Resources / Ripples & Wipeouts

I just discovered an exceptional news site called GlobalPost.com, which gathers together local reporters from around the world to report on events in their home areas.  This tactic – using reports from local people who really understand the situation in their hometowns – gives the stories an authenticity and depth that is becoming increasingly scarce in the news business.  So much of our news today covers mere highlights of stories, glossing over possible implications that reach beyond a given news cycle.  GlobalPost.com is a welcome exception and will be of particular interest to those of us who care about international development, public health, global economics, women’s empowerment and other complex topics. 

Today, for example, GlobalPost.com has five headline stories, each on a different macro topic.  In the Health section, a correspondent named Elizabeth Shelburne reports from the very rural town of Tugela Ferry in the KwaZulu Natal Province of South Africa, a place she calls “the epicenter of a worldwide epidemic of a new drug-resistant tuberculosis.” Her tale of health workers driving more than 100 kilometers per day to inject patients with medications unlikely to stem the tide of the disease is a compelling story in its own right.  Then Shelburne takes her story a step farther, helping her readers make the connections between this small place on the African coast and the millions of other places on coasts and hillsides throughout the world.  The message:  We all need to care about a new pandemic, especially one like drug-resistant TB, which “didn’t have to evolve,” as Shelburne points out in an earlier piece on this same topic.

Reading GlobalPost.com is a good way to broaden one’s point of view, especially this week when most of us are so tightly focused on the minor dramas playing out in the Senate confirmation hearings and the soon-to-come pageants of the inauguration.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s great to celebrate the ascent of a man of mixed race to the White House.  But let’s not be so preoccupied with patting ourselves on the back that we forget why we elected Obama in the first place.

-- Bonnie McEwan