Foreign news website hopes readers will pay for quality
GlobalPost.com, the international news website founded by two veteran Boston journalists, is scheduled to launch Monday after months of planning.
The site - which bills itself as the first international news site based in the United States - is headed by Philip S. Balboni, who built New England Cable News into the nation's largest regional television news network. After leaving NECN in April, Balboni raised $8.2 million to start GlobalPost. The site's cofounder, Charles M. Sennott, a former Boston Globe foreign correspondent, is executive editor and vice president.
Despite the worldwide economic free fall that has taken place since the spring, Balboni says GlobalPost is well-positioned to succeed.
"This is the perfect time [to launch] for many reasons," he said yesterday. "Most of all, there is an enormous void in foreign coverage by the American news media."
GlobalPost says it has assembled a roster of 65 correspondents in 45 countries, plus a staff of 15 at its Boston headquarters. Reporters will focus on enterprise stories and leave coverage of breaking news events to wire services, according to Balboni.
"They're filling a gap that is growing as fewer papers devote resources to covering international news," said Jill Geisler, a faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. "We don't want to end up dependent on a handful of wire services for international news."
Balboni said the company set a goal of attracting 600,000 unique monthly visitors to the site by year-end. That's a small number compared with some niche news sites such as Politico.com, which draws 3.4 million unique visitors a month.
"It's modest," Balboni said. "But we're just a baby coming out of the womb."
GlobalPost is trying to do what some other online news organizations have struggled to accomplish: deliver original reporting and content while turning a profit through advertising, syndication revenue, and subscription fees. Much of the site's content will be free, but beginning in February readers will be charged to access so-called premium content. That includes some exclusive reports and longer, more in-depth versions of content available for free. A one-year subscription costs $199, with discounts offered to students and businesses that have multiple subscribers.
"High-quality journalism is threatened, and it may not be able to continue unless we can convince people that they need to support high-quality journalism on the Web with their own dollars and cents," Balboni said.
Still, he acknowledged the move to rely on subscriptions for premium content was "bold," considering other, more established companies have tried and failed to make fee-based online content work. For example, in 2007, The New York Times Co., which owns The Boston Globe, abandoned its TimesSelect program, which charged users to view some New York Times online content, such as opinion columns.
Geisler said a subscription-based revenue model like GlobalPost's has potential. "It could work for them, and I hope it does," she said.
Balboni has hired Street Attack, a Boston marketing company, to help promote the site.
In addition to gaining publicity by having correspondents appear on PBS news broadcasts nightly, GlobalPost is being pitched on social networking sites like Twitter in an effort to reach younger readers who already get most of their news from the Internet.
Sennott said the site will primarily target Americans interested in international news.
Much of the editorial philosophy, he said, was based on the work he did while he was at the Globe. The site's correspondents - who include two Pulitzer Prize winners - will report stories that illustrate life and issues in the countries they cover and file weekly dispatches as well as daily reporter's notebook entries, Sennott said.
"What we're trying to do is tough, but I think it's worth the fight," he said. 