Knight Foundation head Ibarguen to rescue

Can This Man Save The News Business?
Knight Foundation Head Alberto Ibarguen is bankrolling dozens of experiments to save the news business. Can he rescue newspapers? Thats the subject for an article on Forbes.com. Here is the beginning of the article. Click on the headline to read the full article.


Alberto Ibargüen took over as president of the $2 billion John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in May 2005 after serving as publisher of the Miami Herald, which won three Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure. Now Ibargüen is directing a multi-year plan to spend $100 million on 130 projects dedicated to new media and the future of news. They range from projects on community-financed reporting and media "test kitchens" at universities to a new journalism institute in India, home to the largest newspaper market in the world. He spoke to Forbes in late May.

Forbes: Does the prospect of some U.S. cities having no daily newspaper keep you up at night?

Ibargüen: Absolutely. Not just the possibility of no newspaper, but having a newspaper that's so thin that it can't perform its watchdog role or deliver the kind of information that bonds communities together. That's a much bigger problem for our democracy than new media's challenge to national newspapers. The fact is that new media lends itself more easily to national and international news than local news. For the first time in our history it's easier for a high school student to learn about the crisis in Darfur than it is to find out about corruption in their local City Hall or what the school board wants to teach.

Among the huge number of projects Knight is funding, can you name a few that are paying off?

We funded Spot.us, a site run by David Cohn, one of the smartest 25-year-olds I've ever met. His project invites journalists to pitch their stories to the public. The public then pledges small amounts of money until there's enough contributed to do an investigation of, say, why local businesses are closing in a neighborhood in San Francisco. Online local news sites we've funded include the Gotham Gazette (N.Y.); New Haven Independent (Conn.); St. Louis Beacon (Mo.); Chi-Town Daily (Chicago). Village Soup, a digital news platform in Maine, has done so well that it bought six weekly newspapers that were in financial trouble.

We funded EveryBlock, a newsfeed. By clicking on an address or street corner on a map, you can find out who got killed there, who got robbed there, who on the block contributed to John McCain or Barack Obama, or what the local supermarket has on sale. You can discover a vast amount of information about your own neighborhood. Beyond being an interesting widget, when it really becomes valuable is when a newspaper like the Chicago Tribune puts it on their Web site, adding value to a local news source. EveryBlock is running in 11 cities, with many more coming. We need to fund lots of these experiments, so when 80% of them fail, we can figure out which ones really got it right and then replicate them.