Interview with Sennott about upcoming GlobalPost.com
While most major U.S. news organizations are fleeing the expensive realm of international coverage, the Global Post is poised to enter the space as an online-only organization.
Charles Sennott is a veteran of the Boston Globe’s foreign desk. He laments the fact that many major metros like the Globe no longer have foreign bureaus. He believes, however, that the demand is still there for coverage of international news.
Enter the Global Post. It is staffed by seven editors — including Sennott, the top dog — and seven business staffers in Boston. It, however, has a large network of global correspondents — 70 in 53 countries, to be exact. This new venture will launch on January 12, 2009.
It’s a different structure than most traditional media outlets. The Global Post wants to work with foreign correspondents who are already living abroad and working on other projects. This is a flatter, nimbler structure that should allow the Global Post to add more correspondents where demand is high (Global Post is looking for additional correspondents, by the way).
“We are able to create a very light structure that stretches out across the world,” he said.
That structure that stretches across the world is partly made possible by the fact that the Global Post doesn’t have a newspaper to print. The cost of printing and distribution is hampering innovation at a lot of newspapers.
“We start with a Web-based news organization in which we are stealth and light,” he said. “We don’t have trucks. We don’t have printing press. We don’t order ink by the barrel.”
One area that really piqued the interest of Beat Blogging, is how the Global Post is hoping to tap into local blogging networks. The Global Post will have a dedicated blog editor whose job it is to managing staff bloggers and find quality bloggers around the world.
The Global Post hopes to find the top five bloggers for each area they cover. So, for instance, you could consume Global Post content from Johannesburg, South Africa, while also being directed to the best local bloggers from that area too.
The Global Post also plans on using social media. Sennott wants to use social media to connect with people all over the world who could help the Global Post understand the world better.
“We really want to create a community of writers on one side of the screen, who are working together as people who care about international reporting,” he said. “And we definitely want to create a community on the other side of the screen of people who want to share their thoughts, their ideas and their stories.”
We’ll definitely be checking back in with the Global Post after it launches to see how their mesh of correspondents and bloggers can cover international news.
Some other questions answered:
- What is the business model of the Global Post? Sennott believes they’ll be profitable in year three.
- What will make this news organization different from The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor and other similar publications?
- Is there a future for large metros that continue to focus on print?
Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.
Interview with John Yemma about the CS Monitor’s future
Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.
Earlier this week, The Christian Science Monitor announced that they’ll be ceasing daily print production.
Instead, they’ll be focusing much more heavily online and creating a new weekly magazine. We were interested in finding out how the Monitor’s new Web-first focus would change their journalism and how they would begin to incorporate social media. We also discussed the business reasons behind this decision.
Editor John Yemma said the Monitor has been considering this decision for about two years. The review involved looking at the Monitor’s resources, doing market research, looking at the overall market and what it would take to make this transition. The biggest part of this transition will be revenue.
The Monitor makes the majority of its revenue from subscriptions, not advertising like most newspapers. By cutting back to a weekly product, the Monitor has to drop its subscription rates from $210 to $89 per year.
The Monitor, however, will save more than $2 million a year in printing and distribution costs, according to Yemma. Still, that leaves a gap of revenue of about $1.5 million.
“The main way we’ll make up for the lost revenue is by growing traffic on the Web,” he said.
Yemma means serious traffic. He’s talking from going from about 5 million page views a month to 25-30 million a month. The Monitor is also facing an 11 percent budget cut next fiscal year, which will mean 10-15 percent of the Monitor’s editorial staff will lose their jobs.
The Monitor is hoping to be sustainable within five years from this new model. If the Monitor is able to hit that 25-30 million page view goal, Yemma believes they will be sustainable.
The Monitor is rolling out a new CMS next year, which Yemma says will them to “democratize the running of the Web site.”
“It has to be done by people who have more technical knowledge,” Yemma said about the current Web site and CMS. ”We want people who are less technically oriented and more journalistically oriented to be more involved in the daily management and the hour-by-hour management of the Web site.”
Yemma says that some staff will have to be retrained, while new employees might need to be hired. But it’s too early to tell. Going truly Web-first is a huge paradigm shift. The Monitor isn’t even sure yet what all the possibilities are.
“There are so many ways of telling stories on the Internet that we as journalists haven’t even explored yet because we’ve been so locked into the very linear story telling of print,” Yemma said. “When you switch to a Web-first strategy, you begin to think wow the Web is about interactivity, the Web is about feeds and fluidity and mashups.
The Monitor is still figuring out its social media strategy. Over the next few months, editors will hash out how to best utilize social media and how to make it fit into the Monitor brand. Yemma, however, knows what he wants social media to help the Monitor accomplish.
“Our idea is that the Monitor doesn’t just exist as a single Web site within the kind of little niche that is created, but that it broadens horizontally across the Web and creates a community of Monitor fans,” he said. “Social media really helps us broaden out along those lines.”
The Monitor is not giving up on print. The new weekly magazine will feature original content and analysis that hasn’t yet appeared on the Web.
“Pay people money for the weekly, they deserve fresh, not second-hand content,” Yemma said.
Yemma said he sees planning some of the pieces for the weekly in a way that helps create topics pages for the Web site. For instance, the prototype of the new magazine has a cover story called the “Putin Generation.” That piece would eventually slide onto the topics page of CSMonitor.com for Russia.
“In a sense, the magazine helps us kind of create, over time, a sort of Monitor encyclopedia of the world that will be a living encyclopedia,” he said. “The web is about relatively short, relatively fast updates. The magazine is more in-depth and the two work together on the Web.”
The Monitor is launching another new product that will probably cost money (that’s still being debated). It’s a 2-3 page daily brief in PDF form. It will have abbreviated versions of four main stories on the Web. It would also have briefs and an editorial.
“As we move online, we want to give some of our print readers — who aren’t that keen on the online world — something they can print out and read over their cup of tea or coffee.”
Yemma sees print as an increasingly premium product. Web traffic is highest during Monday-Friday, and Sunday has traditionally been a strong point for newspapers. Yemma believes it makes sense to target a premium print product for the weekend when people have more time to relax and sit down.
“If it’s a premium product, you don’t want to have it every day of the week,” he said.
Some of the other topics discussed:
- Could this model work for other papers? How about for-profits?
- What was the biggest fear you and other top Monitor employees had before making this decision? How did you overcome it?
- How have your employees taken to this news?
- How have loyal readers of print responded?
- A daily newspaper is centered around the daily miracle. There is no daily miracle on the Web. How will deadlines be decided now? What will the new daily workflow be like at the Monitor?
- And much more.
