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Examining our origins.
Photo ©
Andrew Stevenson.
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How
It All Began
By
Stephan Richter, Publisher
In the late 1990s, I was astounded to
realize that, despite all the hoopla about globalization,
the great novel on this subject had not yet been written.
In all likelihood, the great globalization novel cannot ever
be written. There just is too much material, too many story
lines and too many angles to capture in a single book. What
could be done?
 here
is a great yearning among people everywhere to understand
what's going on. Globalization, after all, involves huge
changes that have a direct impact on many. |
Understanding
the mysteries of globalization
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For
an answer, I looked back to another era when the world
had been engulfed in a similar upheaval. The early industrialization
period also confronted people with serious questions
about their relationships to their communities, to society
and to the economy.
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It
is is futile, if not dishonest, to try to
give one "big", definitive answer
on the globalization question.
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How
did people back then try to capture that existential
change — and all the social and psychological pressures
related to it? The great novelists of that time told
the story. But the novelists didn't try to do it all
at once.
First,
they tried to write about the pressures of industrialization
in the form of daily installments in newspapers. Later
on, these same writers would tie the installments together
and publish them as a novel in book form. Today, we
would call that the creation of a second revenue stream.
Hence
the guiding insight for The Globalist: It is is futile,
if not dishonest, to try to give one "big",
definitive answer on the globalization question —
whether in the form of a novel, or a comprehensive policy
paper. But trying to cover the biggest story of our
lifetime in daily installments seems a more promising
avenue.
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A
global exploration
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 That's
the moment The Globalist was born. The Globalist is
dedicated to exploring the vast subject of the global
economy, politics and culture — through one original
feature every day.
And
that's why we break it all down into short stories,
quizzes, fact sheets, charts, quotes collections and
radio snippets. The object is to help audiences everywhere
in the world to make up their own mind on the issue
of globalization.
All
of that is why, right on the cusp of the new millennium,
we launched The Globalist on January 3, 2000.
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