News outlets across the country have downsized or closed their
overseas bureaus. The new Boston-based online international news
service www.globalpost.com has built a network of 70 correspondents in
50 countries.
On a winter morning, I was at my desk in the GlobalPost newsroom watching the sun rise over Boston harbor and waiting for a Skype video conference with a reporter in Beijing. GlobalPost’s Boston offices are a mix of old Boston and the digital age. We’re located in what is known as The Pilot House, a 19th century building perched on Lewis Wharf. It’s where sailors known as pilots used to keep a lookout for the grand masts of the clipper ships. When they spotted one, they’d jump into small crafts and tack out to greet the cargo ships loaded with goods from Europe, India and China and guide them through the shifting shoals of Boston harbor.
In the Pilot House you can feel a continuum of history that connects this place to how Americans have gathered news of the world from the colonial era to today. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the ships brought not just cargo, but news. Today GlobalPost continues that tradition. It has a fulltime staff of 15 in Boston, plus 70 correspondents in 50 countries around the world.
It’s easy to see ominous, dark clouds on the horizon of foreign reporting at traditional news organizations. The Internet has imposed a punishing new economic reality on America’s newspapers, news magazines and networks. By some estimates there are fewer than half as many foreign correspondents working for American news organizations as there were in 2005, when the landscape already looked bleak amid a decade-long downturn for old media.
The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday and The Baltimore Sun have all shuttered their foreign bureaus – and several of those papers are in bankruptcy or teetering on the edge of it. News magazines such as Time and Newsweek and network news divisions have been forced into similar retreats, particularly ABC, which in February announced it would lay off 25 percent of its staff.
All of this occurs at a time when the American audience needs more than ever to know about the world. The global economic crisis, the threat of climate change, global epidemics of disease and two raging wars are all proof of that. The modern world has never felt more interconnected, nor under-covered.
But with an eye toward history, maybe we can view these hard years for American journalism as the necessary destruction that comes before an era of dramatic, new possibilities. With a firm – some might say reckless – belief in this understanding of history, GlobalPost set sail in January of 2009.
In our first year, we’ve built a solid team of correspondents and columnists who work with us on contracts akin to what used to be known as “super stringers.” We’ve had a steady rise in traffic with a total of 9 million visits to the site in the first year. Our audience is engaged and loyal, according to Google analytics. We’ve signed important editorial partnerships with CBS News and the PBS NewsHour and developed a solid syndication business that serves some 30 newspapers in America and worldwide – including the New York Daily News, the Newark Star-Ledger, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and English language newspapers from Cambodia to the Persian Gulf.
We’ve tried to hold true to simple beliefs. One is that great international journalism is based on powerful story telling by talented reporters who live in the countries about which they write. We have some way to go to meet revenue goals and prove ourselves as a sustainable business, but we are gaining momentum on this journey.
For me, it began on St. Patrick’s Day of 2008, when I took a buyout from the Globe, where I had worked for 14 years, and joined forces with CEO Phil Balboni as co-founder of GlobalPost. It was hard to leave the Globe, the paper I grew up with and where since high school I had dreamed of working. For almost a decade, I was proud to be part of the Globe’s foreign desk, a scrappy team of fighters that punched above its weight. We didn’t have the gravitas of The New York Times, but we relished the freedom we had to just go out and find great stories.
I served as Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and as Europe bureau chief in London from 2001 to 2006. I spent most of my time post-Sept. 11 covering Afghanistan and Iraq and then the Madrid and London bombings. Yet economic realities caught up to the Globe and the foreign desk was shut down in 2007. It was time to move on.
In that spring of 2008, I traveled around the world building GlobalPost’s team of correspondents and columnists. The Boston staff consists of eight editors and seven business-side people. The correspondents in the field include cagey veteran columnists like Mort Rosenblum of Paris, who worked for 40 years all over the world for the AP, and H.D.S. Greeenway, who covered just about every major international story in the last half century for the Globe and The Washington Post. It also includes award-winning, mid-career journalists such as Jean MacKenzie in Afghanistan, Caryle Murphy in Saudi Arabia, Matt Rees in Jerusalem, Michael Goldfarb in London, John Otis in Colombia, Matt McAllester as a reporter-at-large and too many others to name.
All are extraordinarily talented correspondents who’ve taken buyouts or been let go from newspapers that have decimated their foreign coverage. Others are young reporters setting up shop as freelancers and relying on GlobalPost as a steady string.
For almost all of our correspondents, GlobalPost is one piece of a freelance portfolio that often includes other newspaper or magazine strings or book projects and documentaries. Our contracts include base pay for four stories per month. We have a separate budget for special projects, which allows us to apply more resources to enterprise reporting. We’ve learned to be flexible and resourceful in helping people assemble lives that will allow them to continue reporting overseas.
We get hundreds of applications for work from young journalists looking for an opportunity. We’ve also set up a Study Abroad page where we host essays and feature stories by college students who are studying abroad.
One challenge is to retain this eclectic team scattered around the world and find a way for them to become more interconnected and reliant on the support they can provide each other. We hope to work with the Overseas Press Club to find new ways to do that.
By the end of our first year, this team of correspondents had produced some 3,500 stories and about 300 photo galleries and videos. Our core audience of about 750,000 readers is 65 percent American, with the rest mostly from English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom,Canada and India. More than 30 percent of these readers check the site several times a day.
We started our news service in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Luckily, we had the startup capital from solid investors to survive the crisis – though like most other businesses, old and new, we failed to meet our revenue goals for the first year. But this year we see advertising picking up and with steady increases in our traffic we believe we can make up that lost ground and stay on track to be profitable in our third year.
We’re working on signing new newspaper syndication agreements, and we’ve started editorial partnerships with CBS News and with the PBS NewsHour, in which we provide two video packages a week and a network of correspondents around the world who can serve as a first line of reporting on a breaking news story. When the Haiti and Chile earthquakes happened, GlobalPost was there. Both CBS and the NewsHour also carried elements of our special report out of Afghanistan and Pakistan titled “Life, Death and the Taliban,” an ambitious multimedia project that included a team of reporters and photographers who set out to tell the story of the Taliban from its origins to Sept. 11 and beyond.
One revenue stream is Passport, a $50- per-year membership fee that invites users of the site to join the GlobalPost community and support the journalism we provide.
On that morning watching the sun rise from my office, my musings were interrupted by that signature chirping of Skype. And with one key stroke, there was Ed Gargan on my screen from his office in Beijing. We took up once again the year-long process it has taken for us to get Gargan, a former New York Times correspondent in Beijing, credentialed as a working journalist with GlobalPost.
And so the daily hassles of working as a correspondent in the field continue. The difference is it used to take 90 days to arrive by ship. Now that information moves at the speed of light via the internet.
OPC member Charles Sennott is executive editor and co-founder of www.GlobalPost.com. Before launching the news service, he worked as bureau chief in the Middle East and Europe for the Boston Globe. He was a 2006 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.