Charles Sennott is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of The GroundTruth Project, a non-profit news organization which serves as the home of Report for America and Report for the World. He is an award-winning correspondent, best-selling author and editor with 40 years of experience in international, national and local journalism. A leading social entrepreneur in new media, Sennott in 2009 became the co-founder of GlobalPost, an acclaimed international news website. He then went on to launch GroundTruth and served as its CEO and Editor-in-Chief from 2012 to 2022. In 2017, GroundTruth launched its local reporting initiative, Report for America, and in 2021 launched an international, sister program, Report for the World.
Throughout his career in journalism, Sennott has done distinguished, award-winning service as a journalist in the field. He has reported on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in at least 20 countries, including the post 9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2011 Arab Spring, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Ukraine. Sennott began his career in local news covering cops, courts and municipal government and his deep experience in global and local reporting led him to dedicate himself to supporting and training the next generation of journalists to serve communities through on-the-ground reporting in under-covered corners of the world. This year Sennott received the World Press Freedom Award from the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on May 1, marking World Press Freedom Day.
Sennott began his career in local news in Western New England and New Jersey and worked for many years as a reporter at the New York Daily News where he covered the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and began following the story of nascent Al Qaeda. He was then hired by the Boston Globe, where he became Bureau Chief for the Middle East and Europe, and a leader of the paper’s international coverage from 1997 to 2005. Sennott was among the first reporters on the ground in Afghanistan following the September 11th attack on America. Sennott has also served as a correspondent for PBS FRONTLINE and the PBS NewsHour. He has contributed news analysis to the BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and others. He holds an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Sennott is currently a Visiting Scholar at Boston College. He and his wife Julie have four boys and live in Massachusetts between Cambridge and Martha’s Vineyard, where he serves as the publisher of the weekly Martha’s Vineyard Times.