Knight of the Newsroom

With newspapers across America hemorrhaging revenue and readers, Alberto Ibargüen has been billed as a kind of savior. As president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, one of the largest grant makers to support journalism, senators sought his advice in May for a panel about the future of journalism, while the title of a recent Forbes magazine profile of Mr. Ibargüen asked: “Can this man save the news business?”

At the same time he is shaking up the news industry, the lawyer and former publisher of The Miami Herald is shaking up philanthropy, earning a reputation as an innovator who embraces fast-paced deadlines and a stop-the-presses willingness to make changes.

Under Mr. Ibargüen’s leadership, Knight is encouraging other foundations to support local journalism, incorporating new technology, and making more risky grants, including a few that even some of its own board members have resisted.

With its signature Knight News Challenge, the $1.86-billion foundation has pledged $25-million to support a variety of digital experiments using new, and sometimes controversial, ways to spark local reporting and deliver information. Knight is now adapting the challenge’s contest-like approach for support of the arts and urban revitalization.

With the news challenge, Knight seeks to circumvent the top-down nature of foundation giving and instead solicit ideas from outsiders, be they charity leaders, business owners, or everyday citizens.

In the parlance of the digital revolution, Mr. Ibargüen says he is seeking the “wisdom of the crowd.”

A Sense of Urgency

Mr. Ibargüen joined the Knight foundation in 2005, after a career as publisher of several East Coast newspapers.

From his corner office overlooking the downtown here, the 65-year-old Puerto Rican has imbued Knight and its 52 employees with a newsroom sense of urgency.

During a recent morning meeting, he enjoyed challenging his senior staff members, almost like an editor pressuring a reporter to explain a story. He repeatedly pushed a Knight employee to provide a succinct definition of civic engagement. After several attempts, he was dissatisfied with the responses and ordered the staff member to keep working on it.

He also sometimes baffles his employees with his off-the-cuff remarks. For instance, during a speech to members of the Council on Foundations in 2007, he decided on the spot to invite the audience to Miami to discuss journalism.

“I ad libbed an invitation to 800 people to come to a conference I had just that moment created,” he says, smiling as he remembers the surprised looks on the faces of Knight personnel in the crowd. Six months later, the foundation put on the meeting.

While he continues to love print journalism — on vacations overseas he will buy four or five foreign newspapers to compare how articles are presented — he has embraced the Internet and new communications tools. Before his appearance in front of the Senate panel to discuss the news industry, for example, he sent a message via Twitter, the social-networking site, asking what he should tell lawmakers.

Out With the Old

With his passion for news and his idiosyncratic whims, Mr. Ibargüen has tried to make the Knight foundation into an organization more responsive to the times.

When he took over, the charitable fund was giving money to journalism schools to teach practices that are key to being a working reporter. A worthwhile idea, he says, but almost superfluous in the fast-moving Internet age.

“We said, Time out. How can we teach best practices when we don’t know what the field is going to be?” he asks.

Under the guidance of Eric Newton, Knight’s vice president for journalism programs, and Gary Kebbel, its journalism program director, the foundation re-examined its strategy, throwing out old concepts about who should — or should not — be a grant recipient.

“We pretended as long as we possibly could that there weren’t any rules at all,” says Mr. Newton, a former managing editor of The Oakland Tribune. “We suspended our internal bureaucratic rules that weren’t serving any purposes except they had been developed over the years.”

From this brainstorming, they developed the Knight News Challenge.

Started in 2007, the challenge seeks ideas for cutting-edge technology that delivers timely information and is being applied to a locality. Instead of seeking out only nonprofit groups, Knight is willing to support individual blog writers or media companies — essentially, anyone with a good proposal. And it tries to tap into a diverse collection of candidates by making the competition worldwide and marketing it in nine languages.

As Mr. Kebbel puts it, the challenge is a request for proposals “on steroids.”

Contests and Experiments

The latest winners, which were announced last month, included a joint effort by The New York Times and ProPublica, an online nonprofit newspaper, to create an open database of government documents used in investigative reports, and MobileActive, a charity that helps people use cellphones to be their own news producer.

Spot Us, a Web venture, gained a lot of press attention after it won the news challenge last year. Mr. Ibargüen says it is an example of a charity that traditional Knight grant making would have overlooked because it was the brainchild of a lone journalist.

The project, which received $340,000 from Knight, solicits donations from the public for specific journalism projects. For example, a reporter would pitch an article about San Francisco’s transit system and request an amount of money, say $500, to do it.

There are questions, of course, about how Spot Us can prevent journalists from gaming the system — raising money and then not writing a word — or donors from seeking to influence a story. But the Knight grantee has grown quickly and produced articles that have appeared in major daily newspapers.

As the foundation supports media experiments, it is also testing new approaches with its own operations. For example, it created the Knight Garage, a Web site where potential applicants can write about their ideas and get criticism from others. The site has had mixed results; 1,600 people offered ideas but few of them became winners. Knight plans to revamp the virtual workshop.

Using the news challenge as a template, Knight has started three similar ventures: the Knight Community Information Challenge, which gives matching grants to community foundations that propose ways to promote local reporting; the Knight Arts Challenge, which supports artists in South Florida; and the Knight Neighborhood Challenge, which awards money to neighborhood-development projects in Macon, Ga., one of the 26 cities where Knight makes local grants.

‘Have Any Ideas?’

Even though stock-market volatility has sapped the foundation’s assets, it plans to continue with the challenges and spend $11.5-million on them this year, roughly 11 percent of its grant-making budget.

While a small percentage of its giving, Mr. Ibargüen says the challenge approach is important because it seeks suggestions from the public and local groups, emphasizing that while Knight sets the parameters, it does not have a monopoly on good ideas.

“It is incredibly liberating to admit you don’t know the answer. Then you don’t have to go out and pretend and say, I am the foundation, I have an idea, and I have the money,” he says. “Instead you can afford to say, I have some money, here’s the problem we’re worried about, do you guys have any ideas?”

The foundation executive says the approach was influenced by his time in the Peace Corps in the 1960s. In Venezuela, he was sent into the Amazon jungle armed with a 16-page plan from the Ministry of Development to open a farmers’ cooperative. After a few weeks upriver, he realized the ministry knew almost nothing about the problems facing the farmers, who harvested a fiber from palm trees to make brooms and brushes. So he improvised.

The lesson from South America, he says, is to ask questions of the people you want to help.

“The focus on the community you are working in is really paramount, and funding the things that are important to the people you are working with,” he says, “not the things that are important for you.”

To be sure, many foundations seek the counsel of their grant beneficiaries, and several, like the Case Foundation, Ashoka, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have explored grant-making contests.

‘The Full Monty’

Yet Peter Frumkin, director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas at Austin, says Knight has been on the leading edge in challenging the traditional way foundations have operated for the last 50 years.

“It is saying that good ideas might reside outside the walls of the foundation,” he says. “Anything you can do to open up to get fresh ideas and more people into the world of philanthropy is valuable.”

He says he would like Knight or others to go a step further and do the “full monty”; that is, let the public suggest what social problems are most pressing, not merely suggest ways to solve the ones that foundations choose.

“How serious are they about giving up subject control” is a big question, says Mr. Frumkin.

While Knight is receiving applause for being more open, the Knight News Challenge has not always drawn praise. Some journalism experts argue it is largely playing at the edges of a crisis.

“You can fund projects, you can say that’s a cool idea, that might be really interesting,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper editor and currently a news-media consultant. “But until you can take an idea and really get it to scale, you aren’t going to deal with the essential problem, which is the great disappearing of reporting in cities and towns across the country.”

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, in Washington, says that Knight and other grant makers have failed to be a “voice of conscience” and challenge the news industry as it cut back on public-interest reporting.

For instance, Knight awarded $700,000 to MTV to get youths to use cellphones to report on the 2008 presidential election. Mr. Chester questions why MTV and its parent company, Viacom, needed philanthropic money.

“The truth of the matter is, the news industry needed tough love,” he says.

Mr. Ibargüen says that the MTV grant was a bit distasteful even to some of Knight’s board members, but that it’s an example of the risks the foundation needs to take to foster innovative journalism.

He also acknowledges that those innovations need to lead somewhere. Eventually, once some new models prove to be sustainable, Knight may shift its strategy and help them grow. Knight may even consider investing its assets in newspapers or other news efforts, a move his board has resisted so far.

“At some point, you need to start looking at what you think you’ve learned,” he says.

But for now, the experiments will continue.

Speaking to his eclectic tastes, he equates such experimentation to John Cage, the avant-garde composer who would incorporate “chance operations” into his music, like making random noise by filling a piano full of nails.

Mr. Ibargüen says the artist taught him a lesson that will always apply to Knight’s philanthropy: “The only rules are the blinders you allow to be put on your own brain.”