THE THIRD WORLD'S LOW-KEY CRUSADER
Peter Martin '51 runs a news servicethat turns the globe upside down.
WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE people who are going to be our enemies," says Peter Bird Martin. "The more we understand them, the harder it will be to kill them."
This principle has helped motivate Martin, a former senior editor of Time magazine and a founding editor of Money, to found the South-North News Service. The nonprofit outfit wires news and background of the Third World to media of the First World ranging from The Los Angeles Times to papers in Canada and Japan.
Martin also runs the Institute of Current World Affairs, a foundation that provides fellowships to promising young people for study abroad (including Martin himself back in 1953). In 1978, in a kind of midlife course correction, he resigned from Time Inc. and took over the Institute, moving it from New York to the second floor of Eleazar Wheelock's 217-year-old house in Hanover. He launched the South-North News Service in 1986.
The name was deliberately chosen to turn the hackneyed think-tank phrase "North-South dialogue" upside down. "It makes you think twice," says Martin.
It also depicts the directional flow of the information the service provides. The stories are written by 170 correspondents most of them natives in 58 countries. They focus on aspects of life in other cultures that First World reporters, no matter how skilled, would not be likely to pick up on devil worship among Bolivian tin miners, child slavery in Sri Lanka, student soldiers in Iran, nascent feminism in Malaysia, urban drought in India, the burgeoning garment industry in Bangladesh.
In addition to the wire service, the outfit desktop-publishes a weekly newsletter and has just launched a monthly international affairs paper aimed at high-school students.
