The Cape Ann Forum Presents GroundTruth Project

NEW PROJECT SEEKS TO EXPAND FREE EXPRESSION

Boston reporter & British photographer team up for media initiative

The Cape Ann Forum opens its final season with veteran reporter Charlie Sennott and photo-journalist Gary Knight on the GroundTruth Project and their efforts to promote freedom of expression in a new media environment. The free program, featuring a talk and visual images, will be held at Gloucester City Hall on Sunday, Sept. 27 from 7 to 9 p.m.

Sennott, an award-winning foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe who left in 2008 to start the online news service GlobalPost and went on to found GroundTruth earlier this year, will talk about the stories they’re focusing on, how they cover global news differently, and what they’re doing to prepare the international reporters of the future. Knight, the project’s visual editor, will talk about the role of visuals in narrative story-telling and share photographs from his work.

“In the digital age, as we are bombarded with so much information from afar, GroundTruth values the idea that being there on the ground and calibrating events in human terms is the key to getting it right,” says Sennott. “We focus on narrative storytelling about issues that matter for an increasingly interconnected world and we search for solutions to these issues.”

GroundTruth, based at WGBH Boston, trains correspondents from around the world to work together across different media platforms and cultural backgrounds with a focus on human rights, freedom of expression, emerging democracies, the environment, religious affairs and global health. Organizers say their objective is to foster dialogue and engagement while exposing injustice and finding solutions.

Over a career spanning 30 years, Sennott has been on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in 15 countries, from the jungles of Colombia to the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. During the “January 25th Revolution” in Cairo in 2012 he served as lead correspondent on two award-winning documentaries for the PBS series Frontline.

He was the Globe’s Middle East Bureau Chief in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and Europe Bureau Chief in London from 2001 to 2005. He founded GlobalPost after the Globe phased out the last of its overseas bureaus in 2008, and he built a global network of correspondents, many of them victims of budget cuts at print publications, who went on to win the Overseas Press Club, Polk and Peabody awards as well as the RFK Award for Human Rights Reporting.

Sennott says his experience reporting internationally led him to launch the GroundTruth Project to train the next generation of international journalists for the digital age. The project’s editorial partners include GlobalPost as well as NBC News, NPR, PBS Frontline and PRI’s The World.

British-born photographer Gary Knight started his career as a photo-journalist in 1988 covering the war between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge and then spent six years in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. He has photographed for news magazines, art-directed magazines, designed books, started media foundations and won numerous honors, including Amnesty International Awards for Journalism in 1997 and 2002, Overseas Press Club Awards, and POYi Awards.

He founded the VII Photo Agency in 2001 to “give free expression to the small number of leading news and current affairs photographers it represented.” In 2003, it was named the third most influential entity in photography by American Photo Magazine. Today it is part of GroundTruth.

“VII created a new space in the media environment that not only acts as a distribution hub for concerned visual narratives to the media but as a publishing entity and a platform for communication strategies with NGO’s such as MSF [Doctors Without Borders], Human Rights Watch and the ICRC [International Committee for the Red Cross],” says Knight who has also worked with the Crimes of War Foundation, the Frontline Club Foundation and the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, among others.

From 1999 to 2009, Knight was a contract photographer for Newsweek, during which he photographed the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, Darfur, and other significant world news events. In 2009, he was awarded a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and moved to the United States. He now directs the Program for Narrative & Documentary Practice at Tufts University.

This is the 90th Cape Ann Forum since the organization was formed after 9/11 to increase public understanding of international issues, and it will be the last full season, according to founder and chair Dan Connell, who says they are not sure whether they will fold it up next spring or scale it back and continue doing programs.

“We’re not sure what we’ll do next—perhaps an annual event and an expanded online presence, maybe a merger with another Cape Ann organization, maybe something else,” he said. “These are things we’ll talk about with our constituents over the course of this year.”

Other events planned for this “transitional” season feature Essex human rights activist Karen Keating Ansara on relief and development in post-earthquake Haiti (Nov. 15); Forum founder Dan Connell on refugees and global migration (Feb. 21); foreign policy analyst and author Stephen Walt on the U.S. and the Middle East, with journalist Christopher Lydon moderating (April 3); and security analyst, career army officer and author Andrew Bacevich on challenges the U.S. faces in the years ahead (May 15).

For more information on the Forum and future events, go to the website at www.capeannforum.org.

For media only: To interview Charlie Sennott, email him at csennott@thegroundtruthproject.org.