Knight Foundation History

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation originated with the Knight family’s belief in the value of education. The brothers’ father, Charles Landon Knight, had a tradition of helping financially strapped students pay for their college education. To honor his memory, the Knight Memorial Education Fund was established in 1940 to provide financial aid to college students from the Akron area. Supported with contributions from the Akron Beacon Journal, the fund existed until December 1950 when its assets of $9,047 were transferred to the newly created Knight Foundation.

Incorporated in the state of Ohio, Knight Foundation was organized principally to carry out the work of the Knight Memorial Education Fund. Almost from the beginning, however, the foundation made small grants to educational, cultural and social service institutions — mostly in Akron — and on a very limited basis to journalism-related causes.

For the first 10 years, the foundation’s assets came from contributions from the Beacon Journal and The Miami Herald, and personal gifts by Jack and Jim Knight. Other Knight newspapers began to contribute small amounts in the early 1960s — a move that led to a limited number of grants to cities from which the contributions came.

Newspaper contributions stopped in 1965 with the foundation’s first major infusion of assets — a bequest of 180,000 shares of Knight Newspapers stock from the Knights’ mother, Clara I. Knight, who died that November. Faced with the prospect of administering a much larger financial aid program, the board of trustees voted in 1966 to end assistance for college students and to replace it with grants to colleges and universities. Over the next few years a limited number of cultural and educational institutions in Akron, Miami, Charlotte and Detroit — cities where the Knights owned newspapers — were added to the foundation’s list of grant recipients.

A turning point came in 1972 when the board of trustees authorized the sale of Clara Knight’s stock in a secondary offering by Knight Newspapers. The sale raised $21,343,500, increased the foundation’s assets to more than $24 million and initiated an expanded grant program focused on the growing number of cities where the Knights published newspapers. Journalism, especially the education of journalists, became a matter of more pronounced funding interest.

Laying the Cornerstone

In 1974 several events occurred that laid the cornerstone for a much larger Knight Foundation. Jack Knight’s wife, Beryl, died, and he underwent major surgery, thus creating concern among his associates about the future of Knight Newspapers. Concurrent with these circumstances, Knight Newspapers merged with Ridder Publications to create Knight-Ridder Inc., at the time the largest newspaper company in the country. Jack Knight was its biggest shareholder.

Heading the newly formed company as chairman and CEO was the merger’s architect, Lee Hills, former president of Knight Newspapers. A close friend and associate of the Knights for more than 35 years, Hills was the first person outside the family to head Knight Newspapers. He had been a foundation trustee since 1960.

Hills recognized that Jack Knight’s status as Knight-Ridder’s largest shareholder placed the company in a precarious position. If the elder Knight died, leaving the bulk of his estate to his heirs, they would be forced to sell most of their Knight-Ridder stock to pay the estate taxes. That would leave Knight-Ridder vulnerable to management by outside interests and possibly a takeover by those who understood little or nothing about newspapers and less about journalism.

Recognizing that both Knight-Ridder’s future and Jack Knight’s legacy of quality newspapers and journalistic integrity were threatened by such a scenario, Hills moved slowly and gently to present his friend with another option: leaving the bulk of his estate to the foundation.

The gentle persuasion worked. Knight rewrote his will. Signed in April 1975, the will left the bulk of Jack Knight’s estate to Knight Foundation.

That year the foundation acquired its first office and hired its first two full-time employees. Ben Maidenburg, a Beacon Journal news executive, was named president. Maidenburg had been a foundation trustee since 1957 and had served as the foundation’s part-time manager.

Over the next few years the foundation focused on grants to educational and cultural institutions in the 11 cities where Knight Newspapers had published. In addition, journalism education and free-press issues emerged as a foundation interest with almost 25 percent of grants supporting journalism-related causes.

Little more than a year after Maidenburg took the reins, he fell ill. Jack Knight asked C.C. Gibson, a friend and Akron civic activist, to fill in. By 1978 it was clear Maidenburg could not return, so Gibson was named president.

A New Chapter Begins

One of Jack Knight’s directives during the final years of his life was that the foundation’s trustees consider its future. The outcome was an early and largely informal strategic planning exercise that resulted in direct statements from Jack and Jim Knight about foundation governance and grant making. Their preferences reflected a desire for an optimum amount of flexibility, “on the grounds,” Jack Knight wrote, “that a truly effective foundation should have freedom to exercise its best judgment as required by the times and conditions under which they live.”

Jack Knight died on June 16, 1981. The task of settling his estate required five years. When the final transfer of funds to the foundation occurred on May 5, 1986, the distribution from the bequest totaled $428,144,588, making Knight Foundation the 21st largest U.S. foundation based on asset size.

During that five-year period, Hills — at the request of Jim Knight, the foundation’s new chairman — guided the board in an intense strategic planning process. With the settling of Jack Knight’s will complete, the new chairman declared the importance of ensuring that the foundation could manage the twentyfold increase in its assets. In the future, Jim Knight said, operating the foundation “will be like running a major national institution. The job will require outstanding talent and leadership.”

The review by Hills and the board resulted in the creation of a new governing structure as well as programming and financial policies. This planning process has served as the blueprint for the foundation’s work ever since.

In grant making, a formal Cities Program emerged focusing on all Knight-Ridder communities. In journalism, the foundation built on the Knights’ legacy of support for education as the cornerstone of quality journalism by establishing, salvaging or strengthening some of the profession’s most prestigious midcareer fellowship programs for journalists. Host institutions included Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland and Stanford, where the John S. Knight Fellowships were established in 1982.

Soon thereafter, the board created separate programs for education, and arts and culture, the two fields in which the foundation had traditionally made most of its local grants.

A key change in leadership occurred in February 1988 as Creed Black, a veteran Knight-Ridder news executive and former publisher of the Lexington Herald-Leader, assumed the presidency. Under Black’s leadership the foundation’s national presence grew with such high-profile efforts as the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a blue-ribbon body that continues to advocate for the reform of college athletics; the Knight Chairs in Journalism, a program that seeks to elevate the quality of education at the nation’s best journalism and public policy schools (now totaling 20) by attracting notable working journalists to serve as educators through an endowed chair; and the National Community Development Initiative (NCDI), the largest philanthropic collaboration in U.S. history. As a founding member of NCDI (now known as Living Cities), Knight Foundation collaborates with other national grant-makers and lenders committed to revitalizing America’s great urban centers.

In 1990, Knight trustees voted to relocate the foundation’s headquarters from Akron to Miami, where several board members lived or spent considerable time. Simultaneously, the staff nearly doubled to 14 — an outgrowth of the complexity of grants, the increased amount of money given away and the need for more sophisticated oversight of the foundation’s $522 million portfolio.

Jim Knight’s Bequest

Prompted by the dramatic and rapid changes, the board in late 1990 initiated a new strategic planning process. Before the first meeting was held, however, Jim Knight died in February 1991, leaving what became a $200 million bequest to the foundation. By this time, the newspaper company the Knight brothers founded and the foundation were operating in 26 U.S. cities.

Hills was elected to succeed Jim Knight as chairman, while W. Gerald Austen, M.D., an internationally known heart surgeon and the surgeon-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, was elected vice chair to succeed Hills. Dr. Austen, a board member since 1987, was the Knights’ physician and longtime friend.

Aware that Jim Knight’s bequest made the strategic planning process even more timely and important, the board undertook an extensive one-year strategic planning exercise that culminated in a decade of initiatives and more focused grant making.

The Cities Program was renamed the Community Initiatives Program, and seven areas of special interest were identified as funding priorities: arts and culture, children and social welfare, citizenship, community development, education, homelessness and literacy.

Also launched under the auspices of the revamped program was the Community Foundations Initiative. It has now provided more than $66 million to either enlarge or establish donor-advised funds at community foundations in cities and towns where the foundation made local grants. The donor-advised funds are mechanisms for making smaller, quicker grants.

In an effort to remain responsive to the emergency needs of Knight cities in the aftermath of disasters, the board adopted a grant procedure to expedite funding in such times of need. The largest commitment was $10 million for the recovery and rebuilding of Dade (now Miami-Dade) County following Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The board also approved $1 million in grants after the Red River flood and subsequent fires destroyed much of Grand Forks in 1997. And after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the board approved a $10 million program to aid direct service providers in Knight communities affected by those events.

26 Participating Communities

During the early 1990s, the 26 cities covered by the Community Initiatives Program remained constant because Knight-Ridder neither sold nor acquired newspapers. However, a series of company purchases and sales in the mid-1990s prompted a board review of the geographic focus of the local funding program. In 1998 the board decided the program should cover the 26 cities that had been eligible for local grants at the time of Jim Knight’s death in 1991. The decision ended the practice of the foundation following the company as it bought or sold newspapers throughout the country.

Journalism proved an especially fertile area for initiatives dealing with educational needs, free-press and First Amendment issues. In 1993 the Knight International Press Fellowships, administered by the International Center for Journalists, were established to enable U.S. journalists and media executives to go overseas to provide professional advice and training in emerging democracies.

Through the Education Program, the foundation forged alliances with such national groups as the National Center for Family Literacy, New American Schools and Teach For America; many of these organizations incorporated the foundation’s cities into their activities.

Through the Arts and Culture Program, the foundation launched two initiatives in the 1990s. The “Magic of Music” Symphony Orchestra Initiative provided grants to symphony orchestras willing to engage their entire organizations in experiments designed to generate a greater sense of excitement about the concert-going experience and a more vital relationship between artists and audiences. The second initiative, the Museum Loan Network, is a collection-sharing program administered by MIT that aims to get artworks out of storage in one museum and onto the walls of another.

On Jan. 1, 1993, the foundation became the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to honor the memory of the brothers who had created it. A year later the foundation incorporated in the state of Florida.

Leadership Changes

A review of the strategic plan in 1995 also served as a catalyst for a change in leadership. Hills stepped down as chairman in 1996 and was succeeded by Vice Chair Austen. Board member Jill Ker Conway, former president of Smith College and a visiting scholar at MIT, served as vice chair under Austen from 1996 to March 2005, when she retired after 14 years on the board.

In February 1998, Black retired as president and was succeeded by Hodding Carter III, a nationally known public affairs journalist and former Mississippi newspaper editor and publisher who had occupied the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Lee Hills died Feb. 3, 2000, at the age of 93. The blueprint on which the foundation operates was largely designed and drawn by Hills. His vision and thoughtful guidance had steered the foundation successfully into a new century. The next key steps were taken at a retreat that September when the board approved a five-year strategic plan mandating the most extensive reinvention in Knight Foundation’s history.

The 2000 strategic plan reasserted the foundation’s commitment to journalism excellence and significantly deepened its ties to its communities, positioning it as a proactive partner focusing on results. The newly named Community Partners Program promised greater resources from Knight Foundation directed over a longer period of time to a locally recommended, tightly focused set of community priorities.

Across the 26 Knight cities, the Community Partners Program deploys program directors who develop fundable strategies in partnership with appropriate nonprofit organizations. Each city benefits from a Knight Community Advisory Committee — a group of up to a dozen local residents offering community connections and guidance on opportunities for funding. 

In July 2005, Alberto Ibargüen, president and publisher of The Miami Herald, took over the presidency of Knight Foundation. Ibargüen was a newspaper executive for more than 20 years, first at The Hartford Courant, then at Newsday in New York, before moving to Miami in 1995. Carter became Professor of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed Southern Mississippi in the costliest disaster in U.S. history. Knight immediately provided support for relief agencies and then initiated a forum in South Mississippi which, by mid-October, brought an army of architects, planners, lawyers and leaders into discussions with local residents from 11 coastal communities. Their efforts led to recommendations to the Mississippi governor’s office for rebuilding the region, and a promise that redevelopment would encompass the needs of all residents.

Knight broke new ground in the area of free speech and open-government issues in 2005, as a Knight-commissioned survey of 112,000 students, 8,000 teachers and 500 administrators showed that most high school students don’t know or care about the First Amendment. Knight promptly supported a nationwide campaign in schools, tied to Constitution Day, which promoted the right of free expression and led to more than 50,000 downloads of curricula for teachers.

With a Knight grant, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and more than 50 other journalism groups launched the first national Sunshine Week in March 2005 to raise public awareness and support for open government issues. More than 2,000 news and editorial pieces ran. Governors and legislatures from 12 states made proclamations for open government The event in 2006 was even larger.

Embracing new media, Knight supported Public Broadcasting Service in launching Public Square, a round-the-clock digital service; and New Voices, a project of the University of Maryland’s J-Lab, that helps local communities start innovative news ventures. Knight also launched the $5 million Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education with five leading American research universities to revitalize schools of journalism.  

The foundation’s National Venture Fund nurtures innovative approaches to investment that might benefit Knight communities. In 2005, the foundation launched the $6 million American Dream Fund – the local component of its $13.5 million Immigrant Integration Initiative, which aims to welcome newcomers into American life by encouraging civic participation, focusing in particular on naturalization and English language proficiency.

William Friday, founding co-chair of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, retired from the Commission in 2005. Friday, president emeritus of the University of North Carolina, had overseen the Commission since its beginnings, when it issued its landmark 1991 report that led to significant academic reform measures and greater leadership by university presidents in athletics matters. Friday was succeeded by another founding member of the Commission, then Wake Forest University President Thomas Hearn. In the spring 2006, Hearn took the position of chairman emeritus and Southern Methodist University President R. Gerald Turner and Michigan State University President Emeritus Clifton R. Wharton Jr. became co-chairmen.

In December 2005, the Knight board reviewed the strategic plan and directed the staff to continue looking for opportunities to fund transformational change in journalism and communities in pursuit of the Knight brothers’ legacy.

Knight Foundation ended 2005 with assets of $2.07 billion.