Michael Maness is the new vice president of the Knight Foundation’s Journalism and Media Innovation program. Maness joins Knight after more than three years as vice president of innovation and design at Gannett. He succeeds Eric Newton, who becomes senior adviser to Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen (a former PBS Board chairman).
During the last five years, the Knight Foundation has invested more than $100 million in its Journalism and Media Innovation Initiative, which includes work on national media policy, technology innovation, public media transformation and the evolution of the World Wide Web. Part of the initiative is the popular Knight News Challenge, now in its fifth year, which competitively awards up to $5 million a year to develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news, conversations and information distribution.