Almost every commencement speaker urges graduates to change the world. Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen went further in addressing Arizona State University journalism graduates, not only urging them to disrupt the status quo but offering money to help.

Ibargüen, addressing 255 graduating students of ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, announced a $250,000 grant to be used for Cronkite alumni to accelerate newsroom innovation.

Ibargüen, who leads the nation’s leading funder of journalism and media innovation, said the opportunity grant would offer up to $15,000 to any Cronkite graduate working in a newsroom who proposes an innovative way to advance digital reporting and storytelling,” according to a release on ASU’s website.

“We’ve been waiting for your generation of digital natives, driven to tell stories, to become the leaders of newsrooms in America,” Ibargüen said, “and maybe this will help that generational turn go even faster.”

With funds in hand, it will make it harder for a “crotchety” editor to reject an innovative idea on the basis of cost, said Ibargüen, the former publisher of the Miami Herald. “So, go forth and accelerate disruption.”

Ibargüen’s remarks came the same week as a report saying most newsrooms were too busy “feeding the goat” to adopt digital tools. Even the nation’s digital leader in journalism, The New York Times, was shown in a recent leaked report to have cultural issues holding back innovation.

Knight Foundation is not relying on journalism school graduates alone to bring transformational change; we’re adding a director to our Journalism and Media Innovation team to help newsroom leaders adopt digital tools and manage the disruptive impact of the Internet.

Free Speech on the Internet

In his address, Ibargüen made clear that digital tools were only one part of promoting informed communities. Graduates are going forth into a world where free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment and defended by newspaper companies was no longer a given in the digital age.

“It is troubling that we could end up with a licensing of speech on the Internet, unless we firmly establish, while still at the beginning of Internet, that the applicable law should be like that of newspapers,” he said. “In other words, that we are free to speak, not free to be allowed to speak.”

Illustrating how high the stakes are, Ibargüen said the editor of The Guardian told him he could not have published Edward Snowden’s revelations if The Guardian U.S. did not exist and enjoy First Amendment protections.

With newspaper companies in retreat as the digital age dawns, “who will support the broadest notions of free speech? Who will speak with the community in mind?” Ibargüen asked.

Related links:

• News21: Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education
• Searchlights and Sunglasses: Field notes from the digital age of journalism
• New digital tools every journalist should try