The tale of GroundTruth’s sequel
A trailer on how and why we’re launching the new and independent GroundTruth Media Partners
In a new plot twist for GroundTruth, we see the narrative arc come full circle in its 13-year saga as the team continues its Herculean effort to defend against mounting threats to journalism and truth itself, by calling upon a new generation to step up and serve our democracy through local reporting.
Call it “GroundTruth II.”
Sincere apologies for the breathless Hollywood pitch line, but this is truly a powerful moment for the whole, epic GroundTruth cast and crew. We are poised for some very exciting years ahead as I turn the GroundTruth brand out into the field to do my own journalism. Meanwhile, Report for America and Report for the World will go full speed ahead on their own journey and focus more on their individual brands.
This week, after much reflection, I announced that I’d be leaving The GroundTruth Project, the non-profit organization that I founded in 2012 and which was officially recognized by the IRS as a 501c3 tax-deductible organization in 2014. It is the culmination of a nearly three year process of succession planning and handing off to a new leadership team.
I will be taking GroundTruth forward to iterate again as a new startup with a new mission and a new business model, which, ironically, circles back to the original for-profit model and places me right back where my 40-year journey in journalism started: reporting on the ground. I’ll be doing that right here through my GroundTruth newsletter on Substack, and we hope you will subscribe and join me on the journey going forward.
For the better part of a year, I worked closely with CEO Rob Zeaske and the staff on the editorial team to establish an independent entity that will carry on the journalism that has always been at the heart of what I envisioned GroundTruth would become. The new entity we launched this week will use the name GroundTruth in a new context as GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC, a base from which I’ll write the GroundTruth newsletter on Substack.
As I return to the craft of journalism and leave behind the challenges of managing and fundraising for a non-profit, I am reflecting on what has been the honor of a lifetime. I am so lucky to have had a chance to bring to life the vision for ‘ground truth,” a concept followers of this newsletter know well by now.
The mission at the heart of that vision has now become a thriving enterprise and a surging movement that is global and local. All of that success is due to the amazing team we built at GroundTruth, to the reporters and newsrooms we support, to the guidance of our stellar board of directors, but most importantly our generous funders have made this all possible.
Since I joined forces with Steve Waldman to bring to life his idea of Report for America, our organization has placed nearly 700 journalists through Report for America in staff positions of up to two years for reporters in more than 300 local newsrooms across all 50 states. The more nascent Report for the World, which was co-founded by my long time executive editor Kevin Grant, is also very much on the rise.
On the business side of the operation, we have seen more than 1,000 percent growth in our budget, going from the $1.2 million we started with, to the current, projected $13 million annual budget. We went from just four employees and myself working from a small storage area that we called “the land of broken chairs” at GBH in Boston, where we launched almost exactly ten years ago at a packed house in Yawkey Theater. Now we have a growing team of more than 50 employees scattered mostly in home offices and shared work spaces across the country and around the world.
Our original model, focused on reporting fellowships, produced award-winning and impactful journalism projects co-published with some of the best journalism organizations in the world, including PBS FRONTLINE, the Atlantic and PRX. Through all 13 years, we have supported an estimated 2,000 reporters in fellowships, workshops and in staff positions through our flagship programs. These reporters represent the best of a new generation of journalists who are out there every day serving in under-covered corners of the world, and right here in America.
One of my favorite moments through the years took place at our national gathering in Chicago in 2022, when the faces of some 300 corps members, all wearing their bold Report for America t-shirts, marched forward across a field and out into the communities they serve. After all the hard work, it was great to see our vision realized and in motion.
Now, we come full circle. Back in 2008, GroundTruth started as my column in GlobalPost, the for-profit news organization I co-founded. GlobalPost won lots of journalism awards but never came close to turning a profit. So I pivoted to build a non-profit model using the GroundTruth name and brought it to WGBH. Now I am pivoting yet again to reimagine GroundTruth as an LLC at a time when the non-profit journalism space feels saturated with so many amazing organizations doing so much good work, I want to see if we can go headlong into this exciting moment of both disruption and innovation to find new sources of revenue that will sustain our journalism.
It is an understatement to say we have a lot of work to do on the new entity, GroundTruth Media Partners which will focus on three areas. The first will be this newsletter which will live and breathe on Substack. The second is thought leadership, through a network of award-winning journalists who will join us to write for, and be interviewed by, the newsletter and through reporting trips where I’ll celebrate the best of local reporting anywhere in the world. The third leg of the stool is an incubator fund that will help support innovative new ideas, particularly around the revolutionary promise of AI, where forces of change are already well underway. I want to hear from young journalists and tech entrepreneurs who I hope will lead the way forward to new AI models to sustain truth telling that serves local communities.
But right now my focus is on the newsletter on Substack, a platform that has given journalists the ability to own their work and amplify independent journalism. With more than 20 million monthly active subscribers, two million of whom are paid participants, Substack has transformed into a tool that is not just about newsletters but for live video and podcasts while also merging the essence of social media and the feel of newsrooms.
Substack is a juggernaut of independent voices that can rebuild the trust in journalism by meeting audiences where they are: from veteran journalists and blue-chip editors like
to vibrant and counter-intuitive voices like and the unofficial dean of the platform, my colleague at Boston College, . If you do not already read “Letters for an American,” you should join the nearly 2 million on Substack who do. Heather is a force of nature and brings it every day (or more commonly in the pre-dawn darkness) to deliver context for this distressing moment in America through applied history.Substack also speaks to GroundTruth’s history of success through innovation and iteration and whatever it takes to find a self-sustaining model. So please join me and let’s get started on a journey to explore the most pressing issues of our time, bringing you even closer to the work we do, with stories that link the local to the global and provide context and clarity in a confusing world. It’s about taking our community—one that believes in the power of local journalism to strengthen democracy – into a new storyline. We hope this next narrative will get rolling like a gritty, indy film with a powerful message about a time when the crisis in journalism has everything to do with the crisis in democracy.
Lights, camera, action!
Looking forward to supporting and witnessing this next generation project.
Best of luck, Charlie. I hope to not only read but hear what you have to say as I have on GBH. Your passion and clarity sustains me.