GlobalPost Co-Founders
Charles M. Sennott
Charles M. Sennott, the Executive Editor and Vice President of GlobalPost, is an award winning journalist and author with a distinguished career in international reporting for both print and broadcast news organizations.
An experienced bureau chief, a hard hitting foreign correspondent and an energetic innovator in multimedia, Mr. Sennott is uniquely equipped to be a leader in the digital age of international journalism.
Through nearly 25 years as a reporter and on-air analyst, Mr. Sennott has been on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in 15 countries from the jungles of Colombia to the deserts of Iraq. He has covered a wide range of stories from the papal transition in Rome to the oil industry in Saudi Arabia.
A longtime foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, Mr. Sennott served as the 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.
In 2005, Mr. Sennott returned to his native New England when he was awarded a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University. In the fall of 2006, he returned to the Globe newsroom as a Staff Writer for Special Projects.
Since then, Mr. Sennott has been a leader on a multimedia team that combines writing with still photography as well as audio and video in an effort to produce groundbreaking coverage both online and in the newspaper.
He has had a hands-on role in building out and designing web pages, writing multimedia scripts, gathering audio and producing web-based content. Sennott's multimedia work has focused primarily on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the devastating impact they have had on returning combat veterans.
Throughout his career, Mr. Sennott has been heralded for his ability to break news and shed light on complex issues in conflict-torn lands. Long before the "war on terror" was part of the American lexicon, he specialized in the coverage of religious extremism and terrorism. Providence College recently awarded him with an honorary doctorate for "years of courageous coverage of faith amid conflict."
As early as 1993, Mr. Sennott was reporting on Islamic militancy and the birth of what became known as Al Qaeda. And after September 11, 2001, he was among the first reporters on the ground in Afghanistan to cover the US military response. In 2003, he reported from the front lines of the US-led invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
Mr. Sennott began his career as a contributor to National Public Radio and moved into print journalism becoming a regional reporter for the Bergen Record of Hackensack, New Jersey and later was a special assignment reporter and a city editor for the New York Daily News.
Mr. Sennott broke many big stories as a city reporter and one exclusive, which exposed a priest sex abuse scandal in New York, became the topic of a best selling book he authored in 1991 titled Broken Covenant (Simon & Schuster.)
At the Daily News, Mr. Sennott also served as deputy city editor where he coordinated daily coverage and oversaw and edited a large staff of metro reporters and columnists.
In 1993, Mr. Sennott was one of the first reporters on the scene of the first World Trade Center bombing. He followed the trail of the suspects from mosques in Brooklyn and New Jersey to Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt and the West Bank where he unraveled the tangled theological and political lines that connected the plot by Islamic militants to topple the twin towers a full eight years before September 11, 2001.
In 1994, Mr. Sennott joined The Boston Globe as an investigative reporter and produced signature coverage of everything from the Big Dig to the U.S. weapons industry.
His reporting won numerous journalism prizes including the prestigious Livingston Award for National Reporting and he was named a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting by Harvard University's Shorenstein Center.
In 1997, Mr. Sennott was named Middle East bureau chief for the Globe and moved with his wife and three-month-old son to Jerusalem. There, he provided coverage of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and other countries while coordinating regional reports from freelance correspondents.
Mr. Sennott delivered running daily coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the despair on both sides as it collapsed into violence in the second intifada. During that tumult, he and his wife had two more sons. One was born in Jerusalem and the other in Bethlehem.
At the same time, Sennott wrote another best-selling book about his years of coverage of the Middle East titled The Body and The Blood: A Reporter's Journey through the Holy Land (PublicAffairs.) The book traced the path of Jesus' life as a way to understand the modern Middle East and to document the diminishing Christian community in the land where the faith began.
As a reporter immersed in the history of politics and religion in the Middle East, Mr. Sennott was featured in a one hour documentary by the Discovery Channel about the biblical trail of Exodus and was a co-author of a third book titled Cradle of Faith (National Geographic.)
Just before September 11, 2001, Mr. Sennott moved with his wife and three young sons to London to take up the posting as the Globe's Europe Bureau chief. A fourth son was born in London.
Mr. Sennott spent much of the first year traveling to Afghanistan where he delivered searing and informed reports from the front lines of the US-led offensive on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Mr. Sennott also coordinated much of the Globe's wider war coverage and developed a network of freelance reporters in Europe and the Middle East.
As the war in Iraq loomed, Mr. Sennott covered the trans-Atlantic divide that opened between America and Europe over the legality and wisdom of invading Iraq. Mr. Sennott also provided front line coverage of the invasion of Iraq and returned several times to manage a Baghdad bureau and to report on the bloody and tragic aftermath of the invasion. A lengthy magazine piece he wrote in 2004 from Baghdad titled "The Perils of Empire" was recognized by the Foreign Press Association as "Story of the Year."
When terrorism struck in Europe, Mr. Sennott was on hand again to provide insightful and experienced coverage of the subway bombings in Madrid and London.
Throughout these years, Mr. Sennott has been a frequent analyst of the Middle East and religious extremism for the BBC, CNN and NPR. He has also produced a series of reports on Pakistan and Afghanistan for "The World," which is a partnership of the BBC and Public Radio International.
Mr. Sennott was a guest lecturer for a class titled "Fundamentalisms" taught by Harvard University's Divinity School Professor Harvey Cox. He has also given numerous talks on the Middle East and religious fundamentalism, including the Nossiter Lecture at Dartmouth College. He was named "Historian-in-Residence" on the Middle East in the spring semester of 2007 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This spring, Mr. Sennott is teaching a course at Harvard University's Extension School titled "Storytelling in the Digital Age."
Mr. Sennott is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (BA, History) and of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism (MS). He lives with his wife and four sons in Harvard, Massachusetts.