Columbia Journalism Review wrote a piece on the new international news web site Global Post. I’m still deciding if I like the look and feel of the web site, but their journalism and business model infrastructure is fascinating. Here are some major highlights.

What is it?

…it was founded by veteran journalists Phil Balboni and Charlie Sennott; that it currently employs seventy freelance correspondents covering nearly fifty countries, seven of them dedicated to transnational, idea-based beats; that these correspondents are supported by fourteen U.S.-based staff members focused on editing and multimedia production; and that the outlet’s three-tiered financial structure relies on advertising, syndication (in print and online), and—this is the biggie—reader subscriptions.

Reader subscriptions you say? No. They must be joking. Haven’t we proven that audiences will NOT pay for content? Ah yes-but will they pay to be part of the editorial decision-making process?

The subscription service in question, Passport—whose $199 price tag, it’s worth noting, is an “introductory” rate for “charter members”—promises not merely access to “premium content” (podcast-y “conference calls” with correspondents, “newsmaker interviews,” a monthly digital newsletter and a weekly editor’s brief), but also access to the ears of GlobalPost’s editors. Passport members will have a say as to which stories correspondents are assigned: editors will choose their top story ideas, and paying readers will get to vote for their favorites. Those readers will be able, in other words, to take part in crowdsourcing that is editorial, rather than reportorial, in nature. GlobalPost’s is a model driven not only by the core premise that good journalism should be paid for, but also by the hope that the promise of investment on an editorial level will engender investment on a financial one as well.

The role of their journalists/correspondents:

Voice—though not bias—is encouraged, and not just in reporters’ blogs, but in their stories, as well. The point of hiring correspondents who live in the countries they’re covering is to avoid parachute journalism, to be sure, but it’s also to publish pieces of writing whose assertions are bolstered by their reporters’ daily experience. “Voice” suggests authenticity, but it requires authority to be truly effective. The logistical challenges faced by parachute correspondents—developing sources; learning which of those sources to trust; navigating, in every sense, new locales—won’t be as common for GlobalPost correspondents who, even when they’re not in their home cities, will be reporting from their home countries. Those correspondents, the thinking goes, will legitimize themselves and their stories—and the way they tell those stories—not just by being there, but by living there.