For their work navigating the future of global media, MIT’s Joi Ito and Ethan Zuckerman have been named as top global thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine.

Joi Ito

Ethan Zuckerman

In its coverage, the magazine offers a portrait of 2011’s global marketplace of ideas and the 100 thinkers who make them. About Ito, a Knight board member and director of the MIT Media Lab, and Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, the magazine writes:

“From ‘Twitter revolutions’ to WikiLeaks, 2011 was a year of profound transformation in how people both consume and produce news. So it is perhaps only fitting that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s pioneering media studies program hired two of the thinkers best poised to navigate the new media landscape — because they helped create it.”

Foreign Policy describes Ito and Zuckerman’s work as key to the future of “where electronic media are heading next”:

“[A]t MIT’s Center for Civic Media, [Zuckerman] will be developing a system for monitoring the bias and reliability of news sources to allow consumers to make informed choices — a kind of nutritional information for the news. Zuckerman will be working with Joi Ito, a Japanese-born venture capitalist appointed this year to head the university’s famous Media Lab, despite never having earned a college diploma.”

Knight Foundation supports MIT’s Center for Civic Media and the Media Lab to further its groundbreaking work with new technologies to inform and engage communities. Ito, an entrepreneur, media investor and former head of Creative Commons, recently joined Knight Foundation’s Board.