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Wikipedia:Canada Education Program/Courses/The Newspaper in Canadian Society (Michael Valpy)

Global Post, founded January 12, 2009, is an online, for-profit news source for international coverage. Their mission is to report on geographical areas that are generally not covered by the daily news media in America. While the articles are intended for an educated American audience, the website is available to all English-reading audiences world wide. GlobalPost’s correspondents live around the world, reporting on the countries in which they live. This helps to reduce American bias and provides true, insightful information about the area in question.

Content in GlobalPost

Users of the GlobalPost website can select articles based on regions, subject matter or opinions.

Regions

Correspondence occurs in Africa, the Americas, Asia-pacific, Europe and the Middle East. Some of these countries are frequently covered by many news media, however many are countries that are rarely covered but offer major sources of news. For example, there are many articles written about news happening in Germany, a country that is rarely seen in daily news coverage. Subject matter in politics, religion, art, science and more is addressed in news that is specifically written about German issues and events, by GlobalPost writers.

Subject Matter

News can be read under categories such as business and technology, war, politics, culture and lifestyle, ‘offbeat’ issues, ‘green’ or environmental issues, and health. Users can also view photos and read opinion pieces that are related to other material found on the site. Each of these headings are then further divided into additional categories: for example, the ‘Green’ heading is further subdivided into energy, wildlife, global warming and special reports. This style of organization gives the user an opportunity to read articles about a specific subject matter but also suggests other articles that are in similar fields. A user can read first read about a famine in Somalia and go on to read about ‘the next global trade battle’ from Belgium or ‘the cost of climate change’ from the USA.

Features

Membership

For a fee, users can become GlobalPost members. Membership comes with additional articles that are not posted for free reading. Members can become active with the site by suggesting topics for correspondents to research and write about. These suggestions are posted on the website and members can vote on articles that they would find interesting. Weekly chats are held globally, where members can discuss international news with fellow members and journalists. Furthermore, GlobalPost offers conference calls with journalists, so that members can get real-time information about issues and events happening overseas. These monthly calls allow members to listen to international news and interact with journalists or listen to the audio after the call. Members also receive discounts on publications and travel.

Social Media

GlobalPost has a Facebook page, where people can ‘like’ the page and access articles, photos and information about the company. This is advantageous for GlobalPost because it keeps their news circulating among its group of 200,756 people that have ‘liked’ the page. Facebook users can ‘share’ stories and comment on GlobalPost’s postings of articles and pictures that also appear on profiles and news feeds. From a business perspective, this feature helps to expand the reader base and knowledge of the company. Readers can also benefit from this feature, since GlobalPost news is brought to them, instead of having to sift through articles on the Facebook page or the GlobalPost website. GlobalPost tweets articles and retweets comments posted by their readers. Like Facebook, this form of social media expands the reader base, the company’s name and creates a conversation. Tweeters that follow GlobalPost can gain access to articles without being on GlobalPost’s website and retweet articles. Followers can connect with other news sources that GlobalPost retweet and follow on Twitter. Brief information about the company is also available on GlobalPost’s profile. GlobalPost has 200,756 followers, as of October 23, 2011. . These social media sites are displayed on GlobalPost’s website, so readers can simply click a link to ‘like’ the Facebook page or follow GlobalPost on Twitter. The use of all three sites provides alternate avenues to post, read and discuss international news.

Authority and News Exposure

With the ever-expanding sources for events around the world, the greatest benefit for news sources is ‘getting to it first’. Global Post is able to find issues worth reporting on because they have such a wide corespondent base. They are uncovering and selling the news not only to the public but to other news sources as well. The issue of funding journalistic endeavors will always be a restriction on what a news source is able to cover and for how long. Traditional news organizations have to budget for the printing of papers, and so cannot necessarily afford to keep many correspondents around the world, in various countries. The benefit for online news is that there is less to budget for the actual presentation of the news sources and more funding for correspondents. A source like Global Post can use membership subscriptions, company sponsorship, advertising and reader donations to fund trips and pay journalists. This allows for better, more diverse news coverage, a feature that many readers value in a news source.

In 2003, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote an article that questions the ‘terms of authority’ in print versus online news sources. He argues that the journalist is considered to have authority on a subject because he or she works on it for a length of time and then produces his or her findings. The readers put their faith in the writer, assuming that all aspects of an event have been covered and revealed to the public. In March of 2003, Chris Allbritton, a former news reporter for New York’s Daily News, asked for donations from his blog readers to fund a trip to the war in Iraq, in the effort to uncover ‘pure’ news. Allbritton collected donations, which funded his trip to Turkey and necessary supplies for writing abroad, such as a laptop, global positioning system and digital camera, among a few other things. From Turkey, he would then sneak into Iraq. In order to produce the ‘purest’ news possible, Allbritton went straight to the source in Iraq and wrote about what he saw, a perspective that was supposedly free of ‘commercial pressures’ and ‘patriotic hype’.

Global Post offers an expanded version ofnews information, similar to Allbritton’s blog on the Iraqi War. With correspondents in many countries, reports come in on all types of events and are revealed to, what Rosen would call, a public on the net or a ‘journalism network’. Having correspondents directly planted in the activities surrounding major events around the world allows for the ‘purest’ news coverage that reveals information to an online network. The users that read these articles remain ‘the readers’ of the news but also become ‘the writers’ of news. In this network, users are able to comment, discuss, and especially with Global post, suggest news. Global post closes in on the divide that used to be readers and writers: now, the divide is more like writers and those who witness and participate in events firsthand. Rosen argues that readers no long consume the news but use news reports to discuss world issues and create news along with the journalist. Readers can now use the news they find at one source and compare it to information they find at other sources, through conversations in blogs or comment postings and articles posted from journalists with different perspectives.

Global Post’s articles uncover events happening around the world by giving the major details and do not include many opinion statements. Users can then use the opportunity to discuss the article on the Global Post website and other social media and perhaps look for a more in-depth coverage in smaller, ethnic news sources. For example, a user can read news about Croatia on Global Post and then investigate further on the Croatian online news source, www.croatiantimes.com: the user reads a general article on Global Post first and then decides to get more information from a source that is more specific. The benefit to reading specific articles in this smaller news organization is that a user can get the news from the perspective of a journalist who has had a Croatian upbringing and therefore, a better, more accurate understanding of Croatian affairs.

Rosen argues that people are no longer surprised to read news because there is always a source that has previously exposed the event. Perhaps Global Post’s model for news coverage is to provide that initial source of information, so that people can participate in the news by discussing the major points Global Post exposes. Perhaps users may even refer to other news sources, where coverage is more specific. This provides an opportunity for smaller ethnic online news sources to expand on what Global Post covers. The news has already been exposed, the challenge is for these smaller sources to expand the coverage of events and possibly even provide news on smaller events that have not been addressed by larger organizations. Global Post initiates the conversation in the public network but leaves more specific stories to smaller sources.

Summary

Global Post does a good job of exposing news worthy events that occur around the world and initiates the public’s conversation on world issues. One can expect to find good articles with quick facts on major and minor events occurring in various countries. The organization is really a place for users to interact with events, even when they cannot physically be present at an event. For example, people can read about a protest, comment on the article and start a global conversation about any issue surrounding a protest, from anywhere in the world. Online news sources provide a place for people to interact with others and enlighten themselves on opinions and other events surrounding an issue.

It is inevitable that users will check multiple sources for information and gain an amount of knowledge before reading a particular online article. It is possible that Global Post is attempting to report on many issues, with quality coverage and content, rather than having a lot of content on fewer issues. This organization produces a few articles that cover a single issue, however it would seem that they leave it up to the reader to look for other sources for deeper understanding of a topic. They do not steal content from news organizations that would otherwise report on an issue but they do provide a multitude of topics that could be covered by other sources with more depth. With this model in mind, Global Post can reach out to both an audience that desires only the major details on a story and those who wish to research multiple sources and then further investigate topics with other news organizations. A user could read about a topic covered on Global Post and then learn more from a different, possibly more authoritative source. While Global Post sends correspondents to individual companies, these journalists cannot possibly be rid of their American values and culture biases. Reading ‘pure’ facts on Global Post can lead to reading specific articles from an ethnic news organization, in which journalists write with the particular ethnic culture and values in mind. The initial source provided facts and the additional source allowed for more insight into what could be a more appropriate perspective on cultural issues. Global Post provides sufficient news coverage of world affairs and focusses on getting the news to the public.

Benefits of Online News Sources

• A source for news that covers many different subjects for countries that are especially not covered in daily news sources
• Profits gained from memberships, advertisers, and research requests can provide more funds for journalists positioned around the world to perform research.
• Perhaps GlobalPost will reach out to the younger generations that don’t read the paper anymore, since they are on facebook and twitter. Being online allows access from anywhere, for example, on a phone, at a school computer, on a laptop at home, etc.

Consequences of Online News Sources

• Membership restricts the freedom to learn everything there is to share about an event or world issue
• American correspondents living in the countries in which they cover, still does not eliminate news bias. Global Post advertises that their news in more pure than other sources, meanwhile journalist reporting on news with an upbringing from that same country would have a less biassed perspective on events

Similar Projects

These projects are other online, for-profit news organizations. However, they are not international news sources.

• Baristanet
• a2Politico
• Alaska Dispatch
• Capital
• RVA News
• OpenFile (note: a Canadian example)

Reference List

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