Some interesting recent developments with online-only, international news agency GlobalPost, which launched in January this year:

Firstly the site has signed a partnership deal with CBS News for foreign reporting, the New York Times reports.

CBS will have access to work from GlobalPost’s network of 70 correspondents in around 50 countries – though these journalists will not feature in the CBS broadcasts.

“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,” explains the Times.

The agency, which operates a three-pronged revenue model, has had some success with its syndication offering, signing up New York’s Daily News and the Huffington Post amongst others.

The membership option to site users has been harder to sell, founder Philip Balboni told the Times.

David Westphal at the Online Journalism Review reflects on the Post’s membership offering, its Passport service, as he considers whether hiring out journalists as researchers could provide a new business model – something the Post is already testing:

“[A] separate unit that would do contract or customized research for paying clients. Revenue generated would supply one piece of the business-model formula that would pay for the core investigative reporting business.”