What’s the Matter with the Knight Foundation?

Looking at front-loading, an unannounced strategic review, and a hold on "prioritizing" new grants

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

A few years ago, I was having coffee with a friend who was also then running the business side of a news nonprofit, and the conversation took a turn. “Now,” my friend said, “we come to the part of the conversation where we both complain about the Knight Foundation.”

I wanted to begin this week’s column by recalling that moment because friction with the industry’s largest institutional funder isn’t new, and I recognize that it isn’t always entirely fair. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has for many years given generously back to the field from which its multi-billion dollar corpus was derived, and a lot of good has flowed from those grants. I have no doubt that the people who work at Knight have been, and are, well-intended. Organizations I have helped run, on whose Board I have served, and for which I have consulted have all been the beneficiaries of Knight grants; this is a point of disclosure, but also one of gratitude.

But things have been happening at Knight that I think are deeply concerning, and reflect some combination of questions about management and judgment.

Multiple potential and actual grantees have told me confidentially that Knight has told them that it is pausing most new journalism grant-making through at least the middle of next year.

Knight’s extra Press Forward money has been spent

What does Knight say? In a series of answers to questions I posed, it reveals that, in the first year of the five year Press Forward initiative, it committed “almost half” of the money it has available. The figures in its response to me are a bit internally inconsistent, but along the way they include a total commitment of “$300 million we had to spend over five years,” with spending of “$150 million in the last nine months.” (I am including the full text of Knight’s response to my questions of October 1 in a footnote at the conclusion of this piece.[i] Knight made similar points in a posting on their web site a couple of hours after sending me that response, saying the front-loading had included “nearly all of the new money” under Press Forward. That posting was also distributed by email yesterday.)

If you got a grant this year, that’s great, of course. But if you didn’t—either because your need hadn’t yet arisen, or it wasn’t considered (perhaps because a current Knight grant hadn’t yet run its course), it could be a huge problem.

Just do the math: if you spend 50% of the money from a five-year initiative in year one, that leaves an average of one-eighth of the remaining money for each of the four subsequent years. Put another way, Knight funding for the rest of the Press Forward period can be expected to average about one-quarter the level it did in the last year, and about half of the level that would have occurred if spending had been undertaken on a level basis. Knight calls what lies ahead “a more typical pace of grantmaking,” with “typical” presumably referring to pre-Press Forward.

A lack of “operational capacity”

This follows separate reports, again from multiple grantees, that there have been repeated lengthy delays, beginning at least as long ago as this past Spring, between approval of grants by the Knight Board and the final signing of grant agreements and the funding of those grants. I can tell you, from my own experience as the general counsel and secretary of a foundation about twice the size of Knight (the Rockefeller Foundation), that there is no reason there should ever be long delays following Board approval; what remains is merely ministerial, and should be perfunctory.

In the case of these delays, Knight confirms that its “operational capacity didn’t expand to match” its grantmaking, and that a forthcoming grantee newsletter will soon lay out “a better process.”

There are, as I see it, three issues here: 1) the decision to so heavily front-load grants without warning the field that it was doing so; 2) the administrative shortcomings Knight now acknowledges; and 3) the decision to now launch a strategic review of journalism grant-making attendant with a partial pause, without any general announcement of that fact. In response to a follow-up question, Knight confirmed to me that it has been engaged in a foundation-wide strategic review since this past summer. It also says that “we will probably not be prioritizing wholly new proposals until at least after” March 2025, although it does not link that to the strategic review.

Pros and cons of front-loading

It's the first of these issues on which I want to focus. Fully front-loading grant-making for Press Forward may make sense, as there are urgent needs. But it’s in contrast to the approach with Press Forward’s own Pooled Fund, which Knight helps control. Grant-making from that fund started slowly, but more than caught up with a bang yesterday, when a jamboree of more than 200 one-size-fits-most $100,000 grants to smaller local newsroom were announced, almost 60% of them to for-profits. Commitments from the Pooled Fund this year, I am told, will be less than one-quarter of the $100 million pledged to that fund so far. The other lead funder of Press Forward, the MacArthur Foundation, tells me that it committed roughly half of its announced incremental commitment to Press Forward in the first of the initiative’s five years.

front loading the money

Knight’s web post said the front-loading gives them the “opportunity to assess the performance of those investments and fill in necessary gaps with our significant [i.e. non-Press Forward] remaining funding.” But it didn’t publicly mention any months-long pause on new proposals.

And front-loading also has significant drawbacks:

• It limits the ability of Knight to support the very new entrants Press Forward seeks to draw into the field or to address problems that arise later in the period;

• It specifically weakens Knight’s ability, at least without a further commitment by its Board, to respond to the possibility of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, and with it a potentially major crisis of government and other attacks on a free press, which Trump has repeatedly pledged;

• Front-loading when macroeconomic conditions are strong, as they are now, will make it much harder to step up if they weaken later in the Press Forward period—an issue that could be exacerbated because any such weakness would also almost certainly reduce Knight’s endowment;

• It is particularly curious to front-load grant-making before undertaking a strategic review. Foundations usually do precisely the opposite, so that they can place bigger bets on whatever priorities such a review reveals.

Issues of management and transparency

Beyond the front-loading itself, there are issues of management. Why was more grant-making not accompanied by more grant-processing capacity, and was that the only administrative issue? What was the rationale for accelerating grant-making just before a strategic review?

Finally, there are also, critically, issues of transparency. If you are in the nonprofit news field and anything important in this issue of this newsletter is news to you, it’s not great that you are learning of it from me, and it shouldn’t have been necessary for you to do so.

Let me end where I began. The Knight Foundation has done a lot of good for journalism, and will continue to do so, I am sure. But foundations generally receive far less scrutiny than other billion-dollar businesses, and it’s a central premise of journalism that less scrutiny can obscure problems. I hope the questions raised here will ultimately strengthen Knight, and redound to the benefit of us all.

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[i] My initial exchange with Knight (questions posed 10/1; answers sent 10/14):

When was the decision to slow down funding made?  When was it first communicated to prospective grantees?

There was no decision made to “slow down” funding. Rather, we dramatically accelerated funding in Year One of Press Forward, per our desire to move “at the speed of news.” We felt it was important to get significant money out the door early in Press Forward’s five-year run so that we had the time necessary to assess the impact of those grants and fill in gaps. We’ve now committed almost half of the $300 million we had to spend over five years. Having spent so much so quickly, it’s true we’ll now commit less in the coming years. But we will continue to make grants and actively manage the few hundred we already have in the field. We’ll also continue to work with our funding partners to make Press Forward the transformational project we know it will be.

I have heard numerous accounts of long delays this year from when grantees were told Knight's Board had approved grants to when signed grant agreements and first payments were made. Why did this happen? Is it somehow related to the funding slowdown?

We dramatically increased our grantmaking this year. Our operational capacity didn’t expand to match that.  We’re at work developing a better process, which we’ll lay out soon in a News@Knight newsletter.

Press Forward has been positioned as a response to a "crisis." Why does it make sense to slow funding amid a crisis?
It is — and that’s why we accelerated grantmaking so substantially.

Does Knight intend to again convene the Knight Media Forum early next year? If so, given that a major purpose of the Forum has been to galvanize funding by others, how do you see that being persuasive when Knight has slowed its own funding?
Yes, there will be a Knight Media Forum. We look forward to talking about the $150 million we committed to local journalism in 2024, the more than 80 grants we made this year, the more than 30 local Press Forwards we’ve played a significant role in helping birth – including the eight in Knight communities – and the key role we’ve played in helping spread the Press Forward concept into Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the UK and other countries. We’re proud of what we’ve done through 2024, and we look forward to celebrating that at the next KMF — and continuing to use that example to encourage other funders to join us.

At last year's KMF, Maribel Wadsworth said the following: "we are well past time to just be talking about solutions. We need a bias toward action....The best time for solutions was yesterday, as the saying goes — but the next best time is right now.” It is time — now — for philanthropy to move at the speed of news." How does this square with the funding slowdown?
Maribel’s bias toward action is exactly why we were able to accelerate our Press Forward commitments and invest so much in 2024. Our $150 million investment over the last nine months is a lot of money in a short time. As noted earlier, we frontloaded commitments to provide more time for us all to assess impact and determine where future funding might be the most useful. So we can’t maintain the spending pace from a budgetary standpoint.

We made a number of grants this year that specifically tapped into the need for speed. We made a grant to support the Knight Elections Hub, which provided election-related services to local publishers at a subsidized rate. Because so many publishers took advantage of the services, we needed to commit more money than originally anticipated, so we pushed a board grant through in a few months to supplement that fund. 

When McClatchy and Gannett announced in March they would stop using AP content, we conceived, developed and got our board to approve – all in a few months — a $1.5 million grant to allow AP to provide its content and services to independent publishers in swing states to assure citizens there would have access to reliable elections information. 

Just last week, we got a grant approved in 22 hours to provide support for journalists trying to cover the devastation in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.