The Ground Truth Project - Now Local Report

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Status note: In 2025, The GroundTruth Project rebranded as Report Local and stepped away from direct editorial and content production work. groundtruth.org now redirects to reportlocal.org. This page covers the full history of the organisation under both names. The Substack publication GroundTruth, operated by founder Charles Sennott through GroundTruth Media Partners LLC, is a separate independent entity and continues publishing at charlessennott.substack.com.

Overview

The GroundTruth Project — rebranded as Report Local in 2025 — is a Boston-based nonprofit journalism organization that has undergone one of the more significant strategic evolutions in the American nonprofit media landscape of the past decade. Founded by award-winning international correspondent Charles Sennott in 2014, GroundTruth began as an organization dedicated to training a new generation of international correspondents and producing long-form multimedia journalism on global issues. Within four years it had pivoted to become primarily a local journalism placement organization, launching Report for America in 2018 as what Sennott described as "Teach for America for journalists." By 2025, with nearly 1,000 journalists placed in hundreds of newsrooms worldwide through Report for America and Report for the World, the organization formally rebranded as Report Local and announced it would step away from direct content and editorial work entirely to focus on scaling its placement programs. The legal name of the organization remains The GroundTruth Project, Inc.

Founding and Origins: GlobalPost and the International Reporting Mission

The GroundTruth Project grew directly from GlobalPost, a for-profit international digital news website that Sennott co-founded in 2009 with Philip Balboni. GlobalPost was created to provide professional international news coverage at a moment when US newspaper foreign bureaus were closing in large numbers, filling a gap in quality international reporting for American audiences. Sennott had spent the prior decade as the Boston Globe's Bureau Chief for the Middle East and Europe, reporting from the front lines of at least twenty countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. At GlobalPost, he developed a special project focused on long-form feature reporting on systemic global issues — this internal project became the seed of GroundTruth.

Sennott launched GroundTruth informally in 2012 and received official 501(c)(3) recognition in August 2014. The founding mission was to train and support a new generation of international journalists — specifically to counter the loss of foreign bureau infrastructure by creating a pipeline of well-prepared young correspondents, supported by safety training, mentorship, editorial partnership, and reporting fellowship funding. The organization's name came from a NASA technical term: "ground truthing" is the process by which a satellite measurement is calibrated by a simultaneous human measurement on the ground, ensuring accuracy. For Sennott, the concept captured everything he believed about journalism: the best way to ascertain the truth about anything is to be there, on the ground, doing the work directly. "We believe great journalism comes from being there, on the ground, to tell the stories that matter," he wrote in the organization's founding field guide. "We call it 'ground truth.' It's an old-school value, but one that is more important than ever."

The August 2014 formal launch of GroundTruth coincided with one of the most devastating moments in recent international journalism history: the public execution by ISIS of James Foley, an American journalist who had worked with Sennott at GlobalPost and had been held captive in Syria for two years. Foley's death, and the haunting footage of his execution, defined the organization's sense of moral purpose and its commitment to journalist safety. GroundTruth subsequently co-led the development of a field safety code of conduct alongside Thomson Reuters, the Associated Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Frontline Freelance Register, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism — a set of baseline safety standards that was publicly launched in February 2015. In 2024, Sennott received the World Press Freedom Award from the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation.

Report for America: The Local News Pivot

By 2017, as GroundTruth's international reporting fellowship work matured, Sennott had become acutely aware of a parallel crisis unfolding in the United States: the collapse of local news. Newspaper jobs had fallen from approximately 450,000 when he started his career to fewer than 180,000, producing vast "news deserts" across the country — communities with no professional reporters covering local government, courts, schools, water quality, public health, or any of the other accountability journalism that had historically informed democratic participation at the local level. In 2017, Sennott joined forces with Steve Waldman — a journalist and media policy expert who had led the Federal Communications Commission's landmark 2012 study on the information needs of communities in a changing media landscape — to launch Report for America, a national service program modeled loosely on Teach for America.

Report for America launched in January 2018. Its model is a three-way funding partnership: GroundTruth pays half of a corps member's salary, the local news organisation partner pays one quarter (encouraging them to raise it from local community sources), and local and regional funders contribute the remaining quarter. Corps members serve for one to three years as full-time employees of their partner newsrooms, reporting on under-covered themes and communities. They receive training, mentorship, networking opportunities, and are required to design and lead a media-focused community service project. The programme grew rapidly: from a pilot cohort of roughly a dozen reporters, it grew to approximately 300 corps members in local newsrooms by late 2022 and to nearly 1,000 placed journalists across hundreds of newsrooms by 2025. Funders have included the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Google News Initiative, the Tow Foundation, the Lenfest Institute, and many others. The Associated Press, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and hundreds of smaller local papers and digital newsrooms have served as partner organizations.

Report for the World

In April 2021, GroundTruth launched Report for the World — an international extension of the Report for America model, co-founded by Sennott and Kevin Grant. The program launched with two partner newsrooms: Scroll.in in India and TheCable in Nigeria. By 2023, Report for the World was supporting 44 corps members at 31 host newsrooms across 20 countries including Brazil, Hungary, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. The model mirrors Report for America's matching approach but is adapted for international contexts, including direct support for newsrooms' philanthropic development to build sustainable local funding. The program reflects GroundTruth's founding international mission applied to local journalism globally: the same conviction that placing committed, supported journalists in specific communities produces journalism that those communities cannot otherwise get.

Awards and Editorial Legacy

Before stepping away from direct content production in 2025, The GroundTruth Project produced award-winning journalism through its reporting fellows and editorial partnerships with organizations including PBS FRONTLINE, ABC News, Foreign Policy, PRI's The World, and the Center for Investigative Reporting/Reveal. The organization received the National Edward R. Murrow Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, an Online Journalism Award for Excellence in Audio Digital Storytelling for "The New American Songbook" (2018), and a People's Voice Webby Award for "Best Use of Interactive Video" for "The Last Generation" (2019). Its work on climate, women and girls, education, economic inequality, and election reform reached audiences through some of the most trusted US broadcast and digital platforms.

The 2025 Rebrand: Report Local

In 2025, The GroundTruth Project made a formal strategic decision to step away from its direct investment in content and editorial work — the international reporting fellowships and the multimedia journalism production that had defined its early years — and to focus entirely on scaling Report for America and Report for the World. The organization rebranded as Report Local, and groundtruth.org was redirected to reportlocal.org. The organization stated: "This transition reflects who we are today: A global, community-rooted organization focused on strengthening local journalism ecosystems." Charles Sennott, who had moved from CEO to Editor-in-Chief in 2022 to make room for new operational leadership, subsequently created GroundTruth Media Partners LLC — a separate independent editorial entity operated through Substack — to continue his personal journalism, thought leadership, and editorial advisory work.

Access and Usage

Report Local's flagship programs — Report for America and Report for the World — are accessible at reportlocal.org, where newsrooms can apply to host corps members and journalists can apply to join the corps. Report for America applications typically open each autumn. Newsrooms seeking to partner with Report for the World can find information at the same site. Charles Sennott's ongoing journalism and commentary is available through his Substack at charlessennott.substack.com. The original GroundTruth Project archive of international reporting, fellowships, and multimedia journalism remains accessible through archived pages at thegroundtruthproject.org, which also redirects to reportlocal.org.

The GroundTruth Project, Inc. — now Report Local
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Founder: Charles M. Sennott (currently operating independently via GroundTruth Media Partners LLC / Substack)

Flagship programmes: Report for America (US, launched 2018) · Report for the World (international, launched 2021)

Current website: reportlocal.org

Report for America: reportforamerica.org

Sennott / GroundTruth editorial: charlessennott.substack.com