World Politics Review: A Look Ahead

This month marks five years since the idea for World Politics Review was born. It was a few more months, in June of 2006, before the site made its debut on the Internet.

Five years is at least a couple of generations in Internet time. When World Politics Review was born, Facebook had fewer than 10 million users. The iPhone did not yet exist, and Twitter was still a month from going live.

While those Internet stars were becoming supernovae, we here at World Politics Review were busy building a network of world-class contributors in order to attract a sophisticated audience interested in thoughtful, in-depth, non-partisan analysis of international affairs.

Then, in mid-2008, just at the end of the financial crisis that set in motion the worldwide economic collapse, WPR improbably went on a hiring binge. World Politics Review LLC grew from one full-time employee to three, as Judah Grunstein, now our editor-in-chief, and Scott Kenerly, our general manager, came on board. Though some might have questioned the timing, in hindsight, it was perfect. As the economic crisis wreaked havoc on the media and publishing industries, and in particular on the notion of free as a sustainable model for all but the most mass-audience of publications, WPR put in place the foundation of a team that could create an information resource so valuable that our readers would be willing to pay for it.

In the three years since, WPR has been, as is is our wont, steadily and deliberately developing that resource. I'm proud to say, on the cusp of our fifth anniversary, that we have built a service that brings together a number of content types, search tools and distribution methods to allow our subscribers to both closely follow and deeply understand international affairs. For an overview of our service, see http://about.worldpoliticsreview.com/overview. To try it out for free for one month, if you haven't already, sign up at http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/freetrial. And if you have further questions, contact me at hampton@worldpoliticsreview.com.

But it would be terribly out of character for our team, which continues to grow rapidly, to mark the passing of five years by announcing the completion of a building project.

Instead, today I want to announce a beginning: the start of the next phase of World Politics Review's development. During the next five years of the life of World Politics Review, we aim to build the most comprehensive, most in-depth, most useful, quite simply, the best information resource available anywhere for following and understanding international affairs.

The first step in this next phase of our development was taken last month, when we entered into a landmark deal with EBSCO Publishing, the world's premier database aggregator. In association with EBSCO, we will now bring World Politics Review to universities, corporations, governments and other organizations around the world, through a combined service that, for institutional subscribers, includes access to WPR content on EBSCOhost as well as unlimited access to WorldPoliticsReview.com. To request a quote or a trial for your organization, visit http://about.worldpoliticsreview.com/wpr-ebsco. If you have questions about our institutional service, contact Scott Kenerly at skenerly@worldpoliticsreview.com.

The next steps we have planned include further improving the user experience for subscribers across our Web site, our e-mail newsletters, and mobile platforms; introducing dynamic tools for research and news tracking; and much more. On behalf of the WPR team, I would like to thank our readers and contributors for supporting World Politics Review over the past five years. We hope you'll consider purchasing a subscription and coming along with us for the next five. And if you like what we're building here at World Politics Review, by all means, bring a friend.

Hampton Stephens is the publisher of World Politics Review.