CBS News plans to announce Monday that it has formed a partnership with GlobalPost, a foreign news Web site, that will provide CBS with reporting from its approximately 70 affiliated correspondents in 50 countries.
As many print and broadcast news outlets are struggling to find ways to cover foreign news, the alliance may suggest a blueprint.
Philip S. Balboni, a founder of GlobalPost, said the organization had been interested in a network news partner since the Web site began publishing in January. Talks turned serious after a successful CBS collaboration involving reporting by a GlobalPost correspondent, Jean MacKenzie, on efforts by the Taliban to skim American aid in Afghanistan.
“Having a broadcast network partner was a high priority for us, and to be associated with CBS News is a great validation of what we are trying to build,” Mr. Balboni said in a phone call. “We hope to become an important source of international news for Americans, and this partnership is a big step in that direction.”
In the early going, at least, GlobalPost reporters will provide information, not work on the air, with CBS using its reporters and anchors to flesh out coverage for broadcast.
CBS News suggested that the alliance with GlobalPost, in which the network will pay a monthly undisclosed fee to the site, represents an expansion of the news divisions’ efforts to cover the rest of the world.
Paul Friedman, the executive vice president of CBS News who helped negotiate the arrangement, was traveling, but said in a statement that the collaboration would increase the footprint of the network’s journalism.
“We are excited about increasing CBS News’s resources, and very pleased to work with GlobalPost’s impressive global network of talented and experienced freelance journalists,” the statement read. “With this exclusive arrangement in place, CBS News will have unmatched access to first-rate journalists with expert knowledge of the countries they live in and cover.”
GlobalPost, which is based in Boston and was founded by Mr. Balboni, the creator of New England Cable News network, and Charles M. Sennott, a longtime foreign correspondent at The Boston Globe, uses a federation of correspondents who also have an ownership share in the site, to report from all over the globe. It has about 20 investors, including the lead investor Amos B. Hostetter Jr., chairman of the venture capital firm Pilot House, as well as Benjamin B. Taylor, former publisher of The Globe, and Paul Sagan, chief executive of Akamai Technologies.
The site has a three-pronged revenue model, including a paid membership service, syndication and display advertising.
The site has had no problems attracting readers: Mr. Balboni said the site averaged more 400,000 unique users a month. But membership has been a tough sell, with subscribers to its so-called Passport Service, which costs about $100 a year, numbering only in the hundreds, he said.
Display advertising on the Web site has been less robust than expected, in part because the advertising market as a whole is suffering, and also because it is a difficult time for a relatively new site that features serious journalism to break in.
GlobalPost has had better luck selling its articles into a difficult news media environment, with 25 clients, including The Daily News of New York, choosing from the 70 to 80 articles a week the site produces.
The alliance with CBS News would help raise the site profile in the industry and suggests that its work, much of it from foreign correspondents who used to work for mainstream news media outlets, is seen as credible.
Mr. Balboni said that as the site grows, he hopes to increase compensation to affiliated journalists, although for the time being, most of its correspondents work part time for the service. Many of them formerly worked for American newspapers, which have mostly forsaken foreign bureaus because of the cost at a time of declining circulation and advertising revenue.
GlobalPost has produced an increasing amount of work in video, but the site’s video approach generally features a lone reporter shooting, narrating and doing some of the editing on a piece.
As envisioned, GlobalPost correspondents will continue to develop reports in the regions where they work, and CBS News will either share that work with its viewers through its anchors or perhaps dispatch its own correspondents and camera people to shoot video and put a CBS face on the reports.