GroundTruth Media Partners
Founded in 2025, GroundTruth Media Partners is a new enterprise founded by award-winning journalist Charles M. Sennott. GroundTruth is dedicated to field reporting and thought leadership on the future of journalism informed by Sennott’s four decades of global and local experience as a reporter, editor, author, documentary producer and social entrepreneur.
At GroundTruth, we are all about inspiring dialogue through independent, community-driven journalism. GroundTruth was spun out of The GroundTruth Project, the non-profit news organization that Sennott founded and which launched two flagship service programs, Report for America and Report for the World.
Our Mission
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Provide Thought Leadership
To provide thought leadership on global and local journalism in the age of AI.
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Produce Local Journalism
To produce and highlight on-the-ground reporting
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Support The Next Generation
To inspire, support and celebrate the work of the next generation of digital storytellers.
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Protect Democracy
To denounce and push back against threats to press freedom and democracy.
About our founder, Charles Sennott
Charles Sennott is the founder of The GroundTruth Project. Under his leadership, GroundTruth has been widely recognized for its excellence, including DuPont, Emmy, Edward R. Murrow and World Press Photo awards. Sennott is the recipient of the 2024 World Press Freedom Award for his work on behalf of supporting a free press in the United States and around the world.
This new editorial spinoff, GroundTruth, is a separate and independent entity focusing on thought leadership and developing the voice of the weekly GroundTruth newsletter.
A leading social entrepreneur in media and journalism, Sennott is an award-winning correspondent, best-selling author, documentary producer and editor with 40 years of experience in international, national and local journalism.
Reporting on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in at least 25 countries, including the post 9-11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Arab Spring, Sennott began his career in local news covering cops, courts and municipal government. Sennott’s deep experience in reporting led him to dedicate himself to supporting and training the next generation of journalists to tell the most important stories of our time. Sennott is also the co-founder of GlobalPost, an acclaimed international news website that launched in 2009 and was folded into GBH and PRX The World in 2014.
Previously, Sennott worked for many years as a reporter at the New York Daily News and then the Boston Globe, where he became Bureau Chief for the Middle East and then for Europe, and a leader of the paper's international coverage from 1997 to 2005. Sennott has also served as a correspondent for PBS FRONTLINE, the PBS NewsHour and PRX The World. He has contributed news analysis to the BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, GBH’s Boston Public Radio, and others.
Sennott is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (BA 1984 History) Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism (MS 1986) and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University (2006.) In 2016, Sennott was accepted into the DRK portfolio of leading social entrepreneurs who can make a difference and in 2017 completed the Sulzberger Executive Training Program at Columbia University. In 2024, Sennott received the World Press Freedom Award from the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation.
Sennott was a Visiting Scholar at Boston College’s Institute for Liberal Arts, where he taught from 2019 through 2024 a seminar titled “Truth: A Short History.” Currently, Sennott is a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, Leadership and Policy, focusing his research on what he calls “a global crisis in local news that has become a crisis for democracy.”
Sennott serves on the board of directors of Ukraine’s leading news organization, Ukrainska Pravda, and on the board of advisors for the Overseas Press Club Foundation and the International Press Institute's North American Committee.
Sennott interviews a Taliban leader on assignment in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. (Photo by Ben Brody/GroundTruth)
Sennott at the launch of The GroundTruth Project (Photo by Michael Casey)
The definition & story of GroundTruth
At the core of what we do is the idea of “ground truth,” or, put simply, a dedication to being on the ground to tell the story. The origin of the phrase stems from a more technical definition by NASA, where ‘ground truthing’ refers to a calibration process used in satellite imagery and across other technologies to ensure the accuracy of their readings. When NASA measures something using a satellite, a human being on the ground takes the same measurement as a way to calibrate the accuracy of the technology’s reading. That human measurement is known as the “human reading,” or the “ground truth.” As NASA states, rather poetically, “when technology and the ‘human reading are in conflict, trust the human reading.”
We believe the act of journalism, particularly in a time of both great disruption and enormous potential, is best thought of as the ‘human reading’ in the calibration process of understanding the barrage of technology that shapes our understanding of the world, including all of the misinformation and disinformation that can come with it. This process of ‘ground truthing’ plays a central role in the future of digital news reporting and is deployed regularly in everything from accurate reading of satellite data in tracking climate change to helping to calibrate and improve the accuracy of Large Language Models in Artificial Intelligence. To Sennott, the idea of ground truth is a powerful metaphor in a time of great disruption and opportunity in media when we all need to calibrate technology by adhering to the simple but profound belief in trusting ‘the human reading.’