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.