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Journalism

Knight Foundation's signature work is its Journalism Program. Since 1950, the foundation has invested nearly $400 million with 1,000 partners to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. Today, the program focuses on leading journalism excellence into the digital age. We define journalism excellence as the fair, accurate, contextual pursuit of truth.
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What We Fund

Training and Education
We aim to speed the news community’s digital transformation by working with both current and future journalists. See Midcareer Training Programs | Knight Chairs in Journalism


News and Newsroom Diversity
We help newsrooms and citizens use emerging technologies to better cover and engage their entire community.


Digital Media and News in the Public Interest
We intend to advance the best values of journalism through rapidly developing digital media.


Press Freedom and Freedom of Information
We work to advance journalism excellence, free expression and freedom of information worldwide through high-impact projects.


Journalism Initiatives

News 21 prepares students for a changing news industry

Top students at leading journalism schools work in teams to report large, complex stories using the latest digital techniques.

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Knight News Challenge: You invent it. We fund it!

Got big ideas? This contest offers $25 million in awards for new ideas that use digital innovation to transform community news.

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High school journalism trains the next generation

Highschooljournalism
.org, a scholastic journalism web site, increases student media in all its forms and improves First Amendment awareness among U.S. students.

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Sunshine Week: Know what your government is doing

Sunshine Week is a national campaign to raise public awareness and support for open government issues.

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Knight Chairs in Journalism

Knight Foundation has established two dozen endowed chairs in journalism at top universities nationwide. The chairs are leading journalists who take positions as tenured professors within academia. They practice journalism, teach innovative classes, and create experimental projects and new programs that help lead journalism excellence in the digital age.
See a list of the 24 Chairs.

Knight's Media Innovation Initiatives

A strategy of experimentation is at the core of these initiatives. Read more.

Research and Publications

Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive: J-Lab's guide to jump-starting digital media skills for newsrooms and classrooms.

News, Improved: Tomorrow's Workforce shows how training can move newsrooms into the 21st centurty. A follow-up to Knight Foundation's study Newsroom Training: Where's the Investment?.

News in a New America: Good journalists should be able to give us news that is as American as America. This book explains how you can find and deal with your blind spots.

The Future of the First Amendment: Learn why high school students think it's wrong to censor lyrics but ok to censor the press.

The Media Missionaries: How American efforts to develop and support journalism around the globe have met with mixed results.

Grantee Progress Report An example of a good status report from a grantee, this one the Teaching Newspaper in partnership with the University of Alabama, can be found here

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Journalism News Releases

Monday, February 1, 2010
National Contest Calls on Community Foundations for Local Information Experiments
Monday, February 1, 2010
CommonWealth Magazine to Expand Reporting with Knight Support
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Top Twitter Users to be Honored by Shorty Awards and Knight Foundation

More News Releases

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Journalism Content on KnightBlog

Sunshine Week 2010, a local heroes contest (Fri., January 29, 3:30 PM)
This year’s Sunshine Week contest, which will be announced March 14-20, will honor local heroes of open government. The efforts of these local heroes, whose work has made their communities a better place to live, will be recognized among media organizations and other groups throughout the nation. Since 2005, Sunshine Week has been held annually to discuss [...] (Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:30:25 +0000)More...
Knight winners are MIT "technologies to watch" (Fri., January 29, 3:27 PM)
Two Knight Foundation grantees have made MIT Technology Review’s list of 10 technologies to watch. Printcasting, a project of Participata, which is currently testing a service that allows amateur publishers to create newsletters and magazines, is supported by an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge. The second Knight Foundation project on the list is the Ushahidi [...] (Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:27:38 +0000)More...
Contest-Driven Innovation - A Growing Trend in the News and Information Field (Wed., January 20, 9:58 PM)
Back when we launched the Knight News Challenge in 2006, using contests to spur innovation was a relatively new concept. But in just four years, the number of similar competitions in the media, information and communication field has doubled. So we decided to take a closer look at the contests globally, to see if we could [...] (Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:58:16 +0000)More...
News Challenge grantee Ushahidi tracks the crisis in Haiti (Sat., January 16, 11:45 PM)
When tragedy struck in Haiti last week, the folks at Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, leapt into action. By Tuesday evening, they were hard at work, collecting and mapping eyewitness reports from the area devastated by a catastrophic earthquake. A story in today's Washington Post highlights their work: The site is www.Ushahidi.com, and it allows [...] (Sat, 16 Jan 2010 23:45:52 +0000)More...
Call for Justice in the Philippine Massacre (Thu., January 7, 4:34 PM)
It's been a while and progress is still slow after the Global Day of Solidarity  called upon President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to ensure justice for the victims of the Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines, where at least 30 journalists and support staff were among the 57 people brutally killed. CPJ joined in on the protest and also traveled to [...] (Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:34:40 +0000)More...
hNews: A better way to consume digital news (Thu., January 7, 4:30 PM)
How great would it be for web sites to let us know when news stories we’ve been following have been updated or corrected? How about also seeing a box of information explaining the type of sourcing used within the story, as well as a link to the organization’s editorial standards? According to an article released by the Columbia Journalism Review, hNews is [...] (Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:30:24 +0000)More...
Foundation support for International Media Development (Wed., January 6, 11:54 PM)
The Center for International Media Assistance has released an interesting new report examining recent trends in private U.S. funding of media development projects around the world. U.S. foundations have funded programs in “media development” (independent news and information in general) and “media for development” (coverage of particular issues). The report recommends donors keep consulting and continue to attract new foundations into the [...] (Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:54:32 +0000)More...
Shame on us if we don’t take the steps needed to feed knowledge to our democracy (Wed., January 6, 10:48 PM)
This essay has been cross-posted from the Nieman Journalism Lab. Way back in the age of paper, in 1986, professor James Beniger, then at Harvard, produced a useful chart on the civilian labor force of the United States. It showed how the bulk of American workers had moved during the past two centuries from working in [...] (Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:48:29 +0000)More...
Knight partners with National Freedom of Information Coalition to create Knight FOI Fund (Mon., January 4, 11:37 PM)
Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation celebrate the receipt of two boxes full of government documents. Courtesy of hughelectronic on Flickr. Last summer, the National Freedom of Information Coalition conducted an online survey to test whether the economic crisis and changes in the media industry had affected efforts to push for more open government. The results [...] (Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:37:33 +0000)More...
Reynolds Foundation expands support for ASNE high school journalism initiative (Wed., December 30, 5:49 PM)
For the past decade, the Knight Foundation has been a supporter of the American Society of News Editors' High School Journalism initiative. This week brings the announcement that the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation will help to support this project well into the next decade. A $4.6 million grant from the Reynolds Foundation will fund five years [...] (Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:49:23 +0000)More...
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