April 2006 Dear Colleague, While you were sleeping, the world changed. Overnight, the earth traveled half a million miles through space. Some 117,000 people were born. About 52,000 people died. Huge companies were sold and bought. Millions of original words and images flowed into the global news stream. Somewhere, someone had an idea for what could become the next Google. The world does this every night. Each day is new, and those days add up, their changes transformational. It’s a world you either change with, or are changed by. Consider: Last year, Rupert Murdoch stood before the American Society of Newspaper Editors and said he was thinking of investing in the web. This year, he owns MySpace.com, the web’s premier youth site. Many news organizations are discovering that today they can reach wider audiences than ever imagined. But there are questions: Will this changing world still include journalism that satisfies democracy’s basic needs? Will great journalists still hold true to Jack Knight’s vision of journalism that “bestirs the people…and rouses them to pursue their true interests”? What news organizations will emerge in the 21st century to do what Jack and Jim Knight’s newspapers did for American communities in the 20th? Those newspapers helped define the communities we lived in by sharing events that happened to neighbors, by defining the problems and possibilities, and by connecting people with a shared language and a sense of place. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation wants to help lead the search for answers. And from the innovations just beginning to come from the news industry, we can see that many of you are also on the job. We believe in verification journalism. We believe in news in the public interest. We believe that new media offer new ways to deliver accurate, contextual news. As the nation’s largest grant-giving journalism foundation, we have invested $275 million during the past half-century in the kind of journalism excellence the Knight brothers loved. We have 170 active grantees, including 20 endowed chairs in journalism and major midcareer and press freedom programs worldwide. Yet we, who are heavily invested in past and present, see the future as journalism’s most exciting time. The future belongs to those honest few who can discover its secrets and see its promise, who are courageous enough to take the risks and committed enough to see them through. This brochure explains how you can join in on the new work we are doing, and, through the Knight Brothers 21st Century Challenge, invite us to join in on the new work you plan to do. Sincerely,
Alberto Ibargüen, President John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Miami, Florida
Introducing the Knight New Media Center
he Knight New Media Center prepares journalists to succeed in the 21st Century. It offers topic training to new media journalists and new media training to traditional journalists. A partnership of the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley, the Center’s advisory board includes top journalists from NYT.com, AP, CNN.com, MSNBC.com and Yahoo. Formerly the Western Knight Center, it has a six-year track record of training the nation’s top journalists. www.KnightNewMediaCenter.org
The Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism
hese annual awards inspire the creative, interactive journalism made possible by the two-way flow of modern mass communications. Past winners include ChicagoCrime.org, which maps the city’s crime interactively on the web. The awards are run by J-Lab at the University of Maryland. J-Lab also runs a Knight-funded seed program for self-sustaining experiments in citizen journalism, community journalism and student journalism called New Voices. Each year hundreds of applicants vie for a chance to get out and report news on their own. www.j-lab.org
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Sunshine Week A new way to call for open government
igh School Remembering the First Amendment. It’s never been easier to start a school newspaper, yet our schools are leaving the First Amendment behind. In 2005, Knight Foundation proved it, with “The Future of the First Amendment,” the country’s most comprehensive high school research project. It showed that nearly three-fourths of the nation’s high school students either don’t know about or don’t care about the First Amendment. Part of the problem: attitudes of teachers and principals. A new law requiring Constitution Day teaching resulted in more than 45,000 lesson downloads from www.teachfirstamendment.org. Starting high school newspapers? On the web, it really is easy. See www.highschooljournalism.org
ollege Showcasing the Toughest Journalism. This fall, college students around the country will show what their journalism schools are made of by releasing their first News 21 summer investigative reporting project. The Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education brings the presidents of leading universities in as partners in improving journalism education. Experts from across the campuses team-teach in the school of journalism, giving students the specialized knowledge they need to tackle large, investigative stories. They’ll report the news both in traditional ways and over the web in “incubator” projects. The schools include Northwestern, Columbia, Missouri, University of Texas and many others.
idcareer Sharpening Tools Around the Clock. The web annihilates space and time, making journalism training available around the clock. In its first year, News University, the 24/7 online journalism training center founded by Knight Foundation and the Poynter Institute, registered 10,000 journalists for its free, self-directed classes. At NewsU, journalists from all experience levels are learning more about interviewing, reporting, writing, photography, design, multimedia journalism and more. If you haven’t explored www.newsu.org, you’re missing something.
n 2005, Knight Foundation funded Sunshine Week, an annual campaign for open government coordinated by the American Society of Newspaper Editors with strong support from The Associated Press and more than 50 other journalism organizations. Held each spring during the week of Bill of Rights author James Madison’s birthday, Sunshine Week results in thousands of news stories, opinion pieces, cartoons, editorials, public meetings, proclamations and even new laws favoring Freedom of Information (FOI). The goal: to help reverse what experts call the worst freedom of information rollback in our lifetimes. In 2006, the campaign’s second year, more than 7,000 stories appeared about FOI issues, as the effort branched out to broadcast and the web. In 2007, Sunshine Week is March 11-17. www.sunshineweek.org
eadership Building a Digital Public Square. This fall, the Public Broadcasting Service plans to launch Public Square, its new, on-air, online digital service. This “citizens channel” aims to increase in-depth and international news. Knight Foundation planning and challenge grants are driving the initiative, which has as its signature program, Global Watch, featuring news reports from originating stations worldwide. The service will be delivered via digital television, satellite radio, webcasting, podcasting and through PDAs and cell phones. If Congress approves the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, PBS and other nonprofits will have an important new way to finance such projects.
Coming Soon A new challenge for a new world
ack and Jim Knight believed in the importance of journalism excellence in the 26 U.S. communities where they owned newspapers. In the 20th century, those newspapers were hubs of their communities. Citizens depended on them. Democracy depended on them. Freedom depended on them. What ideas, which projects and people, will play that role in this century? To find out, we have created the Knight Brothers 21st Century Challenge. This new contest will provide cash awards, grants, loans and investments to extraordinary ideas, brilliant people and visionary projects with the greatest potential to transform the future of journalism by doing what the Knight Brothers used to do, but in ways relevant to 21st Century citizens. This fall, the categories and rules for this new opportunity will be announced. If you wish to be on the mailing list for this competition, please send your email and snail mail address to: web@knightfdn.org.