Message from our CEO

Today, we are re-introducing our GlobalPost Membership Service with new, lower prices and expanded benefits. When you join, you become an important part of our pioneering mission to improve and expand international reporting. Your financial support will strengthen GlobalPost and ensure that we have the resources to continuously improve our service to you.

We first offered our membership service a little over a year ago as a way of giving readers who have a deep interest in international reporting the chance to gain access to premium content and benefits found nowhere else. It was also a very important part of our business strategy and a way to involve readers in the financial support of our mission and, more broadly, of journalism itself.

We’ve learned a tremendous amount since Passport, as our membership service was originally called, began in late April 2009 and we are deeply grateful to all of you who signed up to be members. We’ve taken that experience and rolled it into today’s expanded offering.

We also have a new technology partner in Journalism Online, a New York company created to help publishers develop more effective means of building subscriber-based online revenue. Through Journalism Online’s Press + platform, GlobalPost will have a more robust e-commerce and customer service platform as well as better ways of reaching out and asking you to join with us.

When you become a member of GlobalPost, you gain access to a host of valuable content and benefits not available to other visitors to the main GlobalPost news site, which will remain free and open to all. Perhaps the most important of those benefits is your ability to suggest stories to our editors and then the chance to vote on which of those suggested stories will actually be reported and published. Every week you, the readers, will suggest and vote on an important international story — and the one the membership community chooses will appear on the main GlobalPost site and will be marked as a special reader selected story. We think it is one of the most original and innovative opportunities in journalism.

Members will also have the chance to participate in weekly online chats with one of our correspondents around the world who has been covering an important news story or event. Each month we will host conference calls for our members with a correspondent in a major world hotspot. These, too, are unique benefits offered nowhere else in the news media. They are part of our commitment to listen to and involve our audience in coverage of the world and the many critical issues we all face.

But membership brings even more: each weekday we offer a rotating series of Country Briefs from one of the nations in the so-called G20 which in the aggregate represent more than three-quarters of the world’s economy. You’ll also have a daily World Opinion Roundup with a digest of what the leading columnists and thinkers are saying in the opinion pages of the world’s most important newspapers and journals. Knowing that readers of GlobalPost are also avid travelers, we are offering Insider Travel Guides prepared by our country-based correspondents with a rich menu of insider information about the best places to visit and eat in some of the most interesting cities across the globe.

Please visit us here for a full list of all of the GlobalPost Member Benefits.

Finally, we are also introducing new, lower prices as well as a monthly membership option. You can now join GlobalPost for just $2.95 a month, or join for the full year for just $29.95, a 15-percent discount. Signing up is easy at our new Member Information page.

Many of you may have followed the growing national discussion about the need for consumers of online news to be required to pay for access to their favorite news sites. Journalism in America, and in much of the world, faces a crisis as we transition from the traditional media to the digital age. Financial support for high quality news is by no means assured — and only with the active engagement of readers will the future be promising.

If you’ve been following us, you know that GlobalPost has forged a new model for journalism, one that is more attuned to success in the digital age. But we, too, need the financial support of those who have come to love our content and our site. We are committed to keeping the main GlobalPost site free and open to all. But you can express your support for what we do by becoming a GlobalPost Member — and you’ll also receive unique and valuable benefits in return. Please join with us by clicking here.

With our thanks and best wishes,

Philip Balboni
pbalboni@globalpost.com