Beyond The Fourth Estate

“I think in order to understand what we do and how we do it you have to go back to the beginning. You have to go back to the intent of the donors. We are first and foremost a private foundation that was started with a small handful of dollars from [Knight Newspapers], but primarily all of our wealth comes from Clara Knight, Jack Knight and Jim Knight. In fact, the company, Knight Ridder Inc., never put in a dime. It was all private wealth. ...They ran it, obviously, in the cities and towns where they ran newspapers for decades.”
—Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation

Knight Ridder is perhaps best known for its stock and trade in newspapers. It was once the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., with properties from coast to coast, including such prestigious publications as the San Jose Mercury News, the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press.

The Knight Foundation, a $2.4 billion non-profit institution in Miami, has offered prized journalism fellowship programs, university chairs and grants for 65 years.

But now the foundation is moving beyond the Fourth Estate to the fundamental purpose of journalism itself: community engagement.
“We seek to bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts and rouse them to pursue their true interests,” said John S. Knight in April 1969.

The Knight Foundation has retained its mission to inform and engage people and communities—but with a twist that reflects the changing times.

Good Disruptions
Tables lined with itchy fingers and eager minds at work in an open-spaced office cooperative. Meetings and whiteboards in windowed conference rooms rented by the hour. The rat, tat, tat of keystrokes on laptop computers. One-on-one discussions at community tables by guys sporting beards and zany shirts and women dressed in all black: potential investors, potential sales, potential revenue, potential markets. Art. Coffee. Social media. Social entrepreneurship. The subject matters roll as easily off people’s tongues as they roll together in a cool if not hipster-like fashion that embroils the zeitgeist of the nextgen—polymathic excitability and exuberance for disruption. The good kind of disruption. The kind that often ignites positive social change.

This is LAB Miami, one of Knight’s investments. “It’s a co-op space for entrepreneurs,” explains Matt Haggman, Knight’s program director for Miami. (Knight operates in 26 cities across the counrty.) LAB Miami is located in the Wynwood section of downtown Miami, an up-and-coming neighborhood that was until very recently down-and-out.

“Interesting things were happening around here, but it needed a space, and at the time there was no community gathering point for entrepreneurs and creatives,” says Haggman. That was 2011, the same year he joined Knight. “Alberto said, ‘Go talk to people for four months and tell me what people are saying,’” Haggman recalls. As a former business reporter for the Miami Herald, Haggman had the right set of skills to sniff out an initaitive around entrepreneurship.  

“The goal was to help make Miami more of a place where ideas are built, and where people can pursue ideas,” he says. There was no physical place to do those things.

LAB Miami was born: a 10,000 square foot warehouse that acts as a campus for social and technology innovation. And there is more to it than mere structure. An entire ecosystem was built. Mentor and funder networks were established. An angel investor organization was founded. A rich calendar of events scheduled. Entrepreneur education classes were underwritten at the University of Miami.

What also became apparent as soon as entrepreneurs gained traction was they needed to staff up—fast, says Andrew Sherry, the foundation’s vice president of communications. So another network of resources was launched: a job placement agency called LaunchCode. This stimulates even more activity: Investment in the ideas entrepreneurs hatch, technologies to assist those business missions, and so on.

This, let’s remember, is just one program in one city in which Knight operates.

Radical thinking. It harks back to the time when Jack Knight displayed that kind of progressive approach in business, as well as philanthropy.
Ibargüen notes that in 1948, a German magazine said that Knight was talking about faxing his newspaper to customers—at a time when the world didn’t know what a fax machine was. There was an early company Internet venture called Viewtron that preceded Netscape (it was all text). And perhaps most tellingly, when Knight became a public company in 1969, Jack Knight flew to Wall Street, informing analysts he’d be too busy running newspapers to ever return. He didn’t.