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TRANSCRIPT
Interview with Phil Balboni, GlobalPost CEO and Founder
For podcast release
Monday, August 12, 2013
KENNEALLY: Once upon a time, journalists could reasonably say, “we don’t make the news,
we only report it.” In 2013, though, journalism is the story. E-commerce pioneer Jeff
Bezos has purchased the Washington Post from longtime owners the Graham family,
reminding everyone of the struggle for survival now overwhelming the newspaper business
in the United States. In newsrooms, in boardrooms, and in living rooms, the question is
put: Is high-quality, professional news reporting entering its last days?
Welcome to Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series. My name is Christopher
Kenneally for Beyond the Book. In the GlobalPost newsroom overlooking Boston Harbor,
editors and reporters are giving many readers around the world reason to believe that
professional journalism does indeed have a place in a digital, mobile world. The online-
only news site has earned a reputation for international news reporting in just a few short
years, filling gaps in US news coverage left where the old guard has retreated. Joining us
on Beyond the Book is Phil Balboni, president, CEO, and founder of GlobalPost. Phil,
welcome to Beyond the Book.
BALBONI: Good to be with you. Thank you.
KENNEALLY: Well, thank you for joining us. You know, it’s the worst of times, it’s the best
of times for journalism. I want to ask you first, what does GlobalPost do that traditional
media either gets wrong or hasn’t figured out yet?
BALBONI: Well, I don’t think I would look at it quite that way. I think we’re all in the same
boat. Whether you’re traditional media, new media, purely digital like GlobalPost, the
challenges are similar. Of course, if you are a legacy media brand, whether that be a
newspaper or a television station or a network or a magazine, you carry over from, shall we
say, the old world into this early 21st century problems that are not only lingering, they are
worsening. So that’s one thing we don’t have.
KENNEALLY: And those problems would be?
BALBONI: Those problems are a massive migration of consumers to digital, whether that’s
online or mobile. Mobile, of course, is becoming enormously important –smartphones,
tablet computers, what have you. If you have a legacy media operation, print circulation, if
that be your business, it continues to decline across the board. Everyone is experiencing it,
with very, very few exceptions.
Even when people raise the price of the newspaper or the magazine, it usually isn’t enough
to keep up with the decline in revenue. Advertising revenue in traditional media,
particularly print, also continues to go down at a fairly alarming clip. This is some of the
most prestigious and valuable brands – New York Times, so on and so forth.
These problems have not been resolved. The migration to digital is wonderful in many
respects, but the Internet advertising economy is immensely complicated. It is not nearly
as financially rewarding as the old world, shall we say. And these problems do not, as yet,
have a solution. I would be the last person in the world to suggest that we have something
figured out that no one else has.
I’ll tell you what we do have that is, I think, a great strength. Number one – I think we
have an incredibly interesting niche in global news coverage. It’s one that many people
have departed from. Most people have. There’s only a handful of people left who are
doing it, in terms of original reporting. We have our arms around the world, and we have
an opportunity to tell really important stories that aren’t being told by many other people.
That’s a great opportunity, and it’s an exciting one.
We understand that, since the American audience is our primary focus, that in America not
everyone is interested in international news. But there is a large segment of people who
are. They tend to be the most affluent, the best educated. Many of them are very young,
because young people are very interested in the world. So that’s one great advantage.
Another one is that we built GlobalPost from scratch. We created our entire operation to
be highly efficient, to produce high-quality content at the lowest possible cost. We really
have tremendous control over our cost structure. While we spend millions of dollars, it’s a
modest amount of cost compared to the scale of what we’re doing, and it gives us a greater
opportunity to be financially successful.
This is not something that legacy media is able to do. They’re busy – I’m sure you see it
all the time – almost every day you can read a story about this newspaper or that
newspaper or a magazine or a television station is cutting back, laying off. This has been
going on steadily for five or six years, and it hasn’t stopped. Maybe it’s moderated, but it
hasn’t stopped.
I think, lastly, operating in the purely digital realm is – you develop a sensibility. You
only have that one focus. We only live in this world. Everything that we do is focused on
that. It’s in your DNA, and you really are focused on it. You don’t have divided loyalties.
You don’t have to worry about getting that print newspaper out and delivered to Mr. Jones,
who lives 50 miles away.
Everything that we do is focused on the digital consumer. That continues to be a huge
growth industry, not only in the US, but around the world. We have a very global
audience. Every single month, we have readers from more than 220 countries – almost
every country in the entire world.
KENNEALLY: Well, that digital native status is clearly important to you. But I wonder if you
could help distinguish the kind of coverage the GlobalPost does as well as – or from
Reuters or Agence France-Presse – that kind of thing.
BALBONI: Sure. While we cover breaking news, we tend to focus our reporting on four
principal areas, where we think we can excel and we can do things that others aren’t doing.
That’s politics – global politics – business, culture and conflict. Those are kind of our
specialty areas. You mentioned Reuters and Agence France-Presse. We actually license
both of those excellent news agencies. Their content appears on GlobalPost in a quite high
volume. So we give our readers the opportunity to follow all of those stories.
We also license four other international agencies in Asia and in Europe. We have an
extraordinary range and volume of that kind of material, which is the stories of the day –
some of them important and some of them not so, but they all have some level of interest
among readers somewhere. We can really target our reporting to focus on really
interesting perspective on the world. We’ve expanded our team of full-time
correspondents. Now we have 13 of them and we have another 50 who are purely
freelance.
It’s a fascinating editorial challenge. I always say that journalists have the opportunity to
take the spotlight and train it across the landscape, and you can stop anywhere. It’s a big
landscape. There’s no science to it. It’s really all art, and what an editor or editors believe
is important and what reporters can reach and cover.
We’re still very young. So we’re still determining how to best refine what the GlobalPost
brand means to people, how we can be most valuable in this world. This is a process I can
imagine going on for at least another five years before, hopefully, we’ve landed on just the
right formula where we believe that we’re important, that we’re doing something good and
substantive in journalism, and that also meets the needs of our readers.
KENNEALLY: You mentioned licensing deals to put content from Reuters and AFP on your
site, but you’ve also done some licensing deals that will put your material onto most
recently the NBC.com site, as well as, in the past, CBS and PBS. When you’re going to be
licensing content to those American organizations, what do they tell you they’re looking
for in GlobalPost? I think they need, first of all, an assurance of credible, high-quality
journalism. That’s clearly an important point to them.
BALBONI: Sure. Well, syndication is part of our business model. The NBC agreement is the
apex of that, for sure. Our agreement with NBC is very broad ranging, so that we are
making our correspondents available to them 24/7 to help with their coverage. Television
networks have greatly reduced their foreign bureaus. They usually only have a handful of
people who are actually resident overseas. Usually they’re clustered in places like London,
maybe Tokyo, a few other places. We’re able to help them be sure that when something
happens, there’s somebody that they can trust that’s close by.
We’re also making our content available – not all of it, but a portion of our content – that
can be published on nbcnews.com, and we’re working with them in a variety of other
ways. It gives them a trusted partner whose focus is purely international to augment what
they’re able to do themselves.
Because NBC is multi-platform – you know, they have NBC broadcast network, they have
MSNBC, CNBC for business, and then they have a very big digital platform – they’re very
interesting in the range of opportunities that it presents to us for assisting with their
coverage of the world.
KENNEALLY: Tell us more about the correspondents who are providing that kind of coverage.
They are all Americans – is that correct?
BALBONI: Most of them are Americans. Probably 80% or 90% are. That isn’t a criterion
that’s hard and fast. It just seems to turn out that way. Usually, American journalists write
with the idiom and the ear that’s best for the audience that’s the most important to us. But
we certainly have others. Our principal conflict reporter, Tracey Shelton, is Australian,
and we have others. Our London, UK, correspondent happens to be British. But most of
them are American.
KENNEALLY: For those correspondents, what’s the relationship you have with them? You
mentioned you’ve got full-time correspondents, you’ve got freelancers. Have you learned
how to work with freelancers in the digital age in ways that were different from your
previous experience, for example?
BALBONI: Well, we pay them, first of all, which is very important to them.
KENNEALLY: In a retainer basis – I think, if I read correctly? Or are you talking about simply
the fact that so much of reporting these days goes unpaid.
BALBONI: Well, we began in 2009 with retainers for a large number of our people. We’ve
moved those relationships, with a fewer number, into full-time. So these 13 what we call
senior correspondents work exclusively and full-time for GlobalPost. We found that that
really gave us the kind of control that made the most sense, so that we could do the kind of
coverage that we really wanted.
With the others, the relationships can be more frequent or less frequent, depending on
where they are, what’s happening in the area that they are, how aggressive they are about
pitching us stories, how good and interesting those stories are. But it’s wonderful to have a
broad network of good people.
And I say correspondents. We also have a quite a broad network of videographers as well,
because we’re doing a fair amount of video, and it’s important to have those people on
your team. It would be wonderful if every, you know, reporter could shoot and edit video
or do sound, as we’re doing now. But a lot of journalists are still single track. We
certainly have some who can do it all. But it’s not the majority yet.
At the end of the day, you’re really looking for somebody who’s as good a reporter as you
can find and whose writing is really good. That’s kind of the irreducible minimum for
producing great journalism.
KENNEALLY: What’s the role of social media for you? I follow you on Facebook and on
Twitter as well. That’s clearly been something that wasn’t even around or wasn’t
considered in 2009, when you began, and now is an essential part of what journalism is for
most people. How have you adapted to that?
BALBONI: We have a social media team – three people, who that’s all they do. Social media is
immensely important for all news sites, and there are so many different platforms. You
mentioned Facebook and Twitter. There’s LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram.
There are social bookmarking sites, like reddit. Reddit is one of the largest referrers of
traffic to news sites. It’s a community of people that post articles in scores, in hundreds, of
different verticals. World news happens to be one of them. Politics is another big one.
And then they vote those up or down. The higher they rise in the list of stories, the more
likely they are to be clicked on. And when they’re clicked on, the reader comes to your
site.
But there are people who believe that social media is the way that most or all people will
get their news in the future – that brands will become less important or not important at all.
I don’t think I believe that. But I believe that the sharing of stories by people in the
various platforms that they’ve become accustomed to is clearly very important.
It’s so easy to do it now. You can share a story – you can tweet a story on GlobalPost with
a single mouse click. You come to the site, it recognizes who you are, and you’re
immediately – you have to log in on the site one time. That’s all. After that, it recognizes
you. And then you can tweet a story. You know, it’s just so easy.
We never could do that before. If you were interested in a story that you read someplace,
what did you do about it? You probably didn’t call somebody up. We didn’t have e-mail.
Maybe you were a very good friend, and you clipped it out of the newspaper or you ripped
it out of the magazine and you put it into an envelope, put a stamp on it, addressed it and
sent it off to somebody.
But now we can share things that are interesting to us so easily. So it’s logical that this
social sharing has become a huge way that people find out about things that they would
never have known before. We have to pay an enormous amount of attention to it.
We are looking to create more and more stories that are in our brand-appropriate arena that
are inherently more shareable. There’s a site that you may know of called BuzzFeed.
BuzzFeed was created by one of the founders of the Huffington Post. And BuzzFeed is all
about social media. Their stories are all created – or I shouldn’t say all – maybe some
huge percent are created just for sharing.
Many of them, in truth, are just large aggregations of cute animals or other things that are
amusing but have no substance. So you can carry it too far. But I think social media has
become an incredibly powerful force – really right up there with search as vitally important
for any news site.
KENNEALLY: You mentioned the way that certain brands have lost their luster, the traditional
legacy brands, but GlobalPost is one of those brands that is in a small company – would
include Politico and ProPublica. I think that you would probably find yourselves sort of
very similar in many ways. Those are the new brands, aren’t they, that are coming to have
real value in this age?
BALBONI: Yes. That’s a very good point. There’s half a dozen or so purely digital sites that
have bubbled up to a level of awareness. We look at our audience delivery every month in
comScore, which is really the bible for digital measurement, and we are in the top 35
national news sites in the country now, with CNN at the top. It’s a waterfall that comes
down from the Huffington Post, NBC News, the New York Times, Washington Post, so on
and so forth – all the familiar names.
Within that group, GlobalPost is not number 35, but nearer the bottom. Politico is there.
The Daily Beast is another one. Slate and Salon are the two oldest purely digital sites.
Salon was started in 1995 in San Francisco. Slate was started in 1996 by Microsoft and
was headquartered in California. It’s now owned by the Washington Post.
RealClearPolitics is another one.
But there’s not many in this – it’s a small fraternity. Each has its own niche. Politics is a
big one. There are others that are more general. Slate and Salon are really kind of like
magazine-y. Culture, politics, opinion, certainly some news, but not known as news sites.
So it’s an interesting group. We know many of them quite well, and we certainly pay close
attention to what they’re doing. I imagine they probably pay close attention to what we’re
doing, too.
KENNEALLY: Finally, your history with the journalism business is quite distinguished. You
really helped to established the WCVB brand as a news provider here in Boston, went on
to found, very successfully, New England Cable News – very much traditional media
background. What’s it like for a traditional media man to find oneself, at this point in your
career, in this digital environment, in this startup environment? How do you make it in
that kind of a very different world from when you began your career?
BALBONI: You know, it feels very natural. All the things that I’ve done – this is my 46th
year
in journalism, believe it or not, and I’ve been in almost every medium in which you can do
journalism. But I’ve always taken on interesting, tough challenges and have always been
kind of an entrepreneur – either literally or de facto entrepreneur.
My last enterprise – NECN, which you referred to – we started that from scratch, against
all odds. People said, oh, why would anybody want to watch 24-hour local news when you
could watch at 6:00 or 11:00? Well, because it’s a 24/7 world, and people really don’t
want to wait. We built something that we were very proud of, that was high quality, and
that developed quite a large following.
Digital – I say this often – is so much harder than anything I’ve ever done before. It makes
television seem easy. I could develop massive nostalgia for television in this business,
because everything about it is complicated, particularly the technology and what lies
behind it. Either you learn it and you throw yourself into it and develop a lot of new
muscles, or you don’t, and you sink.
I think it’s a fascinating challenge. Many things are the same. People aren’t different.
Problems and challenges and whatever motivations of people are always the same.
Building the brand and developing credibility is very much the same also. I think one of
the things that all of us are very proud of is that in four and a half years, we have built a
brand that is widely respected, to the degree that, most recently now, NBC News said,
yeah, we’ll partner with you and we’ll tell the world that we’re proud to do that. You just
don’t do that with anybody.
But it feels very comfortable. You have to be prepared to work hard – very hard. And you
have to be prepared to have a large dose of disappointment and frustration. But that’s the
startup world. I feel very comfortable in the environment that I find myself. I know that
this is where the future of journalism is going to be made. We will either survive and
prosper in this environment, or we’re all going to be in tough shape.
KENNEALLY: Phil Balboni – president, CEO and founder of GlobalPost – thanks for joining
us on Beyond the Book.
BALBONI: It was my pleasure. Thank you.
KENNEALLY: Beyond the Book is produced by Copyright Clearance Center. Copyright
Clearance Center is a global rights broker for the world’s most sought after materials,
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