Rosental Calmon Alves has been a Knight Chair in Journalism for nearly three decades, longer than any other chair. A pioneer of online journalism in his native Brazil, Alves had a 27-year career as a journalist and educator before moving to the United States in 1996, where he began his role as Knight Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also founding director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, an outreach program that helps thousands of journalists around the world with online training. 

Between 2012 and 2024, the Knight Center’s innovative massive online courses reached more than 325,000 people in 200 countries. 

In Rio de Janeiro, Alves became a journalist at 16 and a journalism professor at 21. After more than a decade as a foreign correspondent in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. Alves returned to Rio to become an editor, then executive editor and director of Jornal do Brasil, then a leading national newspaper. He launched the first Brazilian online news service specializing in financial news, and Jornal do Brasil Online, the first Brazilian newspaper on the web. He has taught classes in online journalism, international reporting, Latin America journalism and media innovation.