 from the Silicon Valley Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this special presentation of theCUBE, introducing TechTruth. TechTruth is a collaboration between the Ground Truth Project and Silicon Angles theCUBE. I'm here with Charles Sennett, who's the executive director and founder of the Ground Truth Project. Charlie, always great to see you. So, let's tell everybody about TechTruth, Ground Truth, theCUBE, how it all came together. Sure, so we're really thrilled with this partnership. It's a real chance to bring some super talented young women into the Grace Hopper Conference and have them cover it on the ground. And this is our real mission, is to bring a new generation of journalists along and have them cover the biggest stories of their generation, but to do it from being there, from being on the ground. So we're thrilled. Three really talented young journalists will be there in Houston for the conference, working in partnership with you guys. It's gonna be fun. So we're really honored to be part of this. You really bring a background in journalism and editorial excellence. For those of you who don't know, Charlie was the meetings bureau chief at the Boston Globe for the better part of a decade, founded the Global Post, and then started the Ground Truth. Why did you start the Ground Truth? What's that all about? Really saw a need there for a new generation to have more opportunities. So this generation of journalists are really coming in at a time of great disruption. Traditional media is failing. The new media is not giving them the opportunities they need. And we saw a chance to come at this with foundation support. So we have support from the Ford Foundation, from MacArthur Foundation and individual support to try to build opportunity for young people to really give them a chance to learn some old school values in a digital age and bring those forward reporting around the world on the really big social justice issues of this time. And I do think women in technology and the way many women have been boxed out of, careers in technology is one of those stories. What's the name, the Ground Truth? Where's that come from? So Ground Truth is a technical term and it was actually NASA that coined the term. And what Ground Truth means is a calibration process. So when you have satellite technology and you're looking at satellite images when you're using Google Earth, for example, and you're using the satellite technology to come in on the Earth, come down maybe into your neighborhood or your town and look at it. We've all done this on Google Earth, I'm sure. That process only works through the calibration of making sure that there's a close focus on the ground. A patch of Earth about 10 square yards where a human being comes in with a camera, with a lens, a high-powered lens and grabs an optic on the ground so that the technology of the satellite, that optic can come in and lock in on what is called the Ground Truth, a small patch of Earth from which you calibrate all of the pixels of the technology. And I never think of NASA as poetic but they have this beautiful phrase which is they say when the technology of the satellite conflicts with the human being on the ground, it says always trust the human reading. And we think at Ground Truth we're about human readings in a time of too many pixels, maybe too much information, too much data, too much technology. How do you cut through it, get signal? We do that by being there on the ground and really focusing in on what matters. I love that calibration on the ground and not taking the humans out of the equation. There's so much discussion in our industry about machines replacing humans and how it's hollowing out the middle class and it's a great example of where humans plus machines are the best answer. You said traditional media is failing. What do you mean by that? Well, the great newspapers and networks of our generation, so the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, all of those organizations have been rocked by the web because they had a traditional ad-supported model that is now greatly undercut and disrupted by the technology of the worldwide web and the way the ad models are coming together or not coming together to support in-depth reporting. One of the most expensive kinds of reporting is international reporting and that's a lot of what we do. So what we're saying is if you have newspapers failing, which they are sadly, their business models don't sustain the sort of ambitions they used to have, many of them have closed their foreign bureaus and kind of had to downshift their vision. Boston Globe, My Alma Mater is among them, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, you could go down the list. They've all closed their foreign operations. What we wanted to do both at Global Post and now at Ground Truth is say, how do we fill that void? How do we come in and really give support to great in-depth journalism being done internationally and done nationally that can fill a void where traditional media is failing because they just don't have the business model to sustain their operation? Well, and you're seeing the billionaires sweep in, Vizos is an example with the Washington Post, obviously the Boston Globe. What do you make of that trend? I think what's really interesting about it is it has been said that the truth will never go out of business. And I really believe in that. And I think that the truth has value and I think that we don't have enough truth. They talk in this political cycle that we're in as crazy as it is about living in a post-truth era. And that phrase gives me the chills, the idea that we don't have a shared set of facts, that we don't have a way to look at things with the great traditions and standards of journalism that we really need in our country if we're gonna be a thriving democracy. And I think it's one of the things we really hold out as a beacon to the world. That's hard to see these days when the media seems so crazy and you have far left media and far right media and you have this sort of amen corners that people go to, particularly like say MSNBC on the left or Fox on the right. And you could say that some of that may have to do with the moment we live in where we're so challenged to have in-depth quality journalism that really enlightens and informs. Ground truth wants to be a part of a new future where we're gonna really support a new generation of journalists to hold true to those old standards, really try to look back to a different time when we did more in-depth reporting and we're gonna be out there trying to fund that. So take something like for instance, the Spotlight, one of the Academy Award, obviously awesome reporting. You actually participated, you weren't on that team but you funneled some of your articles. I'm proud to have been part of the overall big team but not the ground, you know, the actual Spotlight team that won the Pulitzer's four people and the movie portrays their role beautifully but there are more than a dozen, maybe as many as 20 others of us who contributed to the reporting at that time. The Globe is still a great newspaper. The Boston Globe continues to do fantastic investigative work but where they've shrunk their vision is internationally. They used to have foreign bureaus. They no longer have those. They used to have more national bureaus. They don't have those. So your old job as a Middle East bureau chief has gone. No longer exists. There's no foreign editor at the Boston Globe. So that's new, that's different. That's in the last 10 years. And the Global Post filled that gap. We filled the gap and we did, I'm very proud of the editorial team that we built. They won lots of awards but we didn't have a business model to sustain it. So now Global Post has been brought in under the wing of Public Radio International at WGBH and the Ground Truth Project is also based at WGBH and it's really a great home. GBH, the flagship PBS station in Boston is a place that's really doubling and even tripling down on in-depth journalism. So we're really proud to be part of that family. And speaking of awards, you guys just won the Edward R. Murrow Award. We did. Congratulations. Thanks. That's phenomenal. We had a good night and it was good luck. Very good. All right, let's talk about this fellowship. This is not your first fellowship you guys have done. I think hundreds of these, right? Yeah, we've done over a hundred fellowships now. Okay, and the mission again is to train the next generation of journalists. Maybe talk about a few that you've done, a few of the fellowships. We do big fellowships where we'll build what we call a pop-up newsroom. So we'll go into Egypt, for example, during Tahrir Square and the whole Arab Spring as it was unfolding. We brought 20 journalists together, 10 American, 10 Egyptian, and we covered that story in what we called covering a revolution. How do you do that? How do you cover something that's unfolding? We now put the word revolution in quotes a lot because it went a different way, but it was such a big, seismic interruption into the Middle East history. We wanted to be there on the ground, and the team of journalists we put there in Cairo reporting that story did fantastic work, and most of them have gone on to great careers, really doing amazing work at NPR, Associated Press, New York Times, and other places. They're really, I think we picked well. We picked journalists that are now gonna be a new generation covering the Middle East as it continues to unfold. We've done projects in Burma, for example, looking at Burma as an emerging democracy, where we had, again, a pop-up newsroom in Yangon where we brought together team of journalists, half Burmese, half American, and cover that story. It's such a dramatic story, a business story, a country between India and China that's about to break wide open with opportunity, with democracy, and with a lot of social change and upheaval. We, the young journalists we had there were amazing as well. The secret sauce of our fellowships is we're trying to find top talent with three to five years' experience. So these are emerging journalists, and right when they've had a little bit of experience, give them an opportunity to really invest in something big, something they can focus on, and where possible to combine them with people from the countries we cover. So we don't wanna just have American journalists parachuting in. We also wanna have them working with the journalists who are from there. Tech Truth, this new idea, this idea of really looking at how we can be playing a role in the coverage of technology and supporting a new generation to look at it in new ways. And as we'll be doing in Grace Hopper and the newsroom we'll share with you, we'll be a chance to look at this issue of women in technology. Why is it that so few women comparatively are in technology? And what are we missing out on? That's the thing I'm really interested in going to Grace Hopper and Houston is saying, what happens when big companies, big technology firms don't have enough women employed in their companies? What do we miss? What aren't we getting? And how are we really losing collectively by not being more inclusive and more aware of the ways in which women have been pushed out of the industry? There's a John Furrier, my co-CEO and business partner. We're really obviously thrilled to be part of this. We saw this model emerging. John and I have always had this sort of dream of Silicon Academy. We saw what you guys were doing. You saw theCUBE opportunities and it's all coming together at Grace Hopper. If you don't know Grace Hopper, it's Google Grace Hopper, amazing story. And so we- Amazing woman. Right, it really amazing. She is an icon. Inventor a cobalt. She coined the term computer bug because you had to shoot the moths off the vacuum tubes and see the Commodore and the Navy. I mean, really accomplished individual. Well worked too, really credited with writing some of the first code, right? Yeah, cobalt. And so quite a phenomenal story. And each year the Anita Borg Institute has a celebration of women in Houston. The Cube has been there for, this will be our third year. We get a huge set of 40 by 40 sets. So if you're down there, obviously stop by. And so we've got three fellows and two junior fellows out of Palo Alto High School. And a great editorial advisory board. John Markoff from the New York Times. Matt Carroll, who was one of the original spotlight team. Esther Wojewski, who runs the Palo Alto High School. Laura Satracian, who does Syria Deeply and News Deeply. So they're doing verticals all around the world really right now. So it is an amazing team of advisors. And the team of journalists, the three women who will be in this fellowship are really extraordinarily talented young journalists. I know you're going to get a chance to meet them as we go into the Grace Hopper conference and your audience will get a chance to see the work of some really talented young journalists. All right, so good. Well, thanks for hanging out with me for a little bit here. So check out the groundtruthproject.org for all the articles from the Grace Hopper conference, siliconangle.tv, siliconangle.com. We'll have all the coverage. It's going to be fun. We'll see you down there. Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, David. All right, thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.