Charles Sennott, co-founder of Boston-based GlobalPost.

“I loved covering cops, I loved covering courts, but New York is all about the world,” said Sennott, co-founder of GlobalPost, a Boston-based news operation with a network of more than 100 freelance journalists around the globe.

Sennott described his rise from beat reporter to foreign correspondent to new media executive at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism on Wednesday.

“It was a classic path that existed then but it no longer exists.” he said. “And that’s the sad part - but there are new paths.”

With GlobalPost, Sennott and co-founder Philip Balboni have built a new path from scratch over the past three years.  Today their website, globalpost.com, attracts 2.5 million unique visitors per month and the organization expects to be profitable next year.

“We are impatient but pleased with where we are with traffic right now,” Sennott said.  “We’re punching above our weight.” 

The site officially launched in Jan. 2009, offering professional dispatches from Afghanistan, India and the West Bank among dozens of other locations.  The American stock market was in the midst of diving steeply, the company having secured its financing just months before the collapse.  

“I have never worked harder in my life,” Sennott, with 25 years of reporting experience including conflict zones around the world, said of building GlobalPost. “When you launch, it’s literally this silent drop into the ocean of the Web.  And you’re like, what’s this thing going to do?  What’s going to happen?”

Liftoff

In fact, readership has grown steadily, traffic streaming in from almost every country in the world.  Sennott and his enterprising team have attracted top-tier advertisers, building a solid revenue base.  Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become essential for sharing content.

At the same time, GlobalPost has pursued syndication deals with outlets ranging from the Times of India to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and debuted a paid content product, Passport, powered by Journalism Online.

“[Sennott] was starting a business precisely in the field that everybody said was doomed to failure,” said USC professor Gabriel Kahn. “I think he’s proven a lot of people wrong and shown a way for many others in the industry to go forward.”

GlobalPost holds firm to an editorial mission that echoes the American news sensibility of pioneers like Edward R. Murrow, focusing on telling captivating stories while shunning old-guard institutional privilege.  

“I can bring people into the intifada,” Sennott said. “That’s different from what you get at the embassy briefing.”

This scrappy, bootstrapped attitude runs deep at GlobalPost, holding true to the gritty work of foreign correspondence.

“It’s the old story,” Sennott explained. “You walk in the direction everyone else is running from.”

The pay isn’t great, either, and never has been for many freelance correspondents. 

“We pay the classic freelance fees that everybody does in the field and it’s not much,” Sennott said.  Compensation at GlobalPost bottoms out at $250 per story.

WTC

A defining moment in Sennott’s career came in Feb. 1993, when a truck bomb detonated under the World Trade Center killed seven and injured more than 1,000.

“No one was thinking terrorism in 1993,” Sennott said. “What I didn’t realize then is I would be covering nascent Al Qaeda for the rest of my life, and that continues to this day.”

The Boston Globe recruited him to work in the Middle East, where Sennott was named the bureau chief in 1997, then sent him to Europe in 2001.  He covered 9/11 extensively, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending eight months a year away from his family. 

But by the time the seasoned newsman had completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 2006 - “a year of living comfortably” - Sennott could see that the industry was in dire shape.

“If you did a thermal mapping of the crisis point in American journalism, when it became clear that the news industry was in a lot of trouble, it was that year,” Sennott said.

He returned to the Globe, but the newspaper was no longer able to send him abroad very often.  In 2007, the Globe shut down its entire foreign reporting operation.

“The economic models just didn’t allow them to aspire to do foreign reporting anymore,” Sennott said.

A New Era

So he decided to get serious about starting an organization of his own.  In the process of building a network of correspondents on several continents, Sennott met Balboni, former president of New England Cable News.  Sennott saw that the senior executive could bring high-level business skills to the fledgling network.

“It was almost like a machine in which the cogs come together,” Sennott said. The two raised $8.2 million of investment capital from sources including Continental Cablevision founder Amos Hofstetter, former Boston Globe publisher Benjamin Taylor and Akamai Technologies CEO Paul Sagan.

Sennott still hops planes on a regular basis, interviewing world leaders and creating collaborative multimedia pieces in partnership with PBS’ Frontline and NewsHour programs.

He is perhaps most excited about a new, non-profit initiative that is already underway: GlobalPost plans to raise an undisclosed amount of new capital to fund more in-depth international reporting.  It has already paid for one major feature, “Kosovo’s Mafia”, with funding from the Galloway Family Foundation.

“We want to get to the excellence of Frontline, but we can’t afford it every time,” Sennott said.  “We want to bring new resources in to do great journalism.”

He said GlobalPost is trying to reverse the devaluation of journalistic labor, calling on confident investors, quality reporting and a Web-only business model.

“It would be very sad if we created a world in which journalism is going to be done by those who can afford to be paid very little for it,” Sennott said. “That would change the way we all look at the world.”