GlobalPost illustrates the life of the correspondent nouveau.

Its 65 professional correspondents living around the world earn $1,000 a month for filing news stories and blog posts interesting to a Western, English-speaking audience.

Certainly, there is a need for alternatives to content machines like AFP, Reuters and The Associated Press. These bureaux are forever doing more with less, leaving publics around the world consuming news stories with little background information. Further, wire stories add tremendously to the echo chamber that can be the Internet. Online, the exclusivity of wire content is nil, making its ubiquity at times puzzling.

To wit: in 2006, the content of the top six online aggregators – AOL, Yahoo, Nando, Lycos, Excite and Alta Vista - was comprised of 85 percent wire service copy. Even MSNBC, CNN, BBBC, Sky News, The Guardian and The New York Times are stocked full of wire copy – 50 percent in 2006.

It’s important to note: the mission of Global Post is to better inform American citizens about world affairs. It’s a mission they share with The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. And it’s why all Global Post correspondents, like Teri Schultz, who covers the European Union, are American.

But the mission statement begs the question: is an all-American cadre of stringers the best crew for tunnelling out of the echo chamber?

That’s what Georgia Popplewell, the managing editor of Global Voices, wonders.

• “I still think that in the current climate a more sustainable model for an international news bureau would be one that cultivated local journalists,” she e-mailed Mark Glaser of Media Shift. “The main reason for the closure of foreign desks is financial—yet a good portion of [GlobalPost’s] budget is obviously going to be devoted toward paying the living expenses of their non-local correspondents…I’m not denying that knowledge and experience count for a great deal in journalism. I’m saying, rather, that there are often local journalists with knowledge and experience equivalent to or greater than that of the people GlobalPost is sending in.”

A difference between the two initiatives, though, is that GlobalPost pays its writers while Global Voices is largely a volunteer operation. Its staff is, by and large, unpaid.

Europeans searching for international stories published by either Global Voices or GlobalPost won’t miss out. Nearly all GlobalPost content is available for free online. English-language newspapers may also sign up for a paid subscription to offline content which they may utilise in the way newspapers have always used wire services. A Vietnamese newspaper and the Huffington Post are among early subscribers.

Their subscriptions are part of the three-pronged GlobalPost business model. Which highlights a most unique facet of the new news service: It’s for profit. This is a divergence from recent initiatives like Pro Publica or LinkTV.

Global Post says it will make money from subscription fees as well as online advertising and syndication schemes. On the other side of the ledger, it will pay correspondents $1,000 for publishing at least one story per week, in addition to blog posts. Here again Global Post diverges from recent initiatives like AllVoices, which pays writers based on performance results.

Published: January 28, 2009