COLLEGE PARK, Md. — The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has made a $4.4 million, multi-part grant to the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, University President C.D. Mote Jr. announced today. In recognition of this latest gift, and the foundation’s strong historical support of the university, the planned new state-of-the-art journalism building for the Merrill College will be named John S. and James L. Knight Hall.
The new facility, with a scheduled construction start of early 2008, will carry the names of the brothers who founded Knight Newspapers (forerunner of Knight Ridder) and later the Miami-based Knight Foundation. Of the gift announced today, $2 million will be added to an earlier $3 million building fund campaign gift from the foundation to name the building.
The remaining $2.4 million of the grant announced today will create the Knight Institute for the Future of Journalism, supporting operations of both the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, two professional development programs of the Merrill College. The Institute for the Future of Journalism, to be located within Knight Hall, also will house professional organizations and additional Knight programs, including, eventually, the Knight Chair in Journalism.
“This is a great day for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and the University of Maryland,” Mote said. “Knight Foundation — going back to 1987 — has been one of the strongest supporters of the College of Journalism. The new Knight Hall and the Knight Institute within it will create even more opportunities for partnerships to improve journalism education and training nationwide. Knight Foundation truly looks to the future, and the University of Maryland is delighted to be walking that path with them.”
Alberto Ibargüen, president of Knight Foundation, said the foundation’s board was pleased to be joining forces with the college. “The University of Maryland has been a leader in journalism education,” Ibargüen said. “With the Knight Institute for the Future of Journalism and the state-of-the-art Knight Hall, we’re helping Marylandtake a journalism program that has been a 20th century example of quality and turn it into a 21st century example of innovation.”
The Knight Institute for the Future of Journalism will work with Maryland’s Knight-funded programs to help ensure that as journalism evolves, in all its many forms, it retains the important professional values and watchdog principles essential to a democratic society.
The Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, which received $1 million today, was established at the College with a grant from Knight Foundation in 1988 and offers a series of seminars and courses annually to improve professional journalists’ knowledge of complex subjects. Today’s new funding from Knight for the College’s affiliated J-Lab will launch the Knight Citizen News Network, a self-help training portal for citizen journalists; begin a second phase of a nationwide New Voices community news program; and expand the institute’s annual Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism to include an award for citizen journalism.
“This announcement formalizes a productive partnership that goes back two decades, and I couldn’t be more pleased,” said Merrill College of Journalism Dean Thomas Kunkel. “This school stands for the same values that Knight Foundation does. The Knight name is the gold standard in our field, and we will work hard every day to live up to it.”
Knight Foundation has been one of the Merrill College’s strongest supporters. With today’s gift, the foundation will have committed more than $20 million to the University of Maryland over the last two decades. In addition to ongoing program support for the Knight Center and J-Lab, earlier Knight grants to Maryland created the Knight Chair in Journalism, currently held by Pulitzer Prize-winner Haynes Johnson, and provided funds to support the College’s national magazine, American Journalism Review.
The Merrill College, named after a $10 million gift by the late Annapolis publisher Philip Merrill, offers undergraduate, master and Ph.D. degrees in journalism. It operates several professional development programs, including the Knight Center, J-Lab, the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families and the Hubert H. Humphrey Journalism Fellows Program, and is home to the National Association of Black Journalists and the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. The College operates Capital News Service, a daily news wire staffed by students at bureaus in Annapolis and Washington, D.C., that provides hundreds of news stories each year to newspapers across the region. The school also runs UMTV, the university’s cable TV station that reaches more than 500,000 households in suburban Washington.
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes journalism excellence worldwide and invests in the vitality of U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since its creation in 1950, the foundation has invested nearly $300 million to advance journalism quality and freedom of expression. For more on Knight’s work, visit www.knightfdn.org.