Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
The WorldPost was launched one year ago in Davos. It was born out of a contradiction and a paradox.
The contradiction is that while the world is growing more interdependent, the media is fragmenting — re-nationalizing, re-localizing and even tribalizing. The resulting paradox is that the information age is becoming the age of non-communication across boundaries — political, cultural and ideological.
The aim of The WorldPost is to help bridge this growing chasm by becoming a platform where the whole world meets; a common zone where cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives from all corners of the planet can take place.
To achieve this aim, The WorldPost strives for a global viewpoint looking around, not a national perspective looking out. Along with intelligent curation of the global news and original reportage, what distinguishes us, above all, are the first person global voices of our contributors. Every week, they weigh in as events break from Havana to Beijing, from Moscow to Mexico City, Paris, New Delhi and Abuja among so many other places.
The WorldPost seems to have met an outstanding need. Thanks to you, one year later we have reached 28 million monthly views. We’ve shown that the message can catch up to the medium if we put our minds to it.
On Tuesday we will formally mark our one year anniversary by releasing the “WorldPost Voices” app that will allow you to directly access our blog posts. In addition, our navigation bar at the top of the page will from now on allow you to link to all Huffington Post’s 13 international editions, from Brazil to Germany to India to Japan and more.
It has often been said that the Internet is a “global thinking circuit.” It is global and it is a circuit, but it is not “thinking.” The WorldPost mission is to foster such a connected consciousness for our wired world.
As the 2015 meeting of the annual World Economic Forum convened in Davos this week, The WorldPost focused on the global economy. The governor of India’s central bank, Raghuram Rajan, says the world is poised to stagnate in the year ahead with slow growth in the U.S. and the U.K. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde also warns that 2015 is a “make-or-break year” to move from “fragility” to “stability.” Oxfam Executive Director Winnie Byanyima argues that unless measures are taken to stem inequality, the wealth of the top 1 percent will “overtake” the combined wealth of the next 99 percent. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim points out that falling oil prices have created a global opportunity to put a price on carbon without hurting economic growth.
Closer to the home, Anne-Marie Slaughter promotes the “care economy” in which family and work life can be more integrated through the new flexibility created by technology.
Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi writes that the cosmopolitan “Arab Spring” demographic is still alive despite the image of religious battles overtaking the Middle East. Yousaf Butt traces the roots of Islamist terrorism to Saudi Wahhabism. Philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo recalls the legacy of Muslim activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who shared Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence and religious pluralism. Abdullah Gül, who just stepped down as Turkey’s president, writes from Ankara that we shouldn’t forget the “good things” happening in the Middle East as a result of multilateral efforts, including disarming Syria’s chemical weapons.
WorldPost Senior Editor Kathleen Miles reports on Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi’s call for the modernization of Islam as a religion of peace and development, not violence. From Istanbul, WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports that Human Rights Watch accuses Egypt of “rampant torture and abuse in Egyptian prisons.” Writing from Jerusalem, eminent military historian Martin van Creveld says that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is playing the “Jewish-American card” for political reasons in the upcoming election, not because of the Iranian threat.
Writing from New Delhi, Vivek Wadhwa says that a new “technological boom” is underway in India. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt defends his company’s digital dominance, noting that “competition is just one click away.” Xiao Qiang and Sophie Beach of China Digital Times recount the cat and mouse game in 2014 between Chinese censors and netizens. WorldPost China Correspondent Matt Sheehan reviews a new film by Jia Zhangke titled “Smog Journeys.” He also writes about “the most sought after man at Davos”: Alibaba’s Jack Ma.
In this week’s Forgotten Fact series, The WorldPost turns to Nigeria and Boko Haram to examine how the group’s Islamist extremists have left northeast Nigeria in ruins.
Writing from Mexico City, poet and environmentalist Homero Aridjis recalls the world’s “discovery” 40 years ago of the monarch butterfly winter habitat in his home state of Michoacan and worries now about its survival. Writing from Havana, Orlando Márquez Hidalgo insists that Cuba can both tame capitalism and respect liberty. Also writing from Havana, digital dissident Miriam Celaya calls on her fellow critics to shift from a belligerent stance to one embracing Cuba’s evolving openness.
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy writes from Paris that Michel Houellebecq is neither an Islamophobe or a hero, but a novelist who shouldn’t be confused with his characters. We also published Levy’s remarks to the U.N. General Assembly this week on the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
As election day approaches in Greece, HuffPost Greece’s editor-at-large Pavlos Tsimas writes from Athens and breaks down seven key points to understanding that country’s crucial election. The WorldPost also looks at what the Greek vote means for the rest of the world.
Finally, Fusion — a new partner of The WorldPost — offers a short video on the remarkable story of four undocumented teens from Phoenix beating MIT in a robotics competition.
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute on Governance and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Senior Editor of the WorldPost. Alex Gardels is the Associate Editor of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s editorial coverage. Eline Gordts is HuffPost’s Senior World Editor. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are Associate World Editors.
CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
