DAVOS, Switzerland -- Rockets land in the suburbs of Damascus, unleashing a deadly wave of chemical gas. Hours later a blogger in the United Kingdom uses YouTube to ferret out video clips that tie the attack to the Syrian government. Soon, political leaders from around the planet are consumed with fashioning an appropriate response.
In Washington, the Federal Reserve begins considering how to wean a fragile American economy from artificially cheap credit, triggering a rush of money out of emerging markets worldwide. From Indonesia to Brazil, local currencies plunge and anxiety builds.
In Egypt, a group of young technology entrepreneurs possessed with a smart idea but no money uses Kickstarter to raise $85,000, adding a story of successful innovation to a country beset by joblessness and sectarian strife.
You do not need a new publication to tell you that globalization is a fact of modern life. Yet the consequences of our interconnectedness -- the crises, the opportunities, the altering of tastes and styles -- change so frequently that sophistication, determination and diversity in points of view are required to keep tabs on the state of the world. Moreover, thinking globally is increasingly needed to make sense of what's playing out on your street.
It is simply not possible to understand one's own community, let alone one's country, without applying a global lens. How we work, what we earn and what it costs to secure housing and health care are all shaped by myriad factors determined on multiple continents -- the availability of engineers in India, the price of iron ore mined in Australia, the appetite for Italian fashion in Argentina, the number of jobs for restless young people in the Middle East. What's on the menu, what's showing at the cinema, what's on display at the mall are increasingly shaped by artistic, commercial and design sensibilities from Shanghai to Santiago.
It is in this spirit that we launch The WorldPost, a new global publication forged in a partnership between The Huffington Post, with its growing news-gathering resources around the world, and the Berggruen Institute on Governance, an active think tank engaged with some of the leading thinkers of our age. We are also joined by the Asia Society, which is contributing stories from its first-rate ChinaFile, an artery of news and analysis about the world's most populous country.
The WorldPost is a product of the idea that the most foundational challenges of our era, from the perils of climate change to the epidemic of youth unemployment, can neither be understood nor addressed through the traditional frame of the nation state, but require collective efforts spanning geography and cultures.
That our site is launching this week, amid the festivities at the World Economic Forum in Davos, is no accident. Global thought leaders will play a central role in driving the conversation. And yet The WorldPost is not a dialogue confined to powerful elites: We have engineered the site as a platform for fresh voices from across the socioeconomic spectrum to air out issues; a place to challenge, refine and engage the views of the prominent people whose words will capture headlines on this page. Irreverence and iconoclasm will find a home here.
Drawing on a core strength of The Huffington Post, The WorldPost is essentially a community, not a one-way conduit for pronouncements from on high. Readers are urged to engage and shape the agenda, surfacing stories in need of attention while exchanging views with others -- all of this, in the interest of furthering understanding and enabling better outcomes.
But while we embrace the wisdom of the crowd, we believe fervently in the irreplaceable value of old-fashioned reporting from correspondents steeped in local languages and culture. We have unleashed a new team of correspondents based in Beirut, Cairo and (soon) Beijing. Their work is on display today -- a piece from Cairo correspondent Sophia Jones exploring the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; a lucid explainer on the state of the war in Syria from Middle East bureau chief Max Rosenthal.
We are eager to leverage the reality that ours is already a global newsroom, given our 10 thriving HuffPost international editions. The WorldPost will draw on the talents and expertise of writers and editors scattered from Brazil to Japan, producing reports that reflect multiple points of view on a range of crucial issues. A piece on what's at stake in the upcoming European elections is one such example, with dispatches drawn from London, Paris, Munich, Madrid and Rome. Later this week, we will feature a piece produced by HuffPost Canada probing the consequences of energy extraction on aboriginal lands, a story whose implications can be felt as far away as Nigeria and Greenland. We will also explore the global manifestations of the new emphasis on poverty championed by Pope Francis.
The beauty of being an all-digital publication is that we are limited by no stale template, no formula dictating how and when we ought to deploy resources. We are bound only by a commitment to innovate and experiment in the interest of revealing necessary truths, holding powerful institutions to account, while realizing the enormous potential that exists in every country on the planet.
Journalism by its nature tends to revolve around problems that demand attention. You will find no shortage of such examples on this page. But you will also encounter spotlights on approaches that are proving effective in solving problems, and this is by design. The WorldPost makes no claim to the dispassionate remove that too often characterizes media. In the end, we aim to be participants in progress.