Jeff Bennett's Blog

GlobalPost.com, the Boston-based international news organization that was launched last year by news veterans Phil Balboni and Charlie Sennott, has announced an alliance with CBS to promote its brand of global news from its 74 correspondents based in 50 countries.  CBS News will use GlobalPost’s content for its online and TV broadcast division.

The site does have other partnerships including the New York Daily News.

GlobalPost is operating in the brave new world of news.  In a business environment where most news organizations are cutting editorial resources, especially on a global scale, GlobalPost is building.  They have built a high quality network of correspondents with a new business model that does not encumber the company with lots of unnecessary costs.  Quality is high.  Costs are lower.

Another model that is emerging is what the BleacherReport team is doing in sports.  In this model BleacherReport is building a network of passionate fans who want to write about sports.  This is more citizen journalism.  The quality is high though due to the fact that if you are a contributor at BleacherReport you are posting and editing others posts.  This community based editorial function lifts quality in a meaningful way.

Syndication and branding is such a critical element for an emerging media business. And this is where both the emerging GlobalPost and BleacherReport are very similar.  In both the news and sports media business the traditional companies are trying to cut costs.  Editorial is where they are cutting as there is alot of operating expense in this part of their businesses.  It is counterintuitive as you would think that a media company would not want to cut costs on content…but the models are broken.  This is an enormous opportunity for GlobalPost and BleacherReport as they can offer the content that is needed by CBS, NY Daily News, Fox Sports, CBS Sportsline, and so on for almost free…surely less expensive than the media oultlet producing it themselves.  Both Global Post and BleacherReport pick up needed syndication, links back to their sites and valuable branding that will drive more and more direct audience growth, awareness and valuable links for search engine optimization.

This is the way forward for traditional media outlets…they should rush to get quality players like GlobalPost and BleacherReport on board now!

GlobalPost raised $8.2 million last year to start the news organization.  The site has 400,000 unique monthly visitors at this point.

Congrats to Phil and Charlie as this deal looks like a great opportunity to expand GlobalPost.