Another first-rate journalist is leaving the Boston Globe. Charles Sennott, best known for his years as a foreign correspondent, will join New England Cable News founder Phil Balboni’s new venture, Global News Enterprises, according to a memo written by Globe deputy manager Mark Morrow and obtained by Media Nation.
Sennott will be executive editor, co-founder and vice president of Global News, according to the memo. Here’s the full text of what Morrow had to say:
We are living in a season of too many good-byes, and this one, like so many, is hard. Charlie Sennott is leaving the Globe after 14 amazing years chasing stories all over the region, nation and world. With his unstoppable — indeed, occasionally overwhelming — energy, verve and passion for our craft, he has been a singular presence among us since the day he migrated north from the mad-cap universe of the New York Daily news to take a job with the paper he grew up with and had dreamed of working for from an early age. From day one, he thought big — and delivered. He has also been, there can be no doubt, one of most intrepid reporters in the paper’s history, time and again taking on risky overseas assignments, right up to his return trip last month to Baghdad. (More about that in Sunday’s paper.) I am really going to miss him; we all will.
It will surprise no one that Charlie will land on his feet, in his post-Globe life. He will be joining, as executive editor, co-founder and vice president, a Boston-based web startup — Global News Enterprises — which aims to be the first American-based website dedicated solely to international news. It is an exciting notion, which has already drawn some impressive financial backers, and will doubtless be an adventure. All of us who know Charlie can be sure he is more than up for that.
He won’t be leaving until early April, but he wanted to get the word out as Global News will be announcing his appointment soon. So there will be some days yet to reflect on Charlie’s years with us, to raise a glass and to pick his brain about what is coming next.
Despite Sennott’s long experience in international reporting, he’ll always be known — to me, anyway — as the reporter who told the astounding story of Claribel Ventura, a welfare mother accused of child abuse, and the 100 or members of her dysfunctional family.
Sennott’s story, which closed with a startling quote from one of Ventura’s sisters when asked what message she had for taxpayers (“Just tell them to keep paying”), had much to do with the passage of welfare reform Massachusetts. In 2004, Sennott wrote a 10th-anniversary update.
Sennott is also the author of “The Body and the Blood: The Middle East’s Vanishing Christians and the Possibility for Peace” (2002).
