Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has been called upon by the Knight Foundation, a sponsor of innovative media projects, to bring a venture-capital mentality to the befuddled industry. Hughes will take a position on the Foundation’s board. Hughes and digital media experts from MIT and Harvard will join board members like ProPublica founder Paul Steiger in finding ways to make journalism profitable again.
“We need to be approaching these questions and these problems with an attitude more akin to venture capital than with the attitude of a foundation,” Hughes told reporters. Apart from helping to co-found Facebook, Hughes spearheaded the online portion of President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Alberto Ibarguen, president of the Knight Foundation, has said that his organization has begun to look at its activities as a form of “social investing.”
“Traditionally in the nonprofit sector, because an idea is founded on fate so much of the time, or founded on hope, the typical thing would be for someone to continue and continue until they ran out of money,” Ibarguen told reporters. “An entrepreneur would find a creative way to make it work.”
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