President’s Message: February 17, 2011

Today marks the birth of a new face for GlobalPost with a totally redesigned site, new content and improved navigation. Our mission and our journalistic values remain unchanged. GlobalPost was created to improve and expand coverage of the world’s most important stories and events, some well-known but many entirely unreported by the rest of the news media.

Since our start on Jan. 12th, 2009, GlobalPost has been blessed with incredible growth and we have built an impressive audience both in the United States and across the world. More than 10 million people visited our site in 2010, up from 3.9 million in our inaugural year. They came from 234 countries and territories, virtually every inhabited nation on the planet. This year has gotten off to a roaring start with nearly 1.5 million visitors in January. We are deeply grateful to all of our readers and especially to that large number of you who visit us every day.

The site you are visiting today is the product of many months of design and development work by the GlobalPost editorial and technical team and by our partners at Viewpoint Creative, a Boston firm with whom we partnered on the redesign. Our goals were to take GlobalPost to the next level in terms of ease of access to our content, improved presentation and navigation around the site, so that it is easier for our readers to find the stories they want — whether that is our coverage of an individual country or our topic based reporting on business, politics, war, health, technology, culture and lifestyle.

We have also greatly expanded our coverage of breaking news around the world, launched new blogs to track developments in the war in Afghanistan, in the key BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well as emerging stories in Africa and Southeast Asia. We have a whole new section devoted to video where we can now showcase some of the exceptional reporting being done by our correspondents around the world. And we have greatly improved your ability to comment on and share our stories with your friends via Facebook and Twitter. We hope that our new commenting system, done in partnership with Facebook, will motivate you to share your thoughts on all of the incredible stories on which we report each day.

All of us here at GlobalPost are proud of what we have been fortunate to create and build these past two years. We hope that our redesigned site will demonstrate our ongoing commitment to always seek improvement in our service to you, our readers. We welcome your comments on the site and on our reporting and as always please feel free to contact me directly at pbalboni@globalpost.com.

With all best wishes,

Philip S. Balboni
President, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder