Meriden
He was the keynote speaker at a global fair dedicated to the reporter Steven Sotloff, a 2002 alumnus of the school who was killed by members of the Islamic State group in September 2014, a few weeks after GlobalPost freelancer James Foley suffered the same fate.
During his 45-minute talk, Sennott discussed the parallels between his own journalism career and Sotloff’s, explaining what brought them both to report on the Middle East and the United States’ wars there.
As freelancers in war zones, neither Sotloff nor Foley had access to the same resources as employees of established news organizations, and Sennott also described how he now aims to promote safety as financial pressures drive journalists to report more dangerous stories with less institutional support.
As best Sennott could guess, Sotloff’s writing career began at KUA, at the student newspaper, The Kimball Union.
“It’s where he really learned to separate facts from ideas and put them together in writing,” Sennott said.
(The paper no longer exists, as Sennott learned when he asked how many current students worked for it.)
As a cub reporter, Sotloff covered the 9/11 attacks, which sparked what Sennott called America’s “forever war” — a seemingly endless global war on terrorism that drew both men to the Middle East.
Sotloff started college at the University of Central Florida, but after two years dropped out and moved to Israel, where he held dual citizenship. In the following years, he reported for Time magazine, as well as the Christian Science Monitor and Foreign Policy.
Sennott’s career in international reporting also was influenced by terror at the World Trade Center — the 1993 bombing. He was in New York City on the day in question, sitting in a nearby restaurant, when he heard a boom followed by sirens. Outside, people were walking down the street dazed, coughing and covered in soot.
“Who would do that?” Sennott remembered thinking. “Who are the people who would want to take down the World Trade Center?”
That simple question took Sennott halfway around the world and inspired years of work with the New York Daily News and the Boston Globe.
In 2013, Sennott traveled to Egypt to film a PBS Frontline documentary. The country was locked in a struggle for power between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political organization whose candidate had won the presidential election following the Arab Spring revolution.
Sennott found himself one day inside a mosque, wrestling with camera equipment as a riot went on outside, when someone approached and spoke in English. It was Sotloff.
“Hey, do you need a hand?” Sotloff said. “Do you need help?”
That was about the extent of their interaction, Sennott said; later, Sennott saw Sotloff interviewing sources and became acquainted with his work.
“I’ve read the writing he did about that time in Cairo,” Sennott said. “It was insightful; it was powerful; it was accurate.”
Though Sotloff and Sennott weren’t intimately acquainted, Sennott felt the same personal loss when James Foley became the first American to die at the hands of the Islamic State in Syria.
“I hadn’t seen talent like that in a long time,” he said of Foley, who grew up in Wolfeboro, N.H.. “Someone who really loved what they do, who was on their journey.”
Besides feeling heartsick, Sennott said, he wondered whether the industry had let Foley down.
“I really wonder about that,” Sennott said. “I wonder about this idea — we thought we needed to do better for a new generation of correspondents — and as fate had it, we didn’t get to work with him.”
Foley had good training and was a mature reporter, Sennott said, “But did he have sufficient resources — financial — to do the work he did?”
He expanded on the question in an interview after the talk, saying the rates freelancers were being paid to cover conflicts “were not fair.”
“It’s not only not fair,” he said, “it in some cases could end up putting them in harm’s way, without the resources to get out of it. I think Jim Foley was going to go to Syria no matter what; he was going to work as a freelancer.”
All the same, Sennott said, “some of the places he worked and freelanced with — and I won’t say who those are — but some of them paid him $35 a photo.”
Those concerns sparked the foundation of his new enterprise, The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit news organization, he said, dedicated to Foley, Sotloff and “the many others” who have died while chasing stories.
Since GroundTruth’s founding, GlobalPost, which Sennott no longer runs, has also gone over to the nonprofit model.
GroundTruth, which receives funding from the MacArthur and Ford foundations, offers narrative storytelling from on-the-scene reporting, along with resources, training and support for young reporters breaking into international news.
“You guys,” Sennott said to the KUA students: “Your generation is extraordinary. You are the future of storytelling and you live in a revolutionary world. And if we don’t allow you to have the resources you need to do what you can do, the whole country — and, I would even argue, the whole world — would suffer.”
After the talk, a gaggle formed around Sennott. He swapped stories of bombings with a student from Turkey, which has undergone terrorist attacks and civil unrest lately, and counseled that the young man get a good education and eventually return to his country.
“Inshallah, everything will be all right,” Sennott told the student, using an Arabic phrase meaning “God willing.”
Places like Turkey need people who are willing to report the truth, Sennott said; otherwise, he added, “That’s how the bastards win.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.