Charlie Sennott. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Call it chance, karma, kismet, or fate—Charlie Sennott likes to talk about the serendipity that seemed to lead him and his family to the home on Bolton Road, where they’ve lived since 2006.

A veteran foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe, Sennott points to the news organizations that have been associated with the old house: The old Harvard Post, the Harvard Press, and now Global News Enterprises LLC, which he conceptualized in his basement office and plans to launch in early 2009.

Global News, he said, will be the first U.S.-based website devoted entirely to international news.

Sennott explained that, while he was envisioning the project here in Harvard, New England Cable News founder Philip S. Balboni was cultivating a similar idea. Their ideas converged, he said, and they found themselves working together on plans for Global News for the last 10 months, in between Sennott’s tours covering news in Afghanistan and Iraq for the Globe.

Two weeks ago Sennott closed the door on his career at the Globe, and last week stepped into his new office at Global News at Pilot House on Boston’s Lewis Wharf, taking on the role of executive editor and vice president of the fledgling news organization. Balboni, the organization’s president and CEO, is also one of the start-up’s investors, a group that includes billionaire Amos B. Hostetter Jr., co-founder of Continental Cablevision, Benjamin Taylor, former publisher of the Boston Globe, and Paul Sagan, president of Akamai Technologies.

Sennott said his last days at the Globe were sad, marked by a number of going-away parties for long-term journalists, such as business columnist Steve Bailey.

“There is an economic crisis in newspapers right now,” he said.

He called the traditional newspaper model “unsustainable,” noting the “miles of paper,” used in printing, and the thousands of gallons of fuel used by the delivery trucks that take them to their distribution points.

He said “significant economic pressures” have made mainstream news organizations focus more locally—on the city or the region. “Local papers are poised to do extremely well,” he predicted, “but regional papers face a bleak future.”

Sennott said he has found it increasingly difficult to find international coverage in one place.

“As traditional news organizations begin to cut back or abandon their mission to cover the world, a significant opportunity is opening up,” he said. “Newspapers have squandered their future. They haven’t seen the horizon and where they need to take the papers.”

The coverage of international news in major papers such as the Globe and the New York Times is relatively recent, said Sennott, with the heyday of international news reporting taking place in the ’70s and ’80s.

“Now they’re managing decline and a downshift in vision,” he said.

He calls his most recent article, on the situation in Baghdad one year after the U.S. troop surge, his “swan song,” and speculates that it will likely be the last article of its kind in the Boston Globe.

Sennott believes people’s reliance on the Internet will continue to increase, and envisions homes with computers in the kitchen, where people can hop on the Web over coffee and check the headlines before going off to work.

“There’s a real revolution [going on] in this information age. Newspapers were too late off the mark when the Internet came on the scene,” he said. “They’re like grand old ships, too slow to turn to the future.”

Sennott has great respect and appreciation for the opportunities he’s had to cover history-making events, such as the first attack on the World Trade Center, the London bombings, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The Globe has given me 10 years of an incredible ride,” he said. “It’s given me a great education.”

For Sennott, reporting on world events is more than a job—the experience has been woven into the tapestry of his life. He speaks with affection of the “band of brothers and sisters” covering Iraq and Afghanistan, and of their “journey together since 9/11.”

The office where the idea for Global News was born is filled with memorabilia from his service as a reporter and bureau chief in London and the Middle East, including pieces of shrapnel from devices detonated too close for comfort, and the mock-up of the cover for a book he wrote about his experiences in the Middle East, The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land at the Turn of a New Millennium: A Reporter’s Journey.

He brings a passion to his work that would, he said, be “hard to do” in a dying newspaper industry.

Sennott said Global News expects to have about 70 foreign correspondents worldwide, covering not only the world’s hot spots—scenes of war and terrorism—but also what he calls “the emerging engines of growth in the world economy,” places like India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

“Our lives are all increasingly connected to the world around us,” he reflected.

Global News as envisioned by Sennott will be a network of veteran foreign correspondents, such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Matthew McAllester, mentoring the next generation of foreign reporters, all working together to help keep Americans more informed about the world. His first task on the job at Global News will be to select those new reporters from among the 200 resumes he’s already received.

Looking ahead to his dreams for Global News, Sennott said, “It’s thrilling and daunting to find a new way to cover international news in the information age.”