Posts Tagged ‘Alberto Ibarguen’

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the hiring of Michael Maness (pictured) as vice president of its journalism and media innovation program and the promotion of journalism program VP Eric Newton to the new post of senior advisor to the president.

Maness had been VP of innovation and design at Gannett, and he will succeed Newton. He has been a member of the Knight Foundation’s journalism advisory committee for the past four years.

Newton has been VP of the journalism program since 2006. In his new role, he will help pursue strategic partnerships and new ideas.

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has 2 million reasons to be happy Tuesday courtesy of Google, which provided it with a $2 million grant to support its media-innovation work.

The Knight Foundation said it has invested more than $100 million over the past five years in a multifaceted media-innovation initiative covering national media policy, technology innovation, public media transformation, and the evolution of the Web.

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will shell out $3.14 million in matching grants to 19 local foundations as part of its Knight Community Information Challenge, which is aimed at helping those groups to meet local information needs.

A recent survey by the Knight Foundation found that one-half of the local foundations that responded had invested a total of $165 million in local information.

Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said:

These foundations are at the front line of an increasing movement of place-based foundations to improve the information health of America’s communities. Their work helps residents have the information they need to make important decisions about their communities. Ultimately, our democracy will only thrive if we have informed and engaged communities.

Vice president for communities Trabian Shorters added:

As local information sources have thinned, community and place-based foundations are taking a leadership role in ensuring communities continue to be informed and engaged.

John Hockenberry, host of public radio’s “The Takeaway” opened a discussion with AP president and CEO Tom Curley and Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen at the We Media summit Wednesday with that thesis.

More and more consumers don’t know where they’re getting their daily headlines, because of the Web’s “river of news” from which most of us now get our information — including from services like this.

It is that “river of news” that continues to chip away at the traditional service provided by the nation’s oldest news co-operative, the AP, founded in 1846.

“We’re owned by U.S. newspapers and that is a gift and a treasure,” says Curley. “Being able to aggregate and work with the industry is what makes us special, the fact that the consumers don’t understand that, is not a problem. What matters is that we’re able to get our funding and support our journalists going forward at the rate everyone expects.”

With so much information flowing down the river, Ibarguen had this warning: “The first amendment is about to come under serious attack because of the amount of speech being protected.”

Despite the warnings and the uncertainties associated with the transformational state of the media, Curley and Ibarguen are bullish on the future of media.

Asked what their favorite new media tools are, Ibarguen talked up Spot.US, the open source project that funds community-powered reporting. Curley was most excited about new cameras — still and video — being put “in the hands of the consumers.” The AP worked with Canon, buying up the production line of one model, then dispatching dozens of them to the Vancouver Olympics. Those cameras captured some of the most memorable shots of the games, including the one above taken by the AP’s Chris O’Meara of Canada’s game winning, overtime goal to win Ice Hockey gold.

The We Media conference continues today at the University of Miami.