President and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Participant: We Media Miami ’10
Alberto Ibargüen
The Knight Foundation promotes informed, engaged communities in the digital age.
Ibargüen is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and of El Nuevo Herald . During his tenure, The Miami Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.
He studied at Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Between college and law school, he served in the Peace Corps in Venezuela’s Amazon Territory and in Colombia. He practiced law in Hartford, Connecticut until he joined The Hartford Courant, then Newsday in New York before moving to Miami.
Ibargüen is chairman of the board of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., a museum dedicated to free speech and free press. He also chairs the World Wide Web Foundation, founded by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He is a member of the board of PepsiCo, AMR Corp. (American Airlines), ProPublica and of the Council on Foreign Relations. Over the years he has served on the boards of arts, education and civic organizations including The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Wesleyan University, Smith College and the Trustees’ Council of the National Gallery of Art and was chairman of the board of PBS.
For his work to protect journalists in Latin America as part of the Inter American Press Association, Ibargüen received a Maria Moors Cabot citation from Columbia University and George Washington University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters.
Beth Laing is the project manager for iFOCOS, which organizes the We Media conferences, awards and community. Prior to working with We Media she worked in a variety of new media roles with Knight Ridder, Infonautics and Access Atlanta. She is currently on the board of the Atlanta Women’s Alliance (AWA), Community Advisory Board for Junior League Dekalb and a Leadership Dekalb 2010 class member.