GlobalPost field trip: the future of journalism

Last Wednesday, my Reinventing the News class accompanied Professor Kennedy to the headquarters of GlobalPost, “one of the most widely recognized leaders in charting a new path for the future of journalism,” according to the mission statement of their website. Despite GlobalPost being only about a year old, they already have 70 correspondents in 50 different countries, according to Executive Editor Charles Sennott.

GloablPost's cozy headquarters contrast the sleek, modern web site

Located just a few blocks from Boston’s North End, GlobalPost’s offices are composed of slanted roofs, chandeliers, wood and exposed bricks. Their website, however, is sleek, no-frills and extremely well organized. Ads are minimal. The navigation bar at the top of the site allows visitors to browse stories by region and country, to skip straight to the opinion or multimedia, to read GlobalPost’s mission statement, or to become better acquainted with their 70 correspondents.

The site creates the impression of a journalistic establishment that understands what its readers want, and delving further into GlobalPost’s content confirms that they know what they’re doing. Compared to the New York Times, whose website apparently is under the impression that it’s a newspaper, reading GlobalPost is a revelatory experience. Even with the occasional typos, double-posts and other minor complaints, GlobalPost’s site makes the Times’s headache-inducing layout look muddled, unprofessional and nigh unreadable.

GlobalPost’s content is often exemplary as well. Take the multi-part multimedia report “Life, Death and the Taliban,” in which GlobalPost’s correspondents, photographers and editors “unpack the complex history of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The videos and slideshows are informative and visually interesting, while stories, like Jean MacKenzie’s award winning “Funding the Afghan Taliban,” are concise, packed with information and often breaking.

A barebones interactive timeline attempts to tie the stories together and give an overview of the history, although it could be more intuitive. Videos, however, are integrated into the project skillfully; hover over a video and a preview begins to play immediately, and clicking on the video doesn’t cause the browser to navigate away from the page, making it easy to jump between them and not get lost. If only the stories did the same, perhaps loading at the bottom of the page rather than taking readers to a new window or tab.

"Life, death and the Taliban" ties multimedia elements together to paint a picture of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Sennott told the students in attendance that GlobalPost’s staff work incredibly hard to integrate photography, video, audio, and writing on the web, and that no establishment has really nailed down the formula yet. Their dedication shows, however.

GlobalPost is also home to the incredible Study Abroad program, which has allowed about 70 American college students, nicknamed “The Student Correspondent Corps” by Sennott in an October article announcing the launch of the program, to act as junior foreign correspondents.

“At a time when so many traditional print and television news organizations offer students few opportunities to get started in the craft of journalism, GlobalPost is proud to create what we hope will be a new path for student journalists to become foreign correspondents in the digital age,” Sennott wrote.

To “Study Abroad” seems like a truly awesome experience. I would love to send home first-hand reports of the arcade scene in Japan, game developers in the UK or game censorship in less tolerant parts of the world, with videos and photography to boot. The Study Abroad page allows students to report on the cultures of exotic places, leaving the “big stories” and “hard news” to GlobalPost’s regular seasoned correspondents, and I think some stories about gaming in foreign cultures would be perfect.

Sennott told our class that “great journalism is about being on the ground,” hence GlobalPost’s 70 correspondents, and that he “doesn’t believe in backpack journalism,” stressing the importance of working with other journalists and specialists rather than trying to fly solo. I think he may be onto something, and I hope that GlobalPost represents one aspect, at least, of the future of journalism.

Gamepolitics.com and the politics of games

Gamepolitics.com is the closest thing to a political blog that I will ever regularly read. There is a surprising amount of legislation all over the world, and especially in the US, that affects the game industry and, more importantly, gamers themselves.

where politics and video games collide

Take Australia, for example. In Australia, there is no video game rating higher than MA15+. Many games that earn a Mature rating in the US, the equivalent of an R movie, are denied classification in Australia, and are therefore banned from being sold by retailers. South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has been preventing a new rating from being established for years. Using the topic tracking drop-down menu near the top of Gamepolitics, I can read all posts pertaining to Australia, Michael Atkinson or games ratings in general.

Another neat tool is the Legislation Tracker, which displays a map of the US and Canada and highlights which states and provinces currently have video game legislation, either in the works, established or already defeated. This is a quick way to check if you should be writing any letters or even if there’s an upcoming vote in your state that might affect your gaming freedoms.

When the blog was acquired in 2006 by the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA), a non-profit that represents entertainment consumers, the content stayed the same, and the man behind it- journalist Dennis McCauley- is a super nice guy (I interviewed him in 2008 about the Little Big Planet recall for my Journalism 2 final). In a world where video games are more often than not given the short end of the stick by society at large, Gamepolitics often helps bring things into perspective.