First U.S. Website for Global News
Reporter Founds Multimedia International News Website
After newspaper cuts its foreign bureaus, former Boston Globe reporter launches first U.S.-based website for international news.
Traditional paper newspapers may be shrinking the size of their staff, but journalists are continuously looking at alternatives ways of publishing news and broadening the topics they covering to a wider scale.
Climbing onto the bandwagon of professional journalists taking their "pen" to the Internet is Charles M. Sennott, a former Boston Globe reporter. Sennott recently co-founded Global News Enterprises. Unlike other websites founded by former journalists, however, this news site will not be hyperlocal, a term used to describe news generated for very specific, small local communities. When launched, it will be the first American-based website dedicated solely to international news.
The news site will take on a more professional form than a casual news blog operated by one or two individuals. It is being funded by a group of local investors including Benjamin Taylor, former published of the Boston Globe, who was a member of the family that ran the Globe for more than 100 years before it was sold to the New York Times. Other high-profile journalists include Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek reporter who was the magazine's bureau chief in Berlin and Jerusalem); Sam Kiley, a former Times of London bureau chief for Africa and the Middle East; and Scott Anderson, war correspondent and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.
"As mainstream media retreats from and in some cases abandons a mission to cover the world, they miss out on a moment when the forces of globalization have fueled a need and desire to know more about the world beyond U.S. borders," Sennott said.
An award-winning foreign correspondent and author, Sennott has more than 20 years of experience as a reporter and editor and will build a network of 70 foreign correspondents from all of the world to report on in-depth, multimedia reports.
Sennott served as the Boston Globe’s Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and as Europe Bureau Chief based in London from 2001 to 2005. He was among the first reporters on the ground in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001 and covered the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath.
Sennott was among the last to be a Boston Globe foreign correspondent, before the newspaper decided to get rid of all its foreign bureaus. As a staff writer for the Globe’s Special Projects team, he has just completed a year-long multimedia project on veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most recently, he returned from a reporting trip to Iraq and his multimedia coverage of the five-year anniversary of the war.
A 2006 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Sennott currently teaches "Storytelling in the Digital Age." He says that incorporating multimedia in news opens up many doors in terms of how news is reported and published.
"We want to make Global News the center of a worldwide community of internet viewers who seek to know how political, economic, technological and social trends all over the world connect with their lives, their interests, their investments and their hopes for a better world."
