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GlobalPost is a for-profit online foreign news service.
The site was founded in January 2009 by Philip Balboni and Charles Sennott with $8.5 million in private funding. It is based in Boston and had a staff of about 18 as of 2013, as well as about 70 part-time correspondents in 50 countries, who are generally paid about $1,000 a month, plus a stake in the company, for four stories.
GlobalPost produces print and video reports, as well as multimedia packages. Its work focuses more on in-depth reporting than breaking news and is intended to supplement traditional newswires as “an American voice for foreign news.” GlobalPost also aggregates content from hundreds of international bloggers on the site.
Though much of GlobalPost’s website is available free and supported by ads, the site offers a yearly premium subscription service called Passport that includes access to conference calls and meetings with reporters, as well as custom research projects. In early 2010, it announced its Passport program would be among the first to use Journalism Online’s Press+ paid-content system.
The site’s traffic grew quickly after it was founded (most of it coming from the United States and Canada), though its advertising was slow and premium subscribers few, with 400 by January 2010.
As of 2013, about two-thirds of GlobalPost’s revenue came from advertising, but the organization’s most successful revenue stream relative to its expectations, the source of 19 percent of its revenue as of 2013, has been its syndication business through which news organizations can pay to use its foreign coverage. Its 25 or so clients include CBS News, PBS, New York Daily News and The Huffington Post. The site has also received at least $3 million in foundation funding from various organizations. In 2013, it began a more extensive partnership with NBC News.
The Ann Arbor Chronicle was a local news website covering Ann Arbor, Mich., that shut down in September 2014. The Chronicle was launched in 2008 by the husband-and-wife team of Dave Askins and Mary Morgan and focused primarily on longer-form local government reporting. It was funded primarily through advertising, though the for-profit site also took donations, which it called “subscriptions” and which accounted…
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