The Front Lines with Charles Sennott

Posted on | March 1, 2009 |

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Charles Sennott, award-winning journalist, author and former foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe, may have thrown in his tags as a globetrotter and war journalist, but he hasn’t stopped bringing home the stories that matter. After a career that has taken him from metro reporter in New Jersey to the front lines in Iraq, Sennott traded his overflowing passport for the badge of entrepreneur. On January 12, 2009, Sennott, along with partner Phil Balboni, launched GlobalPost.com — a new venture that is dramatically changing the world of international reporting and marks a new milestone in the era of digital news.

Based in Boston, GlobalPost is the first solely web-based newsorganization to provide daily international news coverage from its own team of experienced correspondents in every corner of the world. The company offers a free, content-rich website with articles, photography, video and audio from more than 60 correspondents in 45 countries.

Charlie’s passion for journalism and storytelling is contagious. His world is full of exhilarating stories of reporting the “ground truth” from the frontlines of war zones, on the trail of terrorists and on the pulse of the people in places such as Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan and Jerusalem. After returning from the first Persian Gulf War, Sennott began a two-decades-long journey of pursuing the growing threat of terrorism around the world. He was instrumental in breaking the story about the first World Trade Center bombing. He was on the trail of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda before anyone knew, or could have known, that they were at the heart of the global threat of terrorism. Sennott has published three books and hundreds of articles that document the struggles in the Middle East and the return of American soldiers to home soil.

CHOICE had an opportunity to sit down with Charlie in November, just two months before the launch of GlobalPost. We spoke on a number of topics, from his start in reporting, through the decline of the traditional news organizations and forward thinking to GlobalPost ten years down the road.

CHOICE: What are your thoughts on the current environment of traditional media, and when did you start seeing these changes?

CS: I came late to the realization that newspapers were hurting as much as they are. I was away for ten years, foreign reporting, just doing my job; I didn’t pay any attention to what I thought was just whining and doom and gloom back home. I truly was a bit dismissive of it all — “the Internet is going to change everything and newspapers are going to die, and we better figure this out.”

And then I came home. I had been away from 1997 to 2006, and I came home to the newsroom and suddenly there were a lot fewer people around. Everyone had taken buyouts and more and more people had left, and some of the real talent had gone. Cubicles where great talent once sat were now phones and clean desks and the image was really bleak and depressing. It began to occur to me that we’ve changed our vision as a result of the economic reality of failing news organizations. We need to recognize that we are not in the business of selling newspapers. We are in the business of selling information. That key concept is so simple if you think about it, but I truly think newspapers didn’t get that.

It was very obvious to everyone else, but not to me until I really saw it coming down. The Boston Globe, which once punched way above its weight and had international news bureaus and some really talented foreign correspondents who were like my mentors and my heroes, guys who are the great foreign correspondents who today work for the New York Times and the Washington Post, really great talent. They [The Boston Globe] killed that whole tradition, overnight. They just said: “We don’t cover the world.” And that decision was made by some really hard economic choices. I understand the decision, but I think it’s misguided. But on the other hand, the Globe is going back to what they do best, which is local, because that’s reality. So for me, it was okay… that’s the reality, then what are we going to do now? Maybe we need to start over, start a new kind of news organization. That is why I left the Boston Globe and began this idea.

CHOICE: Why is GlobalPost so important? Why, after over two decades of reporting, did you decide to begin this new journey?

CS: Well, when the newspapers kill their foreign bureaus, and the networks cut back or kill their foreign staff, we have fewer eyeballs in the world watching what is happening. And every issue we face as a country — terrorism, climate change, global health, the economic meltdown going on in the world — all of those issues are global. You need people who live in the world, who live in the city about which they write, so they really know the ground truth, and they can report that back because they are great storytellers. Not because they are people who assemble facts, but because they go into a place and they see a story. They know this is the way to tell people what is happening here because this is a cool character, and that kind of storytelling is dying in America from traditional sort of dead tree media and the big old legacy news organizations like the networks, it’s dying, and we need that if we are going to understand the world.

What we want to do at GlobalPost is create a new way of doing that, a new opportunity to unleash that talent, to go live abroad and report back from abroad to an American audience that is really underserved in international news, and needs that kind of storytelling from the world if it is going to understand the global issues we face.

I always feel like I am selling Coca-Cola when I say this, but I really believe in this. I truly think this is an incredibly worthwhile shot at doing something that is very difficult to do, but at the same time it’s really important, and you can sell this to people because it’s real. So when I’m talking to a young reporter and I say “Hey, man, I love your writing, you should go, you should take a chance; if you always wanted to be a foreign correspondent, go do it. Here is a chance to have enough to give you the base from which you can do freelance and other work, and you can get a start.” It’s funny because you don’t want to become too much like a preacher in the tent, and then suddenly go agnostic, or not really believe, you know what I mean? For me, I truly have religion on this thing, I believe in it.

Visit www.globalpost.com for more information. Also check out the GlobalPost editor’s blog, which Sennott writes at groundtruth.globalpost.com. Links to Sennott’s archived articles, videos and radio clips can also be found on his blog.

All photos by Iva Zimova.

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