Knight Foundation Leader to Retire, Leaving a Powerful Legacy

Alberto Ibargüen is stepping down as the leader of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, ending a run as the grant maker’s president that began in the George W. Bush administration. With about $3 billion in assets, Knight is among the 50 wealthiest foundations.

During his tenure, Ibargüen made his mark in the cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight operated their newspaper empire. In Detroit, Ibargüen helped orchestrate a $370 million foundation effort to keep the city’s finances from cratering. In Miami, he crusaded for the arts, helping the city become an international cultural destination. And as a former newspaper executive who saw the news industry being decimated all around him, Ibargüen made it a top priority at Knight to restore the credibility and viability of journalism in response to the upheaval caused by the internet.

Ibargüen, 79, was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New Jersey. After serving in the Peace Corps and working as a legal-aid lawyer earlier in his career, he climbed the newspaper ranks. He served as publisher of the Miami Herald when it won three coveted Pulitzer Prizes and publisher of the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald in Miami.

Former colleagues, board members, grantees, and foundation peers say what stands out about Ibargüen’s leadership has been his willingness to veer off-script or scuttle an approach to a problem if it wasn’t paying off. His tenacity, gumption, and ability to craft and drive home a captivating story compelled others to follow when he staked out new ground.

Ibargüen’s career in newspapers helped set the way he ran the foundation. He expected his colleagues at Knight to scout out leads like reporters and be the foundation’s eyes and ears on the ground in the communities they serve. Those around him said he embraced the chaos of a newsroom environment and wasn’t afraid to slam the brakes on a project when something juicier presented itself.

“I don’t find it very useful to say, ‘We only do this,” or ‘We only do that,’” he says. “Setting rules up ahead of time never struck me as that creative.”

‘Big Bet’ on Jouralism

Ibargüen will depart when Knight finds a replacement. In the meantime, he is still busy trying to put together what he hopes is a mammoth fund to support journalism. Ibargüen says the fund will be managed by the MacArthur Foundation, which declined to provide specifics. MacArthur is in the process of developing new “big bets” — areas in which the foundation has devoted tens of millions of dollars to a single subject.

Gesi Schilling

Ibargüen isn’t certain how much the fund will gather from other foundations — although he said "$1 billion is just an ante” for the work that needs to be done. It also is unclear whether the fund will touch on all areas of journalism, including First Amendment issues, technology development, supporting small news outlets, and helping people become more discerning readers and viewers of the news.

Ibargüen says several dozen foundations have said they are interested in joining in, which is a far cry from the response he received nearly two decades ago when he pleaded with philanthropy leaders to throw their support behind saving independent — and relevant — journalism.

“The answer was: ‘We don’t do media,’” Ibargüen says.

Now more foundations and philanthropists understand the importance of an informed electorate, he says. Even if they have another focus, like climate change or education, many are willing to make support of news organizations their second or third priority. The change in heart comes years after Ibargüen canceled a longstanding practice of endowing university journalism professorships and began awarding tens of millions of dollars to experiment with unproven media technologies, give untested young journalism leaders an opportunity, and help small upstart news outlets get off the ground.

At the same time Ibargüen overhauled Knight’s journalism grant making, the foundation continued to pour money into the arts, improving economic opportunity, and enhancing public spaces in the 26 cities where the Knight brothers established newspapers in the 1900s.

Diversifying Knight’s board in terms of race, gender, and ideological perspective,Ibargüen says, was one of his biggest accomplishments. Upon realizing that a tiny percentage of Knight’s endowment was managed by investing firms owned by people of color, Ibargüen developed a survey of foundations and universities with a goal of diversifying endowment money managers. The survey showed that foundations were making slow progress in doing so, and several foundation leaders questioned the survey’s methodology

Before the study Ibargüen says his assumption was that “all things being equal” that Knight’s investment managers picked firms owned by women or people of color. After some discussion with staff, he realized that things were not, in fact equal. For instance, if the criteria for picking an asset management firm includes a stipulation that the firm must be in business for a long period of time, then many more recently established firms with diverse owners are excluded, he says .

About $1 billion of Knight’s assets are managed by firms owned by women or people of color, and the Robert Wood Johnson has surpassed Knight in the amount it has placed in diverse firms. Doing so, Ibargüen says, avoids investment “group think” and helps find new investing opportunities that might have both solid financial and social returns.

The foundation has attracted some criticism for its work.

For instance Molly de Aguiar, president of the Independence Public Media Foundation, says Knight wasted an opportunity to use its media grants to promote racial justice and transform the news industry.

“My wish for Knight has always been that their leadership would better understand how media systems uphold white supremacy, and refuse to support that in any way,” she wrote in an email. “I think about how different the media landscape would be, and possibly also the political landscape,if Knight had used its considerable wealth over the past 20 years to intentionally and patiently focus on media justice, by supporting diverse ownership of media, internet as a human right, and media policy that protects people’s rights to communicate and be heard.”

A report from the Community Info Coop, a nonprofit that promotes public interest journalism, issued a report in February that suggested that Knight’s rhetoric on diversity, equity, and inclusion was stronger than its practices.

The report criticized Knight for making grants to conservative organizations, including the American Enterprise Institute. It also took Knight to task for inviting speakers from Donald Trump’s campaign to speak at the Knight Media Forum, explaining that the campaign was engaged in suppressing Black voters.

Ibarguen brushed off the criticism, saying it was important for Knight to “engage the spectrum” of ideologies.

“For goodness sake. It was a panel about the upcoming presidential election, “ he says. “We had a representative from the Biden campaign. How can you not have a representative from the Trump campaign on the same panel?”

Not Bound by Tradition

At Knight, Ibargüen has managed to remain faithful to the wishes of the Knight brothers, while keeping the foundation’s work at the cutting edge, says John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation and a trustee on Knight’s board until December. Ibargüen’s response in Detroit, where the Knights ran the Detroit Free Press, was both in line with the brothers’ commitment to the city but also represented a different kind of involvement in city finances than the Knights had envisioned, suggested Palfrey. Rather than supporting the arts or community programs, the money Knight contributed to the Grand Bargain went to pay the city’s pensioners, traditionally a municipal, not philanthropic, responsibility.

Similarly, Ibargüen showed that he was not bound to the past when he steered Knight away from endowing journalism professorships at universities. But he jumped at the chance to re-establish the practice when doing so was an attempt to promote equity, Palfrey says. The result, the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University, is led by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Ibargüen worked to set up the center after Jones, who oversaw an extensive New York Times look at the legacy of slavery in the United States, the 1619 Project, was at first denied tenure at University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, another institution that has received support from Knight. Within weeks of the University of North Carolina decision, Knight, MacArthur, the Ford Foundaton, and an anonymous donor provided a total of $20 million for the new center at Howard.

Acting Like Reporters

Hurricane Katrina, which ripped through the Gulf Coast in 2005, baptized Ibargüen’s entry into foundation leadership. After the storm made landfall, he did what he would have done in his newspaper days. He called members of Knight staff in Biloxi, Miss., one of the cities where the Knight Ridder newspaper chain had a newspaper and where the foundation made grants, to get an on-the-ground assessment.

They were nowhere near the wreckage and had nothing to report.

Immediately Ibargüen made grants to the American Red Cross and Salvation Army to help with the aftermath. Then he got as close as he could by plane and rented a truck in Mobile, Ala., to drive the remaining 60 miles to Biloxi himself. He slept in the truck in the parking lot of the Biloxi Sun Herald and began to draw people together to make plans for the city’s future.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Michael Maidenberg, special to El Nuevo Herald

Over the next two years, Knight made a total of nearly $8 million in Katrina-related grants in Biloxi and supported a series of meetings in which urban planners, elected officials, business leaders, and residents tried to come up with ideas about how to rebuild. The idea, says Ibargüen, was to use the storm as an opportunity to give residents a “blank sheet of paper” to envision the community where they wanted to live.

As Ibargüen tells the story now, his face brightens with pride. Not necessarily because it has been an entire success — Knight found that largely due to the multitude of government agencies and other players involved, the process was much more complex than expected. Ibargüen’s satisfaction comes because he was doing two things that had been ingrained in him after working for the Knight brothers’ newspapers for years. First, he was acting like a newsperson by getting all the information he could straight from the people affected. And second, he was carrying on the mission of the Knight brothers, who wanted their foundation to provide lasting service to the cities in which they delivered the daily news.

In the years since, Ibargüen has expected his foundation staff to have the same curiousness and commitment to the cities in which they work. In essence, he expects his program officers to be like reporters on the trail of a hot story. When he pays them a visit in their offices across the country, he tells them to set aside any charts and lay off discussions about the data they are collecting,

“Honestly, I don’t need to leave the office to find that out,” he says. “What I want them to tell me is, what’s the trend? What are people talking about? What is bothering people in Akron? What’s inspiring people in Philadelphia? What’s going on that isn’t generally reported?”

Tech Innovation in Journalism

As the people of Biloxi tried to envision how to emerge from a deluge caused by Mother Nature, newsrooms across the country were getting pummeled by the internet and either didn’t know how to respond or simply ignored the damage, Ibargüen says.

In 2007, Twitter was a year old. Facebook claimed 30 million active users, and many readers had tossed aside the newspaper classified section in favor of Craigslist when they wanted to hire someone for an odd job, sell their furniture, or find an apartment.

Newspapers were shedding jobs, but Ibargüen had yet to see a coordinated response from either the news industry or philanthropy. At a meeting of foundation leaders held in San Francisco, Ibargüen was set to deliver remarks on how to strengthen democracy in the digital age.

He looked at his speech and yawned.

If his own talk bored him, there was no way he was going to keep an audience of 1,000 from dozing off. He set aside his prepared speech and told the crowd about an essay by tech writer Dan Gillmor he had just read in the San Francisco Chronicle. Gillmor challenged community foundations to start supporting the media.

Mark Slatko

Ibargüen delivered the message, along with a challenge. Come to Miami, he told the crowd of regional grant makers. There, he promised rich discussions on the future of media and matching grants from Knight for any community foundations that wanted to get involved. Ibargüen jokes that his off-the-cuff change of plans sent staff members into cardiac arrest.

But the spontaneous change of plans was symbolic of how Ibargüen operates, says Eric Newton, an independent consultant who helped run Knight’s journalism program and served as a senior adviser to Ibargüen for years.

“He keeps an open mind. And if a better idea comes by, he just switches to the better idea,” Newton says.

Community-foundation leaders met in Miami that year as Knight kicked off what was the first of 16 annual Knight Media Forums. Ibargüen’s pledge to make matching grants to community foundations became the Knight Community Information Challenge. Through it, the foundation made117 grants totaling more than $22 million to local foundations to support news organizations and media research.

Getting local grant makers involved was only part of Ibargüen’s developing plan. The same year he started the first of 10 “Knight News Challenges,” which made grants to researchers, entrepreneurs, and newsroom staff members who tried to find ways to help deliver news and information digitally to specific geographic locations. There were few other guidelines. The entire news industry was operating in the dark when it came to the internet, and Ibargüen didn’t want to influence what kind of entries Knight received. An early attempt at a long-form application was nixed by Ibargüen in favor of an open call that essentially said “give us your best ideas,” remembers Newton.

Over 10 years, the challenge made $50 million in grants to people and organizations that developed computer mapping systems for journalists to tell their stories visually, brought the newsroom editing process into cloud internet servers, and allowed radio programmers to digitize their shows in searchable databases.

The focus on innovation was a massive U-turn for Knight, which had previously focused much of its journalism efforts in academe. Ibargüen says he proposed ending the endowed professorships to his board three times over a year-and-a-half before they relented and agreed to switch gears.

The reason to do so, Ibargüen says, was simple. Newsrooms were being pummeled by the internet, and Americans were paying the price by losing connection to the daily events in their own towns. Establishing a new academic journalism program in that context didn’t make sense, Ibargüen says.

“We were at the very beginning of a brand new upheaval in technology, and we didn’t have the answers,” Ibargüen says. “We were teaching best practices for a world we didn’t understand, either. So why in the world should we continue to send the best people to the best universities to learn how to do 1975, ink-on-paper long-form journalism?”

The challenges were a frenetic response to a big problem, says Susan King, a former journalist who is dean emerita at the University of North Carolina’s journalism school. King first met Ibargüen when she helped guide the Carnegie Corporation’s journalism programs under Vartan Gregorian, the foundation’s late president.

King remembers that Ibargüen seemed to be particularly motivated as a foundation leader to solve the problems facing journalism that he was unable to do when he was actually in the business. Because of this drive, she says, Ibargüen wasn’t “strategically rigid” like many other leaders in philanthropy.

But, she says, as the Knight News Challenges entered their final years, grantees may have been looking for more direction from Ibargüen.

Patrick Farrell

“People were trying to understand what the president wanted and what they should do,” she says. “That was hard on grantees, but it also meant he was willing to experiment, make a mistake, and refocus. I think more foundations need to do that.”

Ibargüen, too, recognized that it was time to pivot away from the challenges.

“We really needed to impose a bit of discipline on ourselves,” he says. “We had to make some choices in favor of impact.”

Ibargüen and the Knight board landed on a strategy with a few different components.

In 2016, as the challenges began to wind down, Knight and Columbia University joined in a $60 million commitment to establish the Knight First Amendment Institute to litigate and research free-speech issues.

And in 2019, the foundation earmarked $300 million to support local journalism efforts. Recipients of those grants included the American Journalism Project, which supports local journalism outlets; NewsMatch, a fundraising campaign for local newsrooms; and the Solutions Journalism Network, which trains journalists in methods to connect with the communities they cover.

The same year, Knight set aside $50 million for a network of 11 university research centers to look into ways to promote civic participation and democracy in the digital age.

Using Art to Connect People

One of the biggest injuries the media revolution has inflicted on the news business is the disconnection people feel between their geography — their city and neighborhood — and the news they consume online, which tends to be national in scope, Ibargüen says. As Knight struggled to support new ways to deliver the news by making grants to outlets across the country, Ibargüen also was obsessed with driving home a single story in his hometown. In Miami, he would say, “Art is general.”

The phrase, as Ibargüen has related in countless speeches and meetings about the $214 million Knight has spent on the arts in Miami since 2005, was pulled from James Joyce’s The Dead. As the book ends, the author reports that “the newspapers were right: Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.”

In the polyglot city on the beach, Miamians have big expectations for arts and culture, and Ibargüen wanted to capitalize on that by supporting art as a way to bring people together and connect them to a broader civic conversation. By making art “general” in Miami, he wanted to use Knight’s dollars to ensure that art was not only available to everyone in the city but that art mattered to everyone.

“Art bridges language and bridges experience,” he says. “If Gloria Estefan is singing, your toes will tap, I guarantee it. And if Beethoven is playing, your soul soars.”

Even more, a city where residents are connected through shared cultural offerings can be an essential part of a strong democracy in which political differences are recognized but not demonized, Ibargüen says.

The Knight commitment brought out other donors to support the arts, says Javier Soto, who led the Miami Foundation until taking a job as president of the Denver Foundation in 2019. If Knight had its chips on a certain project, Soto says, donor-advised fund holders at the foundation were more likely to give. A big reason? Ibargüen had a well-rehearsed, compelling story in his pitch for making art general.

As a result of his background in the news, Soto says, “Alberto knew how to present a narrative around the power of the arts to bring about transformational change for Miami that resonated throughout the community in every sector.”

Adds Franklin Sirmans, who moved to Miami in 2015 to serve as director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami: “He has an incredibly persuasive, beautiful, and poetic way of talking about it. I hate to use Alberto’s own terms so closely, but over the past seven years, I have struggled to find my own words.”

Sirmans, who, like Ibargüen, graduated from Wesleyan University, credits Ibargüen for starting the museum’s Fund for Black Art with a $500,000 grant a decade ago. As important as the dollars are, Sirmans values the intellectual commitment Ibargüen has brought to making sure art is an essential part of the city.

A strong arts scene in Miami means the city is “committed to being a place that is open for dialogue,” Sirmans says. “It’s a place that doesn’t shy away from having difficult conversations. Rather, it is a place that is led by art, a place where art is the catalyst for every single thing that we do.”

Gesi Schilling

Ibargüen’s wife, Susana, was a leading advocate for the arts in Miami and served on the Perez museum’s board before she died in 2021. Ibargüen says losing her contributed to his decision to retire. He remains an avid art collector. A few weeks ago, Ibargüen took a moment at a museum event to show Sirmans his latest acquisition: a painting by Alexandre Diop, a Senagalese-born painter.

Ibargüen’s talent for weaving a story and getting a varied group of people to focus on coming together played a large role in sealing the 2013 “Grand Bargain” that helped Detroit as it was drowning in debt.

Detroit had gone bankrupt that year, and city leaders were scrounging for assets to pay its pension obligations to municipal workers. Rather than sell off the art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts to satisfy the city’s pensioners, a group of philanthropy leaders put up $370 million and, with other commitments from the state of Michigan, covered the cost. Not only did the foundation executives, many of whom led grant makers with significant investments in arts programs, want to keep the Detroit Institute of Arts collection intact, they also wanted to ensure that the millions of dollars they had previously spent on social programs in Detroit wasn’t wasted but ultimately contributed to the betterment of the city.

The deal still hung in the balance one evening when Ibargüen and Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, shared a car ride after dinner. With several times the assets of Knight, Ford was key to generating a meaningful commitment. But while Ford’s fortunes were made in the motor city, there hadn’t been a Ford on the foundation’s board for years, and the grant maker’s iconic headquarters was in New York.

Ibargüen, who says he was Walker’s deputy during the negotiations, gave the Ford leader a pep talk.

“If you don’t have the courage to convince your trustees to do this, it will never work,” Walker recalls Ibargüen saying. Steeled, Walker went to his board and came back with an agreement to contribute $125 million, more than double what he originally thought they had the stomach for.

Ibargüen’s talk made a difference, Walker says.

“The certitude of his perspective convinced me that $50 million wasn’t going to do it.”

It wasn’t as hard for Ibargüen to win over his own board members at Knight, recalls Palfrey, the MacArthur president and former board chair at Knight.

The Grand Bargain was well outside the scope of work Knight outlined each year in its annual reports and the comfort zone of its board members, who were more interested in supporting active programs than staving off a big city bankruptcy, Palfrey says. But its components — supporting a city with a long Knight newspaper presence, keeping the art collection from being sold off, and supporting Detroiters who firmly identified with a sense of place — together fit in with the sense of mission laid out years before by the Knight brothers, Palfrey says.

“On paper, they were not in our strategy, but together they were absolutely essential to the kind of risk and the kind of intervention that the Knight foundation absolutely had to make,” Palfrey says.

For Ibargüen, the infusion of cash was necessary because the conditions on the ground dictated it. If Knight and others hadn’t stepped in, the city’s future would have slid even further into despair. He displayed a similar realism in his conviction that without a concentrated effort, news organizations would fail to matter in people’s lives.

To those in philanthropy, Ibargüen offers some advice: “Focus on the world as it is, not as you want it to be.”