Global Post

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 1:43pm on Friday, November 6th, 2009

Writing in the New York Review of Books (Volume 56, Number 14, September 24, 2009), Michael Massing looks at the troubles of the newspaper business and the hope of new models like Global Post:

"Of all the for-profit experiments out there, the most intriguing, perhaps, is Global Post. Launched in January with close to $10 million in start-up funds from private investors, this site already has seventy-four part-time correspondents in fifty countries. The co-founder and editorial chief, Charles Sennott, a former Boston Globe correspondent, says that the "void" created by the cutbacks in foreign reporting has created "an opportunity. We want to be one of the sites that Americans regularly go to when they think about the world." In June, Sennott and a photographer spent nearly three weeks in Afghanistan, producing a multimedia medley of articles, podcasts, videos, and slide shows about the US fight against the Taliban. (To date, the site seems to lean more toward straight reporting than in-depth analysis, focusing on questions like "Who are the Taliban?" rather than "Should we be in Afghanistan?")

The service does not come cheap: in addition to paying most of its correspondents $1,000 a month for four stories, it has a full-time staff of sixteen in Boston. To help meet that payroll, Global Post foresees three revenue streams: advertising, membership, and syndication. Of these, the last seems the most promising; already, it has signed contracts with ten papers to run its stories, including The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (a five-figure deal) and The Newark Star-Ledger."

The full story:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23050

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:34pm on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Online news service GlobalPost will generate $1 million in revenue this year, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported on October 28, 2009:

"Phil Balboni, chief executive of GlobalPost, said the company is on pace to generate $1 million in revenue this year and expects $3 million in revenue next year, which would reduce their operating loss by 50 percent. (He didn’t say so explicitly, but you might deduce from those numbers that GlobalPost’s annual expenses are $5 million.) The goal is to achieve profitability by 2012."

The full story:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/globalpost-generating-revenue-of-1-million-in-first-year/