Knight Chair will refocus on the economics of digital media, journalism

The Knight Chair at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, a professorship created in 1991 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is being expanded to embrace the digital age with a new title and an endowment boost of $200,000.

Now called the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics, it will focus on 21st-century economic models that will preserve and improve the ability of journalists to produce news in the public interest.

Changes in technology and business have weakened traditional news models during the past two decades – a trend that the current Knight Chair at Carolina, the renowned journalist and scholar Phil Meyer, has detailed in his recent book, “The Vanishing Newspaper.” Meyer will retire next year.

The new Knight Chair, who will be selected after a national search, will help create entrepreneurial projects designed to keep news operations profitable. This professor also will create innovative courses and practical research, all available to others on the Internet, and work with other Knight Foundation grantees on seminars and programs on journalism and digital media economics.

In March 2008, Carolina will host a symposium in Meyer’s honor to address how journalism educators can best serve journalism in the information age. “Raising the Ante: The Internet’s Impact on Journalism Education” will further the research that determines how the Internet affects the news media and mass communication.

“Phil Meyer’s book, ‘The Vanishing Newspaper,’ is must reading for every editor and publisher,” said Jean Folkerts, dean of the school. “We expect our new Knight Chair to achieve a similar impact – to generate and communicate ideas and data that help mass communication professionals understand where the field is headed and how to better serve the public while making a profit.”

“Phil could turn journalists into social scientists, and scholars into clear writers,” said Eric Newton, vice president for the journalism program at Knight Foundation. “Carolina will look for a chair who can not only spin straw into gold, just as Phil does, but someone who can figure out how to lead thousands of other journalists and scholars in a search for ways to pay for the great journalism of the 21st century.”

Since 1990, Knight Foundation has endowed chairs at 22 campuses across the United States, putting the best journalism practitioners to work teaching the next generation of journalists and furthering research on the expanding role of media in society. Knight Chairs are professional journalists who inspire excellence; collaborators who reach out and innovate; catalysts around whom universities build expanded programs; and visionaries who strive to improve American journalism.

Knight Foundation, created in 1950, has invested nearly $300 million to advance journalism quality and freedom of expression. It focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change. It has just launched year two of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding millions of dollars for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. The foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news experiments.