Overseas reporters have been a casualty of budget-chopping news organizations, leaving an opening for the online startup GlobalPost. But at a time when many news executives are exploring nonprofit business models to keep specialized reporting flowing, GlobalPost, which made its debut on Jan. 12, is intended to be a moneymaking venture.
With 65 correspondents worldwide — drawn from a surfeit of experienced reporters eager to continue working in their specialties even as potential employers disappear — GlobalPost has begun offering a mix of news and features that only a handful of other news organizations can rival.
Recently, the articles, available free at GlobalPost.com, included reports on Thailand’s Islamic insurgency and Indian yogis worried about the worldwide financial crisis.
That ad-supported reporting is only one part of the GlobalPost business plan. If the business is to succeed, it will depend in part on how many people sign up for a separate paid section of the Web site, which was to have been available in test mode beginning last week but is expected to go online sometime in the coming days.
Called Passport, it offers access to GlobalPost correspondents, including exclusive reports on business topics of less interest to general audiences, conference calls and meetings with reporters, and breaking news e-mail messages from those journalists.
Passport subscribers, who pay as much as US$199 a year, can suggest article ideas.
“If you are a member, you have a voice at the editorial meeting,” although the site will decide what stories to pursue, said Charles Sennott, a GlobalPost founder and its executive editor.
He said Passport is meant to “create a feeling of community” for subscribers who might otherwise see newsrooms as “impenetrable and fortresslike.”
GlobalPost correspondents, who include the former Washington Post writer Caryle Murphy in Saudi Arabia and a Time magazine correspondent turned novelist, Matt Beynon Rees, in Jerusalem, are paid extra for Passport work. Their basic compensation is US$1,000 a month for four articles, plus shares in the venture. The site had 500 applicants for the jobs, Sennott said.
Only a couple dozen people have signed up for Passport, said Philip Balboni, GlobalPost’s other founder and the president and chief executive. The site is depending on marketing partnerships to generate subscriptions — some discounted — and hopes to have more than 2,000 by year’s end.
Two months in, the Boston-based company said demand for the free site — the mainstay of the business — was ahead of expectations. It has logged 250,000 unique users who have visited at least once, compared with the 90,000 Balboni had hoped for by now, and 1.1 million page views, more than half from returning visitors.
“People have clearly liked what they’ve seen,” Balboni said, adding that the site has had visitors from every country except North Korea, Chad and Eritrea.
Advertising remains slow, he said. Liberty Mutual Insurance signed on for a year and Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy has been advertising on a trial basis.
“I think it will just take time,” Balboni said. “We are in an incredible down market.”
More encouragingly, a third revenue stream has been growing, as the company has signed up a growing number of news outlets, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; the Daily News of New York; the Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey; and the Boise Weekly of Idaho, to carry its reports and have use of its correspondents.
CBS Radio News, heard on about 550 stations, recently signed a nonexclusive deal. The network will be able to call on GlobalPost correspondents during breaking news as a backup to its own reporters, said Harvey Nagler, CBS News’ vice president of radio, adding: “You never know where news is going to happen.”
Public TV’s Worldfocus weeknight newscast features reports from GlobalPost correspondents who carry inexpensive Flip digital video cameras when in the field.
The site was started with US$8.5 million from private investors. Balboni, who created the well-regarded regional New England Cable News network, said he was a passionate defender of for-profit journalism.
“I believe deep in my heart and soul that the discipline of the marketplace makes for a stronger organization,” he said.
“It gives you a far greater chance to be a self-sustaining enterprise, without having to turn to government or foundations,” which can be mercurial, he said.
Long before the current debate about whether newspapers and magazines should be charging for their Web content, Balboni envisioned having consumers pay for at least a part of GlobalPost, he said. It was a lesson he learned after years in the cable TV business, which is supported by subscriber revenue as well as advertising. Having created a hybrid model, he said, “now we have to prove it in the marketplace.”
Alan Mutter, a media investor who analyzes news business models at the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, praised GlobalPost in an interview “for being thoroughly modern in its approach to revenue, in that it understands it won’t be simply advertising or subscriptions,” but a hybrid. “They’ve identified every conceivable revenue stream I can think of.”
But questions remain, he said, including how many news organizations still have the budget to pay to use syndicated GlobalPost articles and whether GlobalPost’s executives can create compelling content that will draw enough subscribers to Passport.
“I’ve seen other publishers who offered premium content and the content wasn’t good enough to make you want to write a check,” he said.
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