Here’s the business premise: Recruit student reporters from across the globe willing to work for free. Give the stories to college papers in exchange for ad space. Sell the ad space.

Former Columbia businessman Marc Thompson is the creator of Global Newswire, and he’s hoping this business model will succeed.

“It’s still in the process, but we’re starting to operate in a small way,” said Thompson over the phone from his Memphis, Tenn. office.

The newswire launched this semester. Thompson already has foreign bureaus in the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, China, Australia and New Zealand. He is working on establishing a national editorial board made up of students from 20 college newspapers in the U.S.

The idea of Global Newswire arose in 2006, when Thompson was running the MU Student News, a campus newspaper he owned that was staffed by MU students. Thompson started an international bureau of the paper with student journalists from 10 countries.

Wrangling with the university led Thompson to sell the paper in 2007 and leave Columbia. His controversial history with MU remains an asterisk on the launch of Global Newswire.

BEGINNINGS AT MU

Until 2007, Thompson was a Columbia businessman running two campus newspapers staffed by MU students. He bought the Greek Chronicle in 2002 and MU Student News in 2004 from the original founders, both MU students who wanted to move on after graduating.

Thompson was unaffiliated with the university, and his ownership of the student papers was controversial.

Former MUSN adviser David Roloff and Mark Lucas, director of student life, said students came to them complaining about a loss of student editorial power under Thompson. Lucas said student reporters also told him they were not being paid on time.

“Over a period of months, what the university did was send Thompson letters saying, essentially, ‘fix it or else’,” Lucas said.

A university committee reviewed the case. Because the MU Student News was no longer student-run, the university revoked its recognition as a student group. The university also tried to prevent the MUSN from distributing on campus.

Thompson maintains he expanded opportunities for students, saying he increased the number of students on the advertising staff.

“The MUSN was not a profitable business,” he said. “I had spent a lot of money bolstering the paper and trying to drive up readership. We were fighting the university every step of the way.”

In 2007, Thompson sold the declining MUSN and Greek Chronicle to another local businessman, Tim Rappleano. The move sealed the publications’ fate.

Rappleano revived the MUSN as The Prysms magazine in July 2007, but shut it down after only three months due to his personal “large tax debt,” as Rappleano wrote in The Prysms’ final issue.

That was the end of the MUSN, and with it, the end of Thompson’s involvement in Columbia.

A GLOBAL WIRE SERVICE FOR STUDENTS

Now resettled near Memphis, Tenn., Thompson is back in the student press ring and ready for round two.

This time, he has his eye on a much larger market than Columbia, Mo.

Thompson said he’s spending long days calling student newspapers across the country about Global Newswire. He said he’s gotten two papers on board so far, the Mace and Crown at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. and the Western Carolinian at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C.

His goal is to find 20 college newspapers in the U.S. to form an executive board for the newswire.

The business model comes from College Publisher, a Web design and hosting company comprising the largest network of online student newspapers in the country. College Publisher offers its services in exchange for advertising rights in the digital and print editions of the papers.

It’s not surprising Thompson sees business potential in the college press. While college media have been hit by declining ad revenue just like professional publications, they also offer a great deal to businesses like Thompson’s: clip-hungry reporters eager to work for free.

"I think it's a fantastic idea," said Dawn Murden, the wire's United Kingdom bureau chief and a journalism student at Bournemouth University in England. "Three-quarters of training to be a journalist should be experience, and this is fantastic experience for me, and for all journalists who want to build their portfolio, for that matter."

Thompson said the editing is done at the bureaus by students and few changes are made to the stories when they arrive at his desk. This means some stories from non-English-speaking countries are strewn with grammatical and style mistakes.

Thompson said the mistakes make the stories more “authentic.”

“We wanted readers to read it and say, ‘Yeah, this was written by a Chinese person. It wasn’t written by some person sitting in the U.S. pulling stuff from the Web,’” he said.

At the Western Carolinian, one of the two papers subscribing to Global Newswire, photo editor Megan Morrow said the wire stories make a useful stopgap when reporters drop stories at the last minute.

"It also allows us to cover certain things we didn't really think about," she said.

Does she think misuses of English, such as "at hindsight," add international flavor to the articles?

"We'd definitely read through and edit before we'd put any story like that up," Morrow said.