By Cristi Hegranes, Founder & Executive Director
It was the fall of my sophomore year in high school. And I had made up my mind.
In the wee hours of the morning, in my 90210-poster-adorned room, I decided to commit the ultimate act of quiet rebellion.
Letter by letter, I was going to redesign my handwriting.
With a notebook and a jar of colorful pens in front of me, I made the first bold decision: it would be all caps.
I was done with cursive and the conformity of dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
My decisions got progressively bolder as the night went on.
I put curves where sharp lines once met. I curly cued ends and joined them to meet beginnings, a nod to the cursive of yesterday.
I spent many hours that night tracing out every detail of my new style. I practiced diligently over the next few weeks. On tests and hand-written essays, I focused on training my hand to conform to this new way.
I still use those letters today, more than 20 years later. It is my own personal typeface.
Recently, I’ve come to appreciate this story about my teenage self. I think it gives insightful detail and important context about the person I would become.
For the last 10 years my brother and handful of others have been suggesting that I start a blog. A transparent account of what it’s like to grow this organization. A humorous telling of how we handle bumps in the road and how we charge at full speed through our most formidable obstacles.
A great idea, I agreed. But it never happened.
And for good reason. For many of the last 10 years I have been doing the job of at least 10 people. Steadily growing the organization on a shoe string was no easy feat. So blogging about it too felt like a chore that was always last on my to do list.
Today, things are different. For one, I have built the staff of my dreams. Editors, trainers and reporters around the globe work hard everyday to increase the quantity and quality of the news we produce. And perhaps more importantly, now, I have something to say.
Over the last 10 years a quiet movement has been building here. A young journalist’s dream has come to life. A fledgling nonprofit with an initial $37,000 budget is now a 10-year veteran with a still-lean but growing budget of more than $1.3 million.
But it’s more than that.
I believe that GPI is journalism’s utopia. A place where we don’t take advertising or dollars that seek to influence our content. A media outlet that has excused itself from the 24-hour news cycle so the clock is not our boss. An editorial team that collectively prizes accuracy above all else. And a body of reporters who understand the value of humanity in storytelling.
We have developed our own style here. One that presents the least-covered regions of the world with detailed rigor that places fact and story together in profound ways that help people understand this world a bit better. And one that infuses each article with context — social, historical, political, linguistic, cultural context that our reporters have natural access to because they are not foreigners, they live in the communities that they cover.
The reporters and editors of Global Press Journal have rebelled against the status quo in today’s media that puts ratings before reality and acts as though the public is just a mass of grateful idiots unable to discern fact from fiction.
So, it is time we invited you behind the curtain.
I will take you inside seemingly inane entries in our style guide and our unrivaled factchecking process. I will talk about funding and feuds and I will probably blather on about geography. I will say the f-word and I will work hard to write my dog into as many posts as I can.
But most of all I will make you understand why GPI has become a force blazing a new way forward for global journalism. I will let you into our quiet rebellion and I’ll show you our unique and beautiful typeface that is changing the world.
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