A New Era of Journalism with Charles Sennott

Air Dates: December 22-23, 2018

Since the era of the French Revolution, commentators and politicians have referred to the press as “The Fourth Estate,” signifying the important (if informal) role of the press in public life. Charles Sennott leads a non-profit news agency extending the power of the press to under-covered corners of the world.

Sennott is the founder, executive director, and editor-in-chief of The GroundTruth Project, a non-profit news organization that supports a new generation of journalists to tell the stories that matter in under-covered corners of the world including the United States. Based at the flagship PBS station WGBH in Boston, GroundTruth’s mission is to provide training, mentoring and resources to emerging journalists to do work that seeks to make a difference and to do it safely.

From 2008 to GroundTruth, Sennott was a co-founder, executive editor and VP of GlobalPost. From 1993 to 2008, Sennott was Middle East Bureau Chief for The Boston Globe. He began his foreign correspondent work in 1986 for the Daily News. He is a cum laude 1984 graduate of UMass Amherst, has a master’s in journalism from Columbia and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard from 2005 – 2006.

“Story in the Public Square” airs on Rhode Island PBS in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts on Sundays at 11 a.m. and is rebroadcast Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. An audio version of the program airs Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. & 6:30 p.m. ET, Sundays at 4:30 a.m. & 11:30 p.m. ET on SiriusXM’s popular P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), channel 124. “Story in the Public Square” is a partnership between the Pell Center and The Providence Journal. The initiative aims to study, celebrate and tell stories that matter.