What if public-interest journalism had a white knight: a media start-up is born, packed with pedigree

To be launched in February, The Global Mail will not charge readers, will not sell ads and is not chasing more donors. It was born of a dinner party conversation between Wood and former ABC journalist Monica Attard, the site's editor-in-chief.

The Arab Spring had got Attard, a former foreign correspondent, thinking. ''For years and years the coverage in Egypt was pretty cursory,'' she says. ''Everybody assumed that [former president Hosni] Mubarak was a benign leader who was much beloved, and certainly courted by the West. It struck me that the depth of coverage had not been there. Then I started to think about how journalism was being crunched down … and of course the first casualty always is international coverage.

''So I wondered whether there was any prospect of creating a news organisation which was web-based, and app-based ultimately, where you were tapping into great social movements around the world and where you could also speak to Australian affairs as though we were part of a wider world, rather than simply this pimple of an island somewhere near the South Pole.''

Attard followed up dinner with a call to Wood's office, which she was surprised to find returned. Wood, who founded accommodation website Wotif.com and whose fortune is estimated by BRW magazine at $337 million, had been making headlines with a string of high-profile donations, including $1.6 million to the Greens before the latest federal election, the biggest individual political donation in Australian history. He has also given $15 million to establish a think tank, the Global Change Institute, at his Alma Mater, the University of Queensland.

Interviewed in the boardroom of The Global Mail's warren-like headquarters in Sydney's Macquarie Street - a block up from his private office - Wood says when he and Attard sat down to flesh out her idea, he didn't take much persuading. He was already worried about the decline of good journalism. ''You take it for granted, that's the problem,'' he says. ''When it starts to slip away, you suddenly realise how important it is.''

Attard, who has won five Walkleys in a 28-year career with the public broadcaster, admits she has done nothing like The Global Mail before and believes she is ''absolutely the luckiest editor alive, full stop''.

It may be relatively easy for Attard to spend Wood's money - she has already lured some well-known names such as her one-time ABC colleagues Ellen Fanning and Stephen Crittenden - but the challenge will be to make The Global Mail financially sustainable.

Wood, who is the media start-up's non-executive chairman, has not given all his money upfront but has given a personal commitment to fund it for five years. He monitors spending but says ''it would be silly to nickel and dime it''.

There are fund-raising ideas kicking around - attract more donors, sell smartphone apps - but there is nothing approaching a business plan. Wood, however, remains upbeat. ''I don't go into a venture like this assuming it's going to fail,'' he says. ''It's like Wotif. Nobody thought that would work but gee, it did, didn't it? I've seen so many businesses that start out with immaculate business plans and exit strategies, 99 per cent of which turn out to be complete bullshit.''

Wood says wherever technology generates turmoil, there are always opportunities. In the '90s, he says, ''technology was cracking the travel agent business wide open and I walked in and created Wotif. The content there was hotel rooms, the content here is journalism, but there are some similarities.''

Technology is one area Wood is hands-on: The Global Mail's website is being built by the same Brisbane-based team, Hunted Media, that created content aggregation site Wotnews, which he majority-owns.

Otherwise Wood, who says he had no hand in the recruiting and will have no influence on editorial, is in Attard's hands.

''I have employed a bunch of fearlessly independent journalists,'' says Attard. ''Most people who know [them] know that they won't stand to be told what to do and what to write. It'd be a brave me or a brave Graeme, actually, who ordered them to write something that was in Graeme's interests. It will not happen.''

Attard bristles at questions about The Global Mail's financial viability: ''What's the hurry? We've got a solid five years' funding, during which time I reckon a bunch of hugely intelligent people will come up with a way to make money, with an operation as small as this, with no legacy to carry on our back.''

In fact at this point in time - as you might expect of a fast-moving work in progress - a lot about The Global Mail is up in the air. Wood and Attard send more than a few mixed signals. Wood says he is monitoring spending, but not closely says Attard, who even hints at frustration about the small amount of time he spends in the building. Wood talks of a written charter that stipulates editorial independence but there's only a draft ''about us'' page, which is somewhat looser. Wood says there will be no opinion but the draft code of conduct suggests otherwise. Both Wood and Attard claim credit for the name.

The funding model for The Global Mail is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning US website propublica.org, which was founded in late 2007 with a gift of $US30 million over three years from billionaire philanthropists Herb and Marion Sandler, a grant which has since been extended.

ProPublica, which had outlays of $US9 million in 2010, has 34 editorial staff, most with a print media background. It is devoted to investigative journalism - the expensive, time-consuming reporting that many mainstream outlets find increasingly hard to sustain. The site has broken new ground, acting almost as a service provider to mainstream US media, which are encouraged to republish ProPublica stories free.

The Global Mail, with a yearly budget of $3 million and an editorial staff of 17, has fewer resources than ProPublica and is less tightly focused - a fraught combination.

Where ProPublica concentrates on ''deep dive'' investigations, The Global Mail will serve up a mix of investigation, analysis and colour, updated each day - a demanding schedule for a small team.

Where ProPublica mainly employs writers, about two-thirds of the journos at The Global Mail have a broadcast background and the site will be heavily multimedia. The Global Mail aims to cover the world and already has five foreign correspondents - including Wood's stepson Nick Olle, son of the late Andrew Olle.

Attard denies this level of foreign staffing will be cripplingly expensive, saying reporters are no longer trailed by three-man camera crews. Most of her reporters can shoot footage themselves and they'll write too.

ProPublica's editor-in-chief Paul Steiger, a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a member of The Global Mail's high-powered editorial advisory committee, asks why not take advantage of Attard's success as a broadcast journalist? ''Our approach has worked very well for us, but we wouldn't be so arrogant as to suggest it's the only way.''

ProPublica's strategy is to gradually increase the multimedia content on its site and steadily diversify its funding away from the Sandlers, who aim to reduce their commitment to $US2 million a year. Non-Sandler donations started at $US1 million in 2008 and should reach $US5 million in 2011. ProPublica has begun taking ads and is slowly building up a contingency fund. Eventually, Steiger hopes, ProPublica will create a permanent endowment, providing recurring income from investments. It helps that US laws make donations to non-profit media organisations tax deductible. The Global Mail argued for the same concession in a submission to the federal government's media inquiry. The submission noted the long history of successful non-profit media (including British newspaper The Guardian, owned by the Scott Trust), and called for Australian non-profit media to be given deductible, gift-recipient status and associated tax relief.

Certainly, nothing like The Global Mail has been tried here on this scale before. Comparisons are being made with Eric Beecher's fortnightly magazine The Eye, a short-lived venture that he launched in 1999 as CEO of Text Media. At the time, Beecher recruited a group of senior Australian journalists and said Text was prepared to back the magazine for at least three years. It closed within six months, with losses believed to be about $4 million.

The Eye was a commercial proposition from the start, although Beecher jokes ''it ended up being not for profit''. Beecher, who now publishes the Crikey website, says The Global Mail is a ''fascinating initiative'' and the first serious attempt at non-profit journalism in Australia. The critical test, he says, will be how to measure the website's success - readership, media mentions or awards - and how long the funding can last given most Australian charities are funded from year to year.

Wendy Bacon, professor of journalism at the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, says if The Global Mail hopes eventually to attract a broader donor base, it will have to stand for something, like ProPublica, which aims to produce journalism that ''shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them''. Bacon welcomes The Global Mail but says it will be disappointing if it replicates existing excellent overseas reporting but neglects domestic news and the Pacific - the ''black hole of journalism''.

''The big lack in Australian journalism is resources for investigations for audiences outside the inner and wealthier areas of Sydney and Melbourne,'' says Bacon. ''I am sure the journalism will be strong, but I'll be interested to see if … it fills the gaps left by corporate media and the public broadcasters.''