Farewell, GlobalPost

I began this blog asking what GlobalPost had to offer that other mainstream outlets didn’t. In an early post, I questioned why they didn’t have any original reporting from Israel during the early stages of the Egyptian revolution.  In another, I applauded their humanizing of a UNESCO report about war’s effect on children’s education.

While I tracked them, they also made a major shift towards multimedia, enriching their homepage with images and videos.  I gave their multimedia, expressing my surprise at seeing a Libyan rebel posturing on camera, while criticizing the mediocrity of their photo galleries.  While I’ve gotten used to the new layout, I still find it sometimes has trouble loading.

However, these are details.  GlobalPost.com, at its core, is a venture.  In one sense, it’s an attempt to create a viable internet news site while maintaining traditional media values.  In another, it aims to place the United States in the larger context of the world.  It’s imperfections, which I’ve noted over the course of the semester, are the price for innovation.  And, it’s for that reason, that I bid a fond farewell to the site, and wish it well on its journey.

GlobalPost Blog review

GlobalPost always seems to struggle finding its balance between newspaper and internet culture.  The site wants to open up without losing their credibility as a serious news source.  This becomes clear in their blogs, which take some advantage of the medium to report short news items that wouldn’t justify an entire article, but quite simply aren’t that much fun.

Starting with the good, I like that all the blogs are reported, rather than opinion-based.  Most begin with a nut graf clearly stating what the article is about, and they’re fastidious about sourcing and including links (a note, I would suggest they start setting links to pop up in a new browser, rather than changing the current page).  All the blog subjects are interesting and serious, ranging from BRIC YARD (BRIC is shorthand for Brazil, Russia, India, China, the world’s four largest emerging markets) to a blog on Africa called Africa Emerges and Macro, which gives a “big picture view of an ever-changing global economy.”

But, while they’re well-reported, they read like newspaper articles and lack the personality that makes blogs enjoyable.  There are some attempts to loosen up, like this post about Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposing to rename BRIC to “BRYUKI” as it expands to include South Africa.  BRYUKI, apparently, means pants in Russian.  It’s the sort of cheeky news item that blogs thrive on, but the formal tone it’s written in doesn’t suit the subject.

GlobalPost is in a tough spot as it strives to develop credibility while remaining entertaining.  While I think it’s a smart move to keep the blogs well-reported and sourced, a little more personality would help them stand out from the rest of the site.

GlobalPost’s image problem

First, I’ll say that I generally find the photography that goes along with GlobalPost‘s articles to be high-caliber.  Next, I’ll say that their photo galleries are not.  The two major issues that came up in the sampling I took were that they were thematically half-baked and the individual images were lifeless.  The image quality was fine, but, of the three that I used for my sample, two of them seemed like they could have refined their story better, and all of them included pictures where my first reaction was “is anything happening in this picture?”

The first I’ll discuss is on Major League Baseball’s training and scouting facilities in the Dominican Republic. The main problem is that too many of the pictures are mundane.  While mundanity can be an interesting subject, none of them give the impression of a commentary on, for instance, the repetitiveness of the sport of baseball.  One image, for instance, shows a man a heavy set man in a Washington Nationals cap (presumably a scout or trainer, though the caption doesn’t say) checking his Blackberry.  Two pictures are of crowds watching the game, one from the front, one from behind.  Both could be compelling, but the gallery probably only needed one, and because they lack a compelling focus they come off as portraits.  The next image, after the crowd shot from behind, is of four players standing around, presumably listening to someone out of the shot, the camera focused on a Dominican Republic flag on the closest player’s tee shirt.

The next gallery, centering on anti-Qhaddafi graffiti in Benghazi was better (and, at 12 photos rather than 19, shorter), but still felt inert to me.  I have to admit, I find most graffiti more messy than compelling, and I’m not sure what the gallery would have to do to make the series of walls come to life for me.  It’s perfectly reasonable that there are few pictures in the photos, and yet without them, many of the pictures did little for me, no matter how vociferously they condemned Qhaddafi.

The one I liked best was on the presidential elections in Haiti, won by Michel Martelly. The  premise was best-suited towards a photo gallery, and it told a coherent story.  The opening image shows Martelly blowing a kiss to a crowd of supporters, others show celebrations and protests.  My only criticism is that it didn’t need three images of Wyclef Jean, who tried to enter the race but was declared ineligible, reportedly because of residency requirements.

All the issues in the galleries are fixable, but right now it seems like the site needs to raise their standards a bit.

Al-Jazeera English is coming to Cambridge. How does GlobalPost stack up?

This week, Boston.com reported that Cambridge Community Television will begin airing a nightly one-hour newscast from Al-Jazeera English (AJE).  Today, the Globe lauded the move in an editorial, arguing that more cable carriers should follow suit.  They said that the station has proven themselves by hiring legitimate American and British reporters and with their coverage of the recent Middle Eastern unrest, and that more people should have access to the channel (even while admitting it has a “point of view.”) In light of this, I felt it time to compare GlobalPost with its international news competitor.

What jumps out most is that AJE is dedicated completely to serious news.  I wrote earlier that GlobalPost has embraced the tongue-in-cheek tone of the internet, and it also has a willingness to mix serious news with, say, a map detailing the average penis size in different countries.  There’s a sports section on AJE, but there isn’t a “culture and lifestyle” section, and there doesn’t appear to be any effort towards reporting on celebrity news.

As far as the influence of “point of view” goes, it’s most obvious in the editorial sections.  GlobalPost seems to mainly follow the news cycles of the American mainstream media, while AJE has its own agenda.  All the columns featured right now have to do with Middle East policy or the Japanese tsunami and it’s ramifications for U.S. nuclear policy.  In contrast, AJE has a more diverse lineup of subjects (admittedly, they also seem to have more resources dedicated to the section).  Also, if you read the columns, they tend to take international perspectives more seriously.

In general, I think the differences are mainly due to audience and editorial policy, rather than quality.  GlobalPost is aimed at a U.S audience and is run by journalists trained in the American newspaper tradition.  AJE is aimed at a more international audience and has a broader range of influences.

There’s a civil war going on. Why should I care about a green windbreaker?

A Behngazi rebel is interviewed by Global Post's James Foley

I’ve always been skeptical of the movement in media from print towards pictures and video.  While I don’t mind either as a medium, I’ve always felt that they dumbed stories down to the point where you couldn’t understand the situation.  A lot of this is probably because I tend to be more intellectually oriented than sensory, so I wasn’t picking up as much information from seeing an African child’s thin arms as I would from statistics on malnutrition.   But, both out of necessity and genuine appreciation, I’m coming on board, and today’s post will discuss GlobalPost‘s video reporting.

The usual style is pretty raw.  Rather than a highly edited story like the packages you would see on the local news, they tend to give more of a general, visual understanding of the situation.  Strangely enough, I really, really like it.  As I said before, I don’t think video can compete with print in terms of being informative, but because it’s less filtered it can give you a more experiential understanding.

Take this video, “The Last Rebel Stronghold.” The reporter, James Foley gives a general overview of the situation, “There does seem to be a strong sense that they won’t give up the fight.  And, that there are in this city of a million people a force of young fighting men.  Although unorganized there’s plenty of will to fight and to hold out here.”  True to their aesthetic, the language is informal, almost like he’s making up his copy on the spot.  He also delivers it in a casual monotone rather than the usual broadcaster’s enthusiastic cadence.

The beginning was interesting, if a little dull, but the first interviewee jumped out at me.  I’ve been reading about Libya for weeks now, and I’ve even gotten excited about it.  I was touched recently by a New Yorker blog by Jon Lee Anderson centering on a Libyan-American father whose son had gone to the front line to fight.  Anderson wrote, “BenSadik [the father] told me that he feared for his son’s safety because he was brave, and had told him that he felt the revolution was a cause worth dying for.”

As reports came in this week of a United Nations Security Council resolution imposing a no-fly zone, I started to get as sense that the world was coming together to defend democracy.  It filled me with a high-minded pride that people were acting courageously.  So, when I saw the first interview in the video, I had to laugh.

The first interviewee is a bald, heavy-set man wearing a green windbreaker.  Continuing with the video’s theme of a courageous, rag-tag group of rebels, he responds to the question of whether they’re prepared to fight saying, “No, but we have a strong faith, we won’t give up.  It’s over for him.  Nobody will accept him.”  He reminds me more of a posturing, but confident, hip-hop artist than a highly trained soldier.

Of course, this is what is meant by “rebel army,” a loosely organized group of non-soldiers fighting a war.   If China were to invade tomorrow, I would probably show up to fight in Gap jeans and sneakers.  And, there was nothing misleading or inaccurate about any of the print articles I read prior.  Even if I’d read a description of the man wearing the green windbreaker I probably wouldn’t have noticed.  It was a purely sensory experience, rather than an intellectually informative one, the type of information that can only be conveyed through video.

GlobalPost earns its keep

One of my guiding questions with this blog has always been “What can GlobalPost provide that other mainstream media outlets can’t?”  In a previous post, I wrote that they missed an opportunity by not providing on-the-ground coverage from Israel during the Egyptian revolt.  This week, they took advantage of their global reach, putting a human face on a UNESCO report that found war zones impact the education of 28 million children worldwide.

The Associated Press article on the subject did a good job telling the story with the report’s statistics, and NPR used interviews with foreign aid workers to give the story background, but GlobalPost got a bit deeper by telling the story of a 16-year-old Congolese girl named Yvonne, who fled her home after her father was “shot and hacked to death” and now lives with her mother and nine siblings in a “plastic covered stick dome.”  Her mother tried to pay her school fees for a while, she says in the article, but ultimately they couldn’t afford it and now none of her siblings go to school.  The local school costs $21 dollars a year, and about 25 percent of its students drop out each year because they can’t pay, according to the article.

I’ve written before that one thing I enjoy about the site is that GlobalPost makes me feel at home in the world.  The Democratic Republic of Congo is thousands of miles away, but they write about it the same way they would write about a story in Malden.  Was this the greatest article I’ve ever read?  No.  But, did it tell me a story about the world that I wouldn’t have heard from other international outlets?  Yes, it did.

 

 

GlobalPost makes a funny

One way that traditional newspapers differ from websites is a decrease in formality. Perhaps because its culture was so influenced by blogs and start-ups, it seems more appropriate to crack a joke in cyberspace than in newsprint.  Prior to the site’s redesign, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago, GlobalPost hadn’t yet taken advantage of this. But, some changes indicate they’re loosening their ties, with mixed results.

The most obvious example is in the Your Daily Intel section.  The categories are “Need to know,” “Want to know,” “Dull but important,” “Just Because,” and “Wacky.”  Clearly, they haven’t been hijacking writers from The Daily Show, but this and other aspects of the site indicate an experimental culture worth watching.

If you click on the tabs, you find another deviation from standard newspaper protocol.  The teasers are provocative rather than revealing, more fiction-esque cliffhangers than journalistic headlines.

The New York Times, for instance, has this headline on their homepage: “Tunisian Prime Minister, Vestige of Old Regime, Resigns Mohamed Ghannouchi resigned on Sunday after a weekend of deadly protests.” GlobalPost has this: “Egypt’s ruling military council plans to…”  Plans to what?  I don’t know.  Do I care?  I’m not sure yet, but it’s a worthwhile risk.  (If you’re curious what Egypt’s ruling military council has up its sleeve, click this link)

It’s not their only cheeky experiment.  Another noticeable move is placing stories under multiple categories.  For instance, a story about a London ice-cream parlor with a Lady Gaga themed product is under both the Europe and Culture & Lifestyle sections.  I like the idea, and technically it makes sense, but unlike the other two changes this one makes the site seem less professional.  When I first saw it, I thought there might have been an editorial mistake.  Now that I’m used to it, it’s still a little disconcerting and probably not worth the extra clicks.

In the three risks here, I rated them 1 yes, 1 maybe, and 1 ‘eh…’  But, regardless of the success of these moves, what makes GlobalPost interesting to watch for is how they’re able to walk the line between internet culture and newspaper respectability.