The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has named longtime Gannett executive Maribel Perez Wadsworth its next president, making the Cuban-American news veteran the foundation’s first woman leader.
Wadsworth, who grew up in Miami where the foundation is located, worked as a journalist at several newspapers early in her career before ascending the Gannett corporate ranks to help the media giant adapt to the digital age. She served as publisher of the company’s flagship publication, USA Today, and president of Gannett Media.
Calling her return to Miami an “amazing homecoming,” Wadsworth said she has devoted her life to the mission of journalism, which she said “is absolutely vital to ensuring that communities are strong, that people are informed, that they can make good decisions for themselves, and that they can hold their government accountable.”
She succeeds Alberto Ibargüen, who led the foundation for 18 years before announcing his retirement in March. His last big funding commitment, which Wadsworth will now lead, is Press Forward, an effort developed by the MacArthur Foundation to funnel half a billion dollars to support local news organizations. Knight has committed $150 million over five years to the effort.
To help local news outlets thrive, Wadsworth hopes to invest in a combination of academic research, technology advancement, policy advocacy, and direct support for newsrooms. She said the goal of devoting $500 million to the effort could help change the prospects for local news organizations, which have been pummeled over the past two decades as people have gravitated to the internet for information.
But the money is nowhere near sufficient to establish local news outlets as a trusted, bulwark of democracy, she said. She hopes the amount committed by Knight and MacArthur, which also pledged $150 million, will attract local donors and foundations to the cause, she said.
“Those regional philanthropies are going to ultimately play a big role in augmenting this,” she said.
Founded by the brothers that built a chain of dozens of newspapers across the country, the Knight Foundation makes grants from its endowment, which last year topped $2.5 billion, to support journalism, the arts, and community projects in the cities where the Knights established newspapers.
Knight remains “deeply rooted” in metro newspapers, said Richard Tofel, the former president of ProPublica. Tofel noted that the last four of the grant maker’s presidents, as well as Wadsworth, have come from established newspapers. While he doesn’t know Wadsworth personally, Tofel suggested a change would have been refreshing.
“All this at a time when metro newspapers are mostly disappearing,” Tofel said, “we need to find a new path to providing local news.”
The new Knight leader faces urgent expectations from news providers eager to tap into some of the newly provided money, said Susan King, dean emeritus of the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media. King said Press Forward went through a long planning period that made newsroom leaders impatient.
“There’s a bit of frustration and a lack of clarity around actually how to access the funding,” she said. “People will want the new person to come in and immediately proclaim, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’ But it’s going to take a new person some time.”
‘Defender of Journalism’
By picking Wadsworth, a leader from a huge legacy media organization rather than a digital start-up, Knight gets someone with a breadth of experience who can anticipate many of the issues that will pop up as newsrooms tinker with new business models and news gathering approaches, said Gracia Martore, former chief executive of Gannett.
Martore said Wadsworth was among about 20 midlevel leaders at the company who were plucked from their jobs in local newsrooms in 2009 to help the company revamp its digital efforts.
A lot of the people who were picked could talk a good game, Martore said, “but when it came to executing, they fell a little short.”
Not Wadsworth, Martore said.
“The wonderful thing about Mirabel is the fact that she’s business savvy, and she’s purpose driven,” Martore said. “She understands the mission, and she understands what needs to be done.”
Nicole Carroll, the former editor-in-chief of USA Today, said Wadsworth embedded teams of data specialists in the newsroom to analyze audience reactions to the news long before it became common practice.
“She made sure that we were listening to what our audience was asking for and delivered it,” said Carroll, who is now executive director of the Local Journalism Initiative at Arizona State University.
In 2017, when Carroll was editor of the Arizona Republic and Wadsworth was president of the USA Today Network, Carroll led a team of reporters from her paper and from across the Gannett network of papers in states that border Mexico. They traveled the expanse of the border to document the challenges that would ensue if Donald Trump’s proposed border wall were built.
The project took months to report and resulted in a multimedia package of stories that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Carroll said Wadsworth didn’t flinch about the time and resources needed to put it together.
“You don’t get a bigger defender of journalism and journalists than Mirabel,” Carroll said.
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