Tag Results for GlobalPost

The deadliest day in journalism history happened on November 23 when as many as 30 journalists were killed after an election convoy in the Phillipines was massacred.  With the technology making it easier to report, will inexperience lead to more tragedies?

Our friends at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab have an interesting blog post about GlobalPost, the international news startup created by New England Cable News founder and former WCVB executive Phil Balboni and former Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charlie Sennott.

Speaking at a recent conference at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, Balboni said the company should generate $1 million in revenue this year. That's the good news. The bad news: Nieman Lab blogger Zachary Seward estimates that GlobalPost's annual expenses are about $5 million.

But as with any startup, the question isn't so much whether you're profitable right now as whether you can get to profitability before you burn through your seed capital. Balboni said the goal is to achieve profitability by 2012, which would mean reducing the company's operating loss by 50 percent each of the next two years.

David Carr’s report in the New York Times that Boston-based GlobalPost will partner with CBS News strikes me as a potentially significant development.

It’s unclear from Carr’s story exactly how much use CBS intends to make of GlobalPost’s journalism. But this could be just the boost that Phil Balboni, Charlie Sennott and company need to keep GlobalPost moving forward.

Particularly eye-catching were a couple of numbers. GlobalPost is reportedly attracting 400,000 unique visitors per month, which appears to impress Carr, but which strikes me as dangerously low — even if it’s as good as could be expected for a new project. (For purposes of comparison, the Boston Globe’s Web site, Boston.com, attracts between 4 million and 5 million unique visitors each month.)

Even worse, only a few hundred people have signed up for premium (paid) membership.

Anyone who’s perused the site, though, knows that GlobalPost’s journalism is both engaging and substantive. With network news divisions cutting their international reporting to the bone, GlobalPost has a real opportunity.

With the election in Afghanistan just days away, GlobalPost, the Boston-based international news service, has weighed in with a first-rate multimedia presentation on the Taliban and its operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Reported by executive editor Charles Sennott and photographed mainly by Seamus Murphy, the package includes text, videos, a slideshow, a historical timeline, a Google map, and podcasts posted to the public radio program "The World."

For Sennott, a former reporter for the Boston Globe, the project is something of a reprise. In 2006, Sennott was one of the principal journalists who helped put together a package on the war against terrorism, published on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. His "Reporter's Notebook" of multimedia dispatches from Afghanistan and Pakistan was something of a pioneering effort.

In the GlobalPost series, Sennott draws on his long experience in the region, interviewing sources he first met years ago. And he offers some nuance that leaves you feeling uneasy.

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