GlobalPost launched in January with an ambitious mission, proclaiming on its home page to be “a new voice for global news,” and an interesting revenue stream that combines advertising, syndication and premium membership.
In an introductory video, the site pledges to “fill the void left as traditional media cuts back and in many cases abandons the mission of international reporting.” Its business model is like the “freemium” model that Chris Anderson described in Wired magazine last year.” A small percentage of paying users, he explained, make it possible for content to be free for most of the audience.
GlobalPost stories are free to everyone, but premium subscribers ($199 a year) get extra features, one of which is the ability to submit story ideas that the site’s correspondents may or may not pursue.
With an initial investment of $8.5 million, GlobalPost currently has 65 correspondents on the payroll, each of whom makes $1,000 per month for four articles, The New York Times reported this week. Correspondents get shares in the venture as well.
All the reporters live in the areas they cover. In a video about the site’s mission, Charles Sennott, the site’s executive editor and co-founder, says this practice has “sadly fallen by wayside.” There were about 500 applicants for GlobalPost jobs, the Times reported.
The operation has syndication deals with CBS Radio News and the public television show “Worldfocus.” The site, according to the Times, has had 250,000 unique visitors and more than 1 million page views in two months. Rick Byrne, director of communications and marketing for GlobalPost, said in an e-mail interview that the site has an outside development team and a couple of in-house Web staff, including a multimedia producer.
People with a do-it-yourself ethic, such as freelancers whose budget and ambitions are more modest than GlobalPost’s, can look at the site’s layout for inspiration. The site has a clean, easy-to-read layout. The visual focus of the home page is a single image above a row of five boxes with links to featured stories. Below that, the main content area splits into two columns with blurbs and links to more stories.
The navigation tabs display drop-down menus. The tab for Africa, for example, has Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Senegal and Zimbabwe. Each “region” page features a link to a story, a list of recent posts and a list of global blogs that are not hosted by GlobalPost. The right-hand sidebar alternates ads and links to other tabs and features.
The site features high-quality photos and multimedia, which are generally embedded videos. GlobalPost correspondents carry Flip video cameras when in the field, the Times reported.
Philip Balboni, GlobalPost’s co-founder, president and chief executive, told the Times that now that the site’s creators have put together this hybrid business model for covering the world, they must prove the idea in the marketplace. Their target is to sign up more than 2,000 subscribers by the end of the year.
