• Boston Business Journal, Friday, February 14, 2014 1:25 PM

For a media startup that’s only five years old, GlobalPost has published news projects with the depth and breadth that rival those in this country’s largest papers.

The only problem is, it apparently still isn’t making money.

GlobalPost CEO Phil Balboni tells USA Today media editor Rem Rieder, in an interview published this week, that it has taken longer to reach profitability than Balboni originally thought. “You’ve got to be a tough guy to do this,” says Balboni, the founder and former president of New England Cable News. “It takes a lot of belief in what we care about.”

GlobalPost was launched in Boston by Balboni and editor at large Charles Sennott in the teeth of the Great Recession, with a noble goal: to fill the gap in foreign reportage that opened up as most legacy news companies abandoned their overseas posts. The company primarily seeks revenue from selling ads that appear on its Web site and by syndicating its work to mainstream news outlets. An effort to sell premium memberships didn’t work out as well as hoped, but now the firm is also looking to market customized research to businesses.

It’s a for-profit venture -- one that aims to support a network of correspondents who submit their dispatches from around the world. But GlobalPost has had to take a similar approach that many nonprofit journalism ventures have taken lately: It has turned to foundation money to get the job done.

There’s a special report on its Web site about global inequality, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, for example, and there’s one on the prevalent use of drones, sponsored by the Galloway Family Foundation.

In his interview with Rieder, Balboni seems eager to expand GlobalPost’s work with foundations, and points to a new Ford-supported venture to pay for commentary on human rights and social justice.

But Balboni doesn’t offer up any easy answers for how GlobalPost’s backers will recoup their investments over the long haul. Digital advertising isn’t bringing in the bucks that Balboni and others in the media had hoped it would, back in 2009. And many consumers have become conditioned to getting their online news for free.

“The only thing wrong with journalism today is the revenue equation,” Balboni says. “Until it sorts itself out, it’s going to be difficult for journalism entities to be very successful financially.”

Read the whole story at Boston Business Journal »