be foreign correspondents, to go out in the world and cover it. We want them to pursue a passion for international reporting and help bring stories to light that are currently going uncovered in so many corners of the world. We think our mission fits in with the goals of Service Nation and the call to action that the forum highlighted.

I was in New York for two days for the forum, and it was great to be back. I worked as a reporter in New York City for many years for the New York Daily News before I landed at The Boston Globe. And on this trip on this somber and sacred anniversary, I went to Ground Zero and felt the powerful emotions that are still there for all Americans when they think about what happened that day.

For me, September 11th opened a long 7-year journey of reporting in Afganistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and then in Madrid for the train bombings and in London for the underground bombings. I reflected back on that reporting journey and I thought about how many of my colleagues who worked — or are still working — in Afghanistan and Iraq are now struggling to find work as foreign correspondents.

So many news organizations have cut back on or in many cases abandoned their mission to cover the world. And it makes me realize that Global News Enterprises has an incredible opportunity to fill a void in international news coverage for Americans that is glaring. The challenges before us in creating a new web-based international news organization are extraordinary, but we are pulled along by the feeling that what we are trying to do is important.

And the team we are building is all passionately dedicated to making it a success. It won’t be easy, but I feel a hell of a lot better trying than I did at a newspaper where every day you could feel the energy draining from the mission. It’s a big decision to have left my life in newspapers and to have taken on this new startup, but it is also exciting as hell. I think we have a real chance to radically redefine international reporting in the digital age. There is a revolution going on and I guess I just want to be out there — and want to build a team that wants to be out there — whipping molotov cocktails and storming ramparts for the cause. (Not literally, of course.)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

THE LAST DAY OF A GREAT RIDE IN NEWSPAPERS …

I guess the first post on this blog should be about the last day of what I call one of the “last great rides in newspapers.”

On my last day in the newsroom of The Boston Globe, the huge rolls of newsprint pounded off the trucks onto the loading docks down in the press room as they always do at the end of the week before the big Sunday run. The thud shakes the newsroom. I always loved that sound. It represented the heft of a big city newspaper. The weight of the organization and the importance of what it does.

But on that last day in March of 2008, that thud sounded more like distant thunder. It sounded ominous. And there are indeed dark clouds on the horizon for the newspaper industry, and an ominous feeling is setting in in far too many newsroom. It is a pervasive feeling from the highest realms of management to the cubicles of reporters in the newsroom that the current economic model simply cannot sustain the level of excellence in journalism that it always has. I hope that is not the case, but the feeling in newsrooms like the Globe is palpable. It is felt most intensely at going away parties for veterans. And at the Globe there had been far too many of them in recent years. They usually are a congregation in the middle of the newsroom of editors and reporters huddled around a sheet cake and coffee where stories are told — funny, touching, heartfelt stories — about the work of a great reporter. Lots of talk of the good old days. They felt like Irish wakes without the drinking. The metro editor Brian McGrory said the rectangular sheetcakes had in his mind come to resemble “tiny coffins.” I didn’t want to have one of these maudlin gatherings and I , like just about everyone at the Globe, had grown to hate sheetcake. So instead we gathered at Doyle’s, a great old pub in Jamaica Plain, and raised pints of Guinness and I listened to my editors and colleagues rip me apart with great humor. Some of them were true.

When I joined the Globe in early 1994, the paper was flush with cash. It was truly in the heyday of newspapers which had soared in revenue and circulation throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. They had come of age out of big cities like Boston with a brash confidence. The newsrooms had swagger, and they had solid revenue to back it up. I grew up in Massachusetts and the Globe was a part of my daily life. In many ways, my family was the core of its readership. Every morning, the Globe was on the breakfast table and there was push and pull over the sports page. We were a typical Boston Irish family that through one generation after the next had drifted out to the suburbs. And in so doing we mirrored the demographic sprawl of the paper and we embodied the solid readership that the paper sought for its advertisers.

I came to the Boston Globe from the New York Daily News and for me it was truly a homecoming. It was the paper I had always wanted to work for. And a big part of the draw to the Globe — beyond the obvious hometown pull — was that it was a news organization that had foreign bureaus and where I could live out a long-held dream to become a foreign correspondent. I got the chance in 1997 when the Globe named me the Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem. My wife, Julie, and I went to Jerusalem together with our newborn son, Will. he was only three months old when we left in the summer of 1997 to move into an old stone home in Jerusalem. The title “Bureau Chief” looks good on a business card, but it’s a preposterously grand title considering I was the only Globe correspondent in the Middle East. My wife, Julie, would tease me about this. She’d say, “Whoa! You’re the bureau chief … and (pause for ironic effect) you’re the entire bureau!” Or she would call me in the office and quip, “Is this the bureau chief? Sorry, am I interrupting you in the middle of a meeting with all of your personalities?”

Behind the humor was , of course, truth. The Globe was a small paper to have seven foreign bureaus. But I loved that it aspired to be a paper that covered the world for its readers. And in doing so, it punched above its weight class. We had a tradition of great foreign correspondents form Curtis Wilke and David Greenway to Ethan Bronner and David Filipov. Often, our correspondents were known as the best reporters and most talented writers in their patch. I was very proud to be part of that tradition.

I was the Globe’s Middle East “bureau chief” for four years and covered the Israeli-Palestinian peace process through the height of its greatest hopes and good intentions. And I was there when it all came crashing down and the two sides descended back into violence. I covered the intifada on the frontlines from the moment it began. And through it all our family was growing. We had two children born in the Holy Land. Riley was born in Jerusalem in 1999. And Gabriel was born in Bethlehem in 2000. When Palestinian suicide bombers would strikes Israeli buses or the Israeli tanks would pound a Palestinian village, we would hear the carnage in our garden. The bombings in particular would rattle the windows they were so close. When this happened, birds that would congregate in a lemon tree in our yard would flutter up out of the three and fly away. And our oldest son, Will, would ask, “What’s that Dad?” We would always tell him it was thunder. One day after a bombing and the usual question and the answer which was a lie, he asked, “Dad, if that’s thunder how come it never rains?”

That moment underscored a growing and undeniable feeling that Julie and I shared that having a family in Jerusalem was becoming untenable for us. We felt great sadness and great guilt at the idea of leaving a city we loved and friends on both sides of the conflict behind as we prepared to leave. We arrived in London in early September of 2001. Our moving truck dropped our boxes on September 11, 2001. I was unpacking my office when the news came on the radio that changed the world forever.

I spent most of the next five years covering the dramatically unfolding events of September 11 and its aftermath through the start of the US air strikes in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the Qala-i-Jangi unprising in Mazar-e-Sharif which was probably one of the most wild battles of the first war of the 21st century. That was the place where hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda being held in prison, rose up and seized the prison and fought against US and British special forces for several days. It was the battle where the American Taliban John Walker Lindt emerged from a basement of the fortress to tell a tale of how a California kid ended up taking part in a “jihad” against America.

After Afghanistan, I covered the trans-Atlantic divide that led up to the war in Iraq and then I covered the war itself. I was in the north waiting for the war to begin and covered it from the north down as Baghdad fell and the front lines pushed from Kirkuk and the Mosul and Tikrit and finally the entire regime of Saddam Hussein. For the next several years, I would be in and out of Iraq and covering a spate of bombings in Madrid and London and then looking back and realizing that I had become a war correspondent. I never thought of myself that way, but indeed that was we were covering.

By 2005, I was fairly burned out and was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, which is an extraordinary opportunity to have one year to explore literature and history and art and music and to throw open all the doors of learning that Harvard has to offer. It was a great year.

But in the spring of 2006 I returned to the Globe and could feel that it was a changed place. It was battered by the economic realities of running a big city newspaper and was struggling to find its way. Within a year, the Globe made the decision to cut its entire foreign staff After 22 years in the daily newspaper business and 14 years at the Globe, I have left traditional media and set out on a new venture.

And so now, as you know if you have been reading this blog, we are starting the first fully web-based international news agency. The company is called Global News Enterprises and we will announce the domain name of the website closer to the launch which is set for February 2009.