Charles Sennott criss-crossed the world as a reporter for The Boston Globe, covering the kinds of calamities that foreign correspondents cut their teeth on - wars, terrorist attacks, insurgencies and civil unrest. Then he came home to Boston a few years ago to another kind of calamity.
The newspaper business, as a business, was collapsing. An economic shockwave that continues to this day had begun rolling through the print journalism industry, leaving layoffs and cutbacks in its wake. At The Globe, foreign bureaus were closed.
Developing a Business Plan
So Sennott began developing a business proposal for a nonprofit international news agency. But, he admits, “I am a field reporter, not a businessman. And I hit a wall. I could raise some money to start a non-profit, but not enough to leave my day job and pursue this dream.”
But Sennott found a businessman, Philip Balboni, the founder and former president of New England Cable News, the nation's largest regional television news network. Balboni, it turned out, had long nurtured a similar idea.
“And his business plan was sound and it was based on a for-profit model,” Sennott says. “So we teamed up as co-founders and under his business plan we wove together our two editorial visions.”
The result is Global Post, a website that launched Monday with a roster of 65 reporters - including veterans of The Washington Post, CNN and The Associated Press - stationed in some 45 countries.
The site’s aim is not to compete with major news organizations in covering breaking news, but to produce in-depth features and enterprise stories to supplement that coverage. Global Post is free, but will offer premium content for $199 a year.
Banking On Three Revenue Streams
Investors have plunged more than $8 million into the site. Sennott and Balboni hope to turn a profit in a few years through the premium content subscriptions, online advertising and by selling stories to newspapers.
Unlike traditional news organizations, Global Post will not operate expensive, full-fledged foreign bureaus. Instead, it will pay its far-flung reporters, many of whom already work for other news agencies, $1,000 a month, and they will work from home. To sweeten the deal, reporters will receive equity stakes in the privately held company.
And they will be provided with digital video cameras to produce multimedia reports.
Global Post arrives at a grim time in the news business, and not just for traditional print journalism; even online ad revenue is slowing. And with the U.S. economy in turmoil, it seems safe to assume that most Americans are focused on domestic concerns.
But Sennott thinks Global Post it can succeed because “we are not lugging around the encumbrances of old media such as trucks and printing presses and network television bureaucracies and pay scales for top executives and talent.”
And as other news agencies continue to shutter their foreign bureaus, Sennott says Global Post will “provide great story telling about issues that we believe an American audience wants to hear and see and read. We believe that Americans are under-served in their options for international news and we are out to be a new community for people who want to know what is happening in the world beyond America.”
