The text below is an edited version of a speech by Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen delivered to a group of journalism educators, business, non-profit and media leaders at the Boston Foundation on Thursday, June 10, 2008.
By Alberto Ibargüen, CEO and president, Knight Foundation
I wouldn’t presume lecture to this group about the First Amendment or why it is such an extraordinary document. But this is a talk about communications and the First Amendment is so much at the core of Knight Foundation that it’s worth outlining why it is.
First, consider the concept. The premise of the Amendment is a notion that citizens have certain natural rights. The Amendment grants no rights; it only prohibits Congress from abridging five specified rights inherently in the people: to speak freely and to publish, worship, gather and demand that government serve us…in other words, the key elements that define and distinguish us as Americans.
Knight Foundation exists because of tax laws that channeled towards community purpose the fortune that Jack and Jim Knight built through their business success, practicing free speech, publishing newspapers in cities across America.
But as much as those rights may be natural and safeguarded in the Constitution, they are not a guarantee that society or markets will value them, nor that the models we employ to exercise them will thrive or even survive. Freedom has consequences, and we are living one of those periods of consequences, transitioning away from a time when our civic structures and information systems basically conformed to the same geography.
Jack won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials against the war in Vietnam – an exercise of free speech that earned him controversy, and might have landed him in jail in another country. But not here. Why? Because of the First Amendment. So we, at Knight Foundation, owe our very existence to an American ideal that protected our founder and allowed him to prosper, protected by the rule of law.
Jack was a journalist and his brother a businessman. They were both also community builders and realized that information was vital to communities. And in order to get that information to communities – and to make a profit -- they seized upon new technology in printing, transportation and communications, including relatively new inventions like the telephone.
They didn’t seek to make their news operations uniform across communities. They ran a company of newspapers, not a newspaper company, and each of their newspapers reflected the needs and values of each different and distinct community.
They delivered to their communities the news and information that helped people decide their “own true interests,” as Jack Knight used to say. And they delivered it in a pattern consistent with the government, social and economic units in which we lived. In other words, the circulation area of a Knight newspaper was roughly defined by the geographic definition of the metropolitan areas they served.
I. A Community is Connected by Shared Knowledge
The notion that units of government, local and regional economies and social patterns should be consistent with information delivery and sharing is not new and the Knight brothers were not the first ones to build on it. The notion goes back to the ancient Greeks, to Aristotle, who suggested that the ideal size – and limiting factor – of a polis was that it should be small enough so that all citizens could gather in a public square and hear a speaker.
A community, and the ideal unit of government, was only as large as the sphere of shared information. Fast forward through history, even to the relatively recent history of the United States and you’ll see that, even as we grew, Aristotle’s “sphere of shared information” could be defined by the circulation area of a newspaper or the reach of a local radio or television station.
Stop for a moment. Just think how antiquated that already sounds to our ears in 2008…that a sphere of shared information should be limited to an area the size of a newspaper’s circulation.
Google, Yahoo!, YouTube and Facebook, any newspaper with a website or any individual with Internet access can be heard in every town square all over the world. The world is turned upside down!
That has enormous benefits. We are more attuned to global challenges than ever before. We are more connected to other peoples and cultures and continents.
But our government and our civic life are still organized around geographically-defined, physical-space communities. The people we elect to decide big issues and small, are selected and elected from within comparatively small geographically delineated units. Congresspeople and mayors who decide environmental and education policy, war and peace and, locally, who fixes the potholes and supports the police, all are still chosen from cities and towns, not from Second Life…at least not yet! No wonder there’s a tension between the way we share information and our civic life, and no wonder there’s a deficit and a lack of focus in the information that effectively informs our community life in physical space.
These changes have been hard on industries we’ve grown up with and loved. You all know that newspaper readership is down and revenues have tanked. Local television covers less civic information and a Clear Channel radio station might actually be run by remote control from a central location thousands of miles from the community they serve.
Institutional investors in newspapers have financial – not civic – interest in news operations, and their interests are short term, defined by an investment strategy not an indefinite commitment to a community. For example, an investment group might move in and out of their stake in a Chicago paper but the Chicago Tribune will only ever be Chicago’s paper.
But there’s little to be gained from lamenting how the media landscape has changed. A more productive approach is to embrace the change and make it yours, infusing it with your values.
II. The Knight Approach: Experimentation and Engagement
That’s what we’ve chosen to do at Knight Foundation.
We believe technology can strengthen community information, and through that information, communities themselves.
If I had to pick a single statement of purpose, I’d say that it’s exactly the same as our founders, Jack and Jim Knight: we, like they, seek to meet the information needs of communities in a democracy. And we, like they, seek to fund projects that advance the communities in which they owned newspapers, advance journalism, the craft that brought them wealth and distinction and support ideas and innovators whose work transforms.
Over time, we’ve invested $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. But the perhaps the most telling figure, the one that best describes our purpose and intent, is that in the last three years, we’ve committed more than $100 million to media innovation initiatives.
Today, our work is focused on innovation and experimentation. The question we ask is not “How do we save newspapers?” The question is, “How do we save effective communication that communities need to manage their affairs in this democracy?” In other words, how do we save journalism in the digital age?
Our media innovation strategy is this:
- Experiment broadly.
- Analyze impact and make some bets on trends.
- Engage the best journalism training minds in the process.
- Engage other funders.
- Seek the wisdom of the crowd.
Let me elaborate just a little.
We have opted to make our contribution by experimenting with a wide range of ideas to meet the information needs of communities. The more experiments we seed, the more likely we are to find innovations that will serve communities, strengthen journalism … and that markets will adopt and sustain.
We’re not looking for ideas to create virtual communities. We’re looking for digital tools to support the delivery of information to geographically-delineated communities—our version of Aristotle’s public square.
Our signature effort in this is the Knight News Challenge, now beginning its third year. We offer $5 million each year, funding ideas that use digital platforms to deliver news and information to geographically defined communities. We want to use the World Wide Web not to make a world-wide connection, but a local one.
Last year, we had more than 3,000 applications and we funded 16. About 20% of the grants went to applicants who were 25 years or younger.
Examples from last year’s winners include Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web that caused an explosion of communication within the Internet. Now an MIT professor, Berners-Lee continues to be an advocate of keeping the Web free. He is concerned about the integrity of content on the Web and we will support his team’s development of technology that will allow writers to disclose sources – and readers to quickly verify information. They plan to use technology in the service of fact-checking.
Another idea we support came from David Cohn. His project, spot.us, invites investigative reporters to pitch their stories on the web. Instead of an editor telling them “yes” or “no,” people like you and I can support their stories by donating toward the cost of doing the story. If someone wants to investigate public corruption or product failures, for example, they would put a proposal on the web in spot.us and people could choose to fund it, each limited to small dollar amounts so no one can own the story.
When our News Challenge readers considered this proposal, the journalists hated it; the techies said it was exactly what the web was for. We decided to fund it.
We’re also supporting an effort to deliver news and information to cell phone users in Zimbabwe. And in Sochi, Russia, we’re supporting technology that will allow a virtual town meeting to discuss how the town is changing in preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics. This may sound unremarkable, until you consider how unusual community empowerment and information sharing are in a closed society.
Our second media innovation initiative was a $20 million investment in the Knight Center of Digital Excellence.
We started with the premise that, today, if you’re not digital, you’re a second class citizen. You’re second class in access to information and second class economically and even socially. For a foundation dedicated to community and communications, that’s not acceptable. So we set out a goal of universal digital access in each of our communities.
In each of these communities you’ll find public interest in online access and commercial interest. Public interest might be personified by a mayor or embodied in a school board and the assets they own vary enormously. Some have wired school systems, others have lamp posts from which you can hang Wifi or Wimax transmitter boxes. Others actually own spectrum. Communities also vary in their level of sophistication about what they own and how it might be used, connected or leveraged.
Commercial interests (Comcast, Verizon, etc. ), naturally target that part of the public that can pay for access and they are typically far more sophisticated about digital access than their public counterparts.
That difference in sophistication and focus is what has given us an opportunity to enter the field as consultants. We’ve created a pro-bono consulting organization, the Knight Center of Digital Excellence, that will bring in expertise of whatever sort is necessary to level the playing field between the public and the commercial interests as they negotiate. Our participation can help not only facilitate a better deal for the public interests but ensure focus on that part of the community that would otherwise have fallen on the other side of the digital divide.
I’m happy to tell you that we’ve begun to work, at different stages of development, with cities as different as Akron and Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit and Milledgeville, Georgia.
A third media innovation initiative we’ve undertaken is the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy at the Aspen Institute.
The commission’s charge is straightforward:
- Articulate the information needs of communities in this democracy,
- Take a snapshot of where we are today and
- Propose public policy that will encourage market solutions to get from where we are to where we should be.
We don’t expect magic in the form of new business models that will somehow turn around the finances of traditional media. What we do expect is smart, public policy solutions that will encourage markets to experiment and innovate and get us from where we are to where we want to be in community communications. That could mean FCC policy, postal rate policy or tax policy. They might consider, for example, whether it should be the policy of the United States to support local community information resources and, if so, whether the tax policy of the United States should encourage and promote that.
The co-chairs of this commission will be Ted Olson, the former Solicitor General of the United States, and Marissa Mayer, who is the Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google. Other members of the group will include Akamai CEO Paul Sagan, who is here tonight, former LATimes editor John Carroll, two former FCC chairmen, Michael Powell and Reed Hunt and Mary Junck, ceo of Lee Enterprises.
At the same time we’re looking at high level policy, we also want to seed grassroots experiments, and there, we’re looking for partners.
III. Call to Action: Community Grants
Community foundations were created to meet the core needs of communities. In a democracy, information is a core need. But like most people, community foundations often assume news and information will be there, as they always have been, in their newspapers and local radio and TV. They have not, until now, paid much attention to the diminishing availability of civic information and, until now, have had little reason to believe that they can affect that slide.
We want to change that. Knight’s community foundation initiative, is a five-year, $20 million experiment designed to match community foundation efforts to meet the information needs of their communities. We plan to match their funding of proposals to support innovative, community-based journalism delivered on digital platforms.
A community foundation might, for example, fund five bloggers who will regularly write about education and the schools in their town, or support the local online daily or weekly that needs to hire reporters, or even endow a chair in journalism at a local newspaper or radio station or the local PBS or NPR affiliate. We’ll match the funding.
We’ll also provide expertise in the form of a “circuit rider” operation — teams, each with a media expert and technology experts to work with community foundations and their boards to consider and implement their ideas for media innovation.
The common thread that runs through these four initiatives is media innovation. That defines Knight’s direction and is also the common thread connecting other recent media grants like the Carnegie-Knight initiative to improve journalism education, sending all of NPR’s program staff to Berkeley for new media training, media innovation programs at Berkeley, USC and Arizona State, J-Lab training now moving to American University and NewsU at the Poynter Institute in St Petersburg, Florida. All together, that’s serious money – about $100 million – in a relatively short period of time.
And there will be more. We’re only at the beginning of a transition. As a recent speaker at an MIT conference on the subject put it, on a change/time scale of 1 to 10 we’re at about “2.”
Knight Foundation can afford to be innovative. Unlike industry, we’ve no need to deliver profit to an investor. We can tolerate failure in the interest of learning. But much more than that, what better purpose can a foundation have than supporting experiments to move the society forward?
Our goal is to bring communities together through information. I think that’s consistent with Jack Knight’s definition of a great newspaper that he said should inform and illuminate the minds of its readers, define and expand their understanding of things and allow them to pursue what he called “their own true interests.”
Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.