Dan and Ellen talk with Charlie Sennott, a former foreign correspondent at The Boston Globe who left in 2008 to become a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded Global Post and The Ground Truth Project. Ground Truth, a nonprofit, was a partner to GBH News, FRONTLINE, PRX The World, and the PBS NewsHour. It focused on partnerships to amplify international and national news projects.

Now, Charlie has turned his attention to local news. He teamed up with Steve Waldman to launch Report for America as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Dan and Ellen talked with Waldman on an earlier podcast.

Sennott's newest creation is GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC based in Woods Hole, where he leads a small staff and publishes and writes the GroundTruth newsletter on Substack. The non-profit that was called "The GroundTruth Project" has recently rebranded to call itself Report Local with Report for America and Report for the World as its flagship initiatives. Report Local and the University of Missouri School of Journalism did groundbreaking work on water issues in the Mississippi River Basin.

In his most recent post on Substack, Sennott writes about this new branding. He also writes about how he officially stepped aside from the program, but remains incredibly proud of the movement it has created.

As his own act of community service, Sennott is also serving as the publisher and editor of the Martha's Vineyard Times on Martha's Vineyard where he and his wife, Julie, who has an extended family on the Island, now live year round.

Dan and Ellen are also joined by Alexis Algazy, a Northeastern student who has done a compelling story about why politicians need to engage in storytelling on social media.

Dan has a Quick Take about public support for local news. Politico recently published an in-depth story on what's gone wrong with a program in California that was supposed to provide $250 million to help fund local news over a five-year period, with the money to come from the state and from Google. The deal seems to be coming apart. And yet there are reasons to be optimistic — as you will hear.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the role of video in recording the violent acts of ICE agents in Minneapolis, and the protests all over that city. Video by bystanders has played an important role in exposing what's happening on the ground. But video and social media in general also pose a challenge for reporters covering the story for the Minnesota Star Tribune. Editor Kathleen Hennessey spoke about it in a brief interview with Semafor.

Dan and Ellen talk with Mike Beaudet and Lisa Thalhamer. Mike is a colleague at Northeastern, where he is a journalism professor. He is also an investigative reporter at WCVB-TV, Boston's ABC affiliate. He's worked in local television news for more than 30 years. Before joining WCVB-TV he was an investigative reporter and anchor at WFXT-TV in Boston. Beaudet's research at Northeastern focuses on the future of local television news and finding new ways to grow the audience and engage younger viewers where they're consuming content.

Lisa is a journalist and researcher. She's currently editor-in-chief of The Scope, a hyper-local publication in Boston, as well as an adjunct professor at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on improving the mental well-being of journalists, particularly those in local TV news, where she worked for more than 15 years as a producer.

While earning her master's degree at Northeastern, Thalhamer was Reinvent's Video Innovation Scholar, helping newsrooms evolve their video storytelling skills to fit the world of social media.

In keeping with the all-Northeastern theme of this podcast, Dan and Ellen are also joined by Greg Maynard, a student of Dan's who has done a compelling story about what cord-cutting means for local cable access outlets.

Ellen has a Quick Take on the end of an era in Minneapolis. In December, the daily newspaper, the Minnesota Star Tribune, stopped printing copies at their giant brick plant in downtown Minneapolis. The Strib is printing at a Gannett plant in Des Moines, Iowa. That means earlier deadlines, and 125 jobs lost.

Dan has a wild story for his Quick Take. Last summer there was some sad news coming out of Claremont, New Hampshire: the Eagle Times, a star-crossed paper that had had its ups and downs going back to the 1940s, was closing its doors after its wealthy owner, Jay Lucas, failed to meet payroll. At the time, New Hampshire Public Radio ran a story on the shutdown that was harsher than you would have expected. But there was a reason.

Dan and Ellen talk with Jennifer Peter, who was named editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project in September of 2025. The Marshall Project is a national nonprofit that covers issues related to criminal justice. She's only the third editor in 10 years, replacing Susan Chira, a former New York Times editor. Peter started her career as a reporter, working for 12 years at newspapers in Idaho, Connecticut and Virginia before joining The Associated Press in Boston. From the AP, she moved to The Globe, where she rose quickly through the ranks. She was regional editor, politics editor, and city editor. As metro editor, she oversaw The Globe's Boston Marathon bombing coverage, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News.

In 2018 she was promoted to managing editor, the number-two position in the newsroom. In our conversation, Peter tells us about The Marshall Project's mission, including its foray into local news in Cleveland, St. Louis and Jackson, Mississippi.

A production note: Dan is at Northeastern, but Ellen is beaming in from a studio at Brookline Interactive Group, which handles multimedia for the town of Brookline. BIG, as it is known locally, is also host to a class of Brandeis students who travel to Brookline to report and write stories for Brookline.News, the nonprofit newsroom Ellen is part of. BIG provides audio and video of Brookline civic meetings and also works with Brookline public school students on multimedia projects.

Dan has a Quick Take about yet another newspaper that's gone out of business, although this one has an unusual twist. The devastating wildfires that ripped through the Los Angeles area last January have claimed the Palisadian-Post, a twice-monthly newspaper that had been publishing since 1928. The problem is that many of the residents were forced to leave, and though rebuilding is under way, the community hasn't come close to recovering.

One of Dan's Northeastern students, Abbie O'Connor, is from the Pacific Palisades — her home is still standing. She wrote several times in my opinion journalism class during the semester about how the Palisades were affected by the fire. Among other things, an enormous number of Palisades residents moved to Manhattan Beach, re-creating the sense of community they had in their former homes.

Abbie's final project was an enterprise story on racial and economic disparities in the rebuilding resources that are being made available to the mostly white, affluent residents of the Pacific Palisades and the lower-income, historically Black community of Altadena.

Ellen's Quick Take is about Brian McGrory returning as editor of The Boston Globe in January. McGrory left in early 2023 to become chair of Boston University's journalism department. He'll replace Nancy Barnes, who announced last week that she'd be stepping aside.