WebProNews

Did you hear that the president of East Timor was shot on Monday?  Perhaps not, if you stick to American news sources.  And it's this sort of lapse that Philip Balboni tends to address with the creation of Global News Enterprises.

Granted, Global News won't properly exist in time to follow the president's recovery - the site isn't supposed to launch until early next year.  Also, correspondents will get offered ownership shares instead of fulltime jobs, and some content will get hidden behind a pay wall.  Our eyebrows are rising.

Still, some other details concerning the venture sound very promising.  First, it has already received $7 million in funding, and the providers of this money know the news business well.  Jenn Abelson states that the group was "led by the billionaire Amos Hostetter Jr., a co-founder of Continental Cablevision, one of the first U.S. cable companies."

Additionally, "Benjamin Taylor, former publisher of The Boston Globe, and Paul Sagan, president of Akamai Technologies, are also among the investor group."  And Balboni himself founded New England Cable News, a regional cable TV network.

Global News will have on-the-ground correspondents in at least 70 countries when it launches.  Questions and reservations aside, we look forward to that time.  This is an area in which some would-be competitors have faltered, and the new site should force the contest to continue.