Message to Our Readers, July 2010

By Philip S. Balboni, President, CEO and Co-Founder

I want to offer a brief update on GlobalPost’s progress this year and also take this opportunity to express my gratitude and that of our staff for the enthusiasm and loyalty so many of you have shown over the months since our launch in January 2009. We deeply appreciate it.

GlobalPost has been one of the leaders in the movement to create new, more sustainable models for journalism at a time when news organizations everywhere are struggling with historic forces of change driven by technology, new consumer habits, and an eroding economic support system for traditional media. Our particular mission is to help fill the enormous void that has grown up in coverage of the world by US news organizations. More than ever before in history, we need knowledge of other countries and of the global forces that are impacting our economy, our environment, and our very security.

That is why GlobalPost exists and why we are working so hard to offer excellence in global reporting while also building a company with the financial strength to support our journalism mission.  I am proud to report that GlobalPost is making excellent progress and in an effort to keep you, our readers, informed let me share just a few recent highlights. 

Most importantly, the growth of our online audience continues to be one of our great strengths. In May, GlobalPost had 905,000 unique visitors from more than 222 countries, and we are very much on pace to achieve our 2010 goal of one million unique users a month. More than 4 million people have visited our site so far us this year and we expect our year-end total audience to be close to 10 million.

Nearly half of our total readership each month comes from returning visitors, a strong demonstration of loyalty and satisfaction for an online news site and I want to thank all of you who are regular visitors to GlobalPost. Please ask your friends to give us a try.

Our reporting from across the globe continues to expand and each month we employ more than 125 free-lance journalists, including our core team of more than 50 correspondents in every region of the world. Our goals for the remainder of the year include significantly enhanced coverage of the war in Afghanistan; expanded reporting from a number of strategically important countries including Brazil, Russia, India, and China; more background reporting and analysis on major global trends and events; and a continued commitment to high quality video reporting through our On Location series.

I am also very pleased to report that GlobalPost is on track to have a strong year financially with a significant increase in total revenues. We are particularly pleased by the growth in advertising revenue, our most important source of income. The syndication of our content to other media entities in the United States and around the world also continues to grow with significant upside potential in the years ahead.

One of the most innovative parts of GlobalPost is our Passport membership service. Passport was created to give our readers an opportunity to support our journalism while also receiving premium content and special benefits available only to members. Although we are committed to keeping GlobalPost free and open to all readers, we encourage all of you who visit us regularly to join Passport.

Later in July, we’ll institute new membership prices -- just $1.99 per month, or $22 a year, for a basic Passport membership or $49.95 for a full year’s premium membership that brings access to additional content. We hope you’ll join with us soon.

It’s important for me to remind those of you who have been with us for some time, as well as those of you who are new to GlobalPost, that we are a totally independent news organization. We are funded for the long term by a truly exceptional group of individual investors. GlobalPost has complete editorial independence, hews to no political point of view, and has no ownership ties to any other media company. Our sole dedication is to you, the readers.

All in all, 2010 is shaping up as a year of continued strong progress for GlobalPost. We could not succeed without your support and engagement, so please come often and tell us what you like and also what you believe needs improvement.

You can always reach me at pbalboni@globalpost.com.

With our best wishes, Phil Balboni

Year-End Message from President and Co-Founder Philip Balboni

This has been an extraordinary first year for GlobalPost. Steeped in growth and accomplishment and the forging of a multitude of wonderful partnerships, our site has become one of the most widely recognized leaders in charting a new path for the future of journalism. Most importantly, as we look forward to our second year in 2010, we are grateful to you, our readers and supporters throughout the world. Millions of you visited GlobalPost in 2009 and you came from virtually every nation and territory on earth. We are humbled by your commitment to GlobalPost and we reaffirm our dedication to the highest ethical and journalistic standards, and to our mission of covering as many of the world’s most interesting and important stories as our resources will permit.

During the past year, we built a strong brand and a highly distinctive website and we assembled a top-notch editorial and business team at our headquarters in Boston and around the world. As part of that team, our network of more than 70 correspondents spread across more than 50 countries in every region of the globe has become GlobalPost’s greatest asset. We are intensely proud of our correspondent corps. At a time when international news coverage continues to diminish, GlobalPost has become a trusted and reliable destination for the many journalists of all ages who have a passion to remain in the field as well as for those who aspire to join them as a foreign correspondent. Finally, we’ve fashioned a unique identity for GlobalPost that is beginning to establish long-term value and that will serve as the foundation for a vibrant business in the years to come.

One of the great successes of 2009 is the rapid growth of our audience. Perhaps the most common refrain that I heard when I was developing the business plan for GlobalPost was that no one really cared about international news and that we would never be able to build a sufficiently large audience in America or elsewhere to achieve financial viability. We’ve proven decisively that the skeptics were wrong. More than 4 million people have visited GlobalPost since our launch in January. More than three-quarters of a million unique visitors came to us in November, to use the internet terminology that defines audience success for any website. That total far surpassed our goal of achieving 600,000 unique users in a single month, a goal we set before our launch on Jan. 12, 2009.

And this audience is stunningly global. We’ve had visitors from 230 countries, less than a handful of every country and territory on earth. Consistently each month we have visits from more than 200 countries and those sending the most readers are the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Australia, China, Germany, Japan, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Brazil and Sweden.

We have also forged a remarkable array of editorial and promotional partnerships with both traditional and new media that have been enormously helpful in expanding awareness of GlobalPost. These partnerships include the PBS NewsHour, CBS News, AOL, the Huffington Post, Reuters, WorldFocus (also via PBS), Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, NewsMax and many others.

From the financial perspective, launching a new enterprise into the winds of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s has made the job of building the revenue side of our business much more difficult and challenging. And yet the three revenue streams that we created – advertising on our site, syndication of our original content and our premium content paid membership Passport — are all operating well and with varying degrees of success. GlobalPost was able to achieve meaningful revenue growth in 2009. We also managed our business and capital with great care. In the digital age, a journalism enterprise, to be successful, must avoid the spending pitfalls and the overreaching that were often common practice in many traditional media companies. We believe in fiscal restraint, prudent management and efficiency of operations.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the companies and advertising agencies that believed in us and supported us in 2009. In particular, I would note Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, Bank of America, Siemens, Merrill Lynch, Boston law firm Nutter McClennen & Fish, Tufts University, Singapore Airlines and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, one of the world’s leading cancer centers. Our thanks also to advertising agencies Digitas, Starcom Worldwide, Hill Holliday, MEC Global, PHD and Digital Root.

GlobalPost is well positioned for revenue growth in 2010. Our syndication business has seen substantial growth and we now have a growing body of affiliates in the United States and internationally. They include the New York Daily News, the Newark (NJ) Star Ledger, the Pittsburgh (PA) Post-Gazette, the South China Morning Post, the Cambodia Daily, CBS News and CBS Radio, the Australian Associated Press and others too numerous to mention here. We are very optimistic about continued growth in this sector of our business.

GlobalPost has also been a pioneer in generating consumer revenue online through our Passport premium membership service. There is a rapidly growing body of opinion that the future of journalism is intricately connected to direct financial support from online readers. We believe deeply in that, just as we do in building a community of readers who share our passionate interest in the world and who are empowered to share their thoughts and story ideas with us. We continue to believe that quality journalism has great value and that it is worthy of readers’ direct financial support. But we also believe this choice should be voluntary. We hope to find new, more effective ways to ask for your financial support just as we hope to find better ways to engage and reward you for that support. We are convinced there is a natural partnership here that can work on the web as it has always worked in the traditional media world.

Overall, it has been an exceptional year. Although our journey is just beginning, and we have a long road to travel, we are proud of our strong beginning and we are deeply grateful to all who have believed in us and supported us: our wonderful investors, our talented staff, our business and editorial partners, and our readers who most especially make it all worthwhile.

With best wishes for the holidays and the New Year, Phil Balboni

Our Mission:

GlobalPost is embarking on a bold journey to redefine international news for the digital age. To get there, we are relying on the enduring values of great journalism: integrity, accuracy, independence and powerful storytelling.

GlobalPost follows no political line. We encourage our correspondents to write with a strong voice and to work hard to unearth facts. But we leave opinion on the opinion pages.

We are proud to be an American news organization with a decidedly American voice. We also intend to seek out and tell the truth as we find it. To quote the great American newsman and foreign correspondent Edward R. Murrow, we aspire always to report the news “without fear or favor.”

Around these principles, GlobalPost intends to build a community of top correspondents as well as a community of users of the site who share the need and the desire for quality news about the world. We invite you to be part of that community and to provide feedback on our coverage and actively engage in the site as a participant. New technology allows us to make newsgathering a more transparent process — a process in which our visitors are invited to take part.

We commit to you that all reporting on GlobalPost will be held to the highest journalistic standards and that we will always make every effort to offer reporting that is fair, intelligent, comprehensive and free of partisanship. We pledge to be courageous in the pursuit of the truth and to stand firm against forces that may want that truth hidden.

We believe in an old school tradition that correspondents should live in the countries about which they write. We believe this is the only way to deliver you the kind of on-the-ground reporting that matters, reporting that can make a complex place clearer and that can untangle complex issues in a way you can understand how the events happening in a distant corner of the world affect your life every day at home.

As a matter of principle, we are dedicated to broad coverage throughout the world and especially of those geographic areas that have been historically under-reported by the American news media. We are committed to reporting on world issues and events that are important to the national dialogue and to improving the conversation of our democracy in an increasingly interconnected world.

We, the Founders of GlobalPost, are also acutely aware of the fact that quality journalism in America is threatened more profoundly today than at any time in our history from an unprecedented combination of forces: the transformational power of technology and the internet, the dramatic erosion in the economic underpinnings of the traditional media, and a steady migration of the most devoted consumers of news as well as younger people to new content platforms, most importantly the web.

GlobalPost is a direct response to these forces. Our mission is to provide Americans, and all English-language readers around the world, with a depth, breadth and quality of original international reporting that has been steadily diminished in too many American newspapers and television networks. GlobalPost is at the leading edge of what we hope and believe will become a new flowering of journalism in the digital age, built around new models of financial support.

GlobalPost is a for-profit enterprise and we are proud of the fact that every employee and correspondent in our network is a shareholder in our company. That is a rare opportunity for journalists and it’s part of what makes our company unique. GlobalPost’s financial support comes only from individuals of integrity who believe in our mission.

We have forged a business model that includes three pillars of financial support. The first is online advertising. The second is the syndication or sale of our content to other web and print publications around the world. And the third, and most bold, is the creation of an elite community on our site through paid membership — or through a rewards system for frequent users of GlobalPost — which we have dubbed Passport.

But whether you have three revenue sources or 30, there is no guarantee of success without the strong support of the users of our site. We hope you will join us here on GlobalPost often and see us as the first place you turn to understand what’s happening in the world around you. We look forward to serving you and to hearing from you in the months and years to come.

Read more about Philip S. Balboni and Charles M. Sennott. 

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