NEW JOURNALISM PROJECT: Phil Balboni's GlobalPost

A guest post from Nikolaj Gammeltoft , a current student at the J-school who is interested in the business side of journalism:

I talked to Philip Balboni of GlobalPost today as a relevant follow-up
to yesterday's Ken Lerer and venture capital session. As you know,
Philip Balboni is a journalist, media entrepreneur and founder of
globalpost.com: http://www.globalnewsenterprises.com/teamExec01.php .

I thought I would share my notes from the conversation with the class
because what Balboni is doing is interesting from a media start-up
perspective and because there might be opportunities to work for
globalpost.com later on as freelance foreign correspondents. Please
forward if you see it relevant.

Balboni is launching www.globalpost.com in January 2009.

In Balboni's words, GlobalPost is a new destination for high quality
international news in America. It is not event oriented (he does not
want to compete with AP and Reuters). Instead they want to publish the
untold stories from around the world. They are using country-based
reporting and the freelance correspondents live in the countries they
report on – they do not hop from country to country.

GlobalPost is targeted at an American audience, reflecting Balboni's
view that foreign news reporting is an underserved niche in US
journalism. "The absence of global reporting is stunning," as he said.
Balboni called GlobalPost a destination site – not a news service
although they sell syndication services to newspapers.

It is a start-up so it has a small organization (Balboni works out of
in Boston) but he sees big business and editorial opportunities down
the road in this kind of international news reporting service. His
cost structure reflects this. So as Balboni said, it is sufficiently
costly to create quality news but not too expensive.

It is based on three revenue streams: Advertisement (sponsorship-based
rather than transaction-based); syndication to newspapers (a
supplement to papers that have eliminated their foreign desk and
correspondents – The Star-Ledger in Newark is the first customer to
sign on for this) and finally paid content (they are launching an
elite membership called globalpost passport which will be "fairly
expensive." They are using focus groups to find and understand the
audience for this kind of service).

They are using freelancers as their country correspondents (mostly
Americans right now but could use other nationalities writing in
American-English). They sign agreements that are multi-year and pay
them in cash + shares in the company. Balboni said they had stepped up
the freelance relationship to a higher level. They want to have the
regular relationship with one reporter in a country but they are open
to having more in the same country depending on size and importance I
guess (they have three in China now for example).

Balboni said that GlobalPost is a great place for a young foreign
correspondent to start out at.

GlobalPost has not received venture capital money. Balboni has raised
the money from individual investors ("individuals of integrity," as he
called them) and he stressed that GlobalPost is "totally independent."
He wrote a business plan for GlobalPost and got people to believe in
it.

Balboni said he had always moved to new technologies in his career.
From print to cable programming and now to internet. He thinks
journalism will be reborn/saved by the internet. But there is an
enormous challenge here. He believes serious news consumers will be on
the web in the future. So we have to build new models of journalism
for the web because quality journalism must succeed on the web,
otherwise it might disappear.

As for advice for a media entrepreneur starting out today?

Balboni said: Look for a void, fill a need - develop a business plan
around it. Politico did it, they created a high quality political
reporting site, but were also lucky that they had the greatest
political campaign of US history as their launch pad. But look at how
to service local markets/local communities. There are a lot of
opportunities.

Balboni is on the school's Board of Visitors. He is a graduate of the
school. He was in an international reporting program at Columbia early
1970s (after having worked at UPI) and came up with this idea for an
alternative wire service then. So as he said about GlobalPost: "The
seed for this was planted at Broadway and 116th Street."