His lawyer wanted him to fight that decision, Balboni recalls, but, again, there was the matter of money. Specifically, not having any. “I didn’t even have any money to pay his bill—which he was nice enough to forgive—and my wife was pregnant, my daughter was about to be born, and I needed a job.”

So, a job Balboni got—one that would launch a thirty-plus-year career in broadcast journalism. And that, for the time being, was that.

Until this week, when GlobalPost’s launch brought to fruition the years-old idea that seems, however, particularly suited to the infancy of the Internet. Indeed, the Web’s ability to collapse space and time—and to bring stories alive in ways that even the most exciting prose cannot—makes it a logical locus for foreign reporting. As Amy Jeffries, GlobalPost’s senior multimedia producer, puts it, “Integrating multimedia with other content, so it’s not off in a corner somewhere, so it’s not divorced from our mission—that is our mission.”

To fulfill it, Sennott (who personally recruited a high percentage of GlobalPost’s editorial staff) and Balboni have assembled a crackerjack crew of reporters: award-winners, experienced shoe-leatherers, former editors and bureau chiefs. They tend to fall into one of three categories: young-and-hungry; mid-career-and-looking-for-a-change; and seasoned-and-looking-for-an-adventure. The correspondents are generally paid $1,000 a month—without benefits—for four 800-word stories, with blogging and multimedia work currently unpaid and (depending on whom you talk to) falling somewhere on the scale between “encouraged” and “expected.” Many of the correspondents, especially the younger ones, are doing their GlobalPost reporting in addition to other freelance gigs in journalism (Jason Overdorf, GlobalPost’s India correspondent, freelances for Newsweek) and other ventures (Matt Beynon Rees, who covers Israel, is doing his reporting while writing the next of his Gaza-focused mystery novels). Many of the correspondents are journalistic refugees, bought-out or laid-off casualties of journalism’s war with itself.

And many of them are indignant about the low priority the journalistic community, as a whole, has given to international coverage at a time when familiarity with world events is more vital than ever. “The fact that our industry is so badly managed is not our fault,” GlobalPost’s U.K. correspondent, Michael Goldfarb, told me. “Clearly the big organizations aren’t nimble enough to react to this new reality that we’re facing.”

The success Sennott had in recruiting what Goldfarb calls “a pretty ace team” of correspondents, Goldfarb thinks, indicates their dedication to good journalism. “It’s a measure of how much the reporters in the field want to do the job,” he says. “No matter how much all of us have taken a kicking…we come back, excited to work.”

Given their shares in the company’s spotlight and its stock, the correspondents are players in a game whose stakes are high: if this crack team of reporters and business-side operators can’t make international reporting profitable, it’s hard to imagine that anyone else can. Still, they believe, the high stakes are worth the gamble, in part because it’s a gamble whose winnings can be shared. “We must—must, must—create new, for-profit models of journalism,” Balboni says. “The best way to ensure long-term sustainability is by having a real business that is fired in the marketplace, and that has revenue that’s generated by consumers and other means that will sustain it for the long term.” He respectfully disagrees with those who have argued that journalism’s economic future lies in the nonprofit world. “Nonprofit is great—we have NPR, which is one of the great journalism organizations created in the last 100 years—but it’s an unusual phenomenon. And even NPR, as we’ve seen, has financial problems,” he notes.

For Balboni, quite literally, it’s profit-or-bust. “I believe that this is the best way,” he says of GlobalPost’s model. “I don’t believe it’s the only way, but if you want to look at the overall future of journalism—we have to have for-profit models if we’re going to have a future. That’s why we’re going down this road.”


Beyond Funding

It’s fitting that the attention GlobalPost has received this week—and, indeed, the attention it’s been receiving since the organization announced itself last March—has focused on the financial-model aspects of Balboni and Sennott’s venture: at a time when journalism as we’ve known it is [insert your favorite dying-a-slow-death euphemism here], the need for financial sustainability is literally vital.

And yet. In all the Will This Save Journalism? flurry, less attention has been paid to the editorial aspects of GlobalPost’s plans for innovation. Which are in some ways just as significant as the financial. “We always said that GlobalPost is not a breaking news organization,” Balboni says. “Our correspondents are not primarily focused on reinventing the wheel”—they have no interest in changing a reporting model that the AP, the BBC, and other organizations already use to great effect—but aim rather to add new dimensions to the breaking-news stories that other organizations write. In that, the journalism GlobalPost plans to produce—contextual, narrative, with an emphasis on good writing and, as Sennott is fond of reiterating, “good storytelling”—promises (or threatens, depending on your point of view) to shift the balance of power between breaking-news and more context-driven stories in international coverage. By focusing on the latter, GlobalPost is effectively rejecting the view of a world whose contours are shaped and shaded by breaking news’s general tropism toward tragedy—a view that not only tends to lump the world beyond our borders into the euphemistic blur of “foreign countries,” but that also broadly conceives of those countries as plagued by explosions and floods and angry riots, and populated by militant men, sexually oppressed women, and bulge-bellied, empty-eyed children.