Knight Foundation funds enhanced Nieman Fellowships

Two Latin American journalists will receive Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University to help them discover new ways to inform and engage their communities and foster a free press in their own countries, thanks to a new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

The funding expands the scope of the long-established Knight Latin American Nieman Fellowship by supporting new experimental fieldwork projects for the journalists at the end of the academic year, with a new grant of almost $200,000. These projects may involve in-depth coverage of a story, the creation of a new journalistic enterprise or research on policy and its impact.

Knight Foundation has supported the Knight Latin American Nieman Fellowship for more than 20 years, helping to educate 32 leading Latin American journalists.

The Knight Nieman Fellows will collaborate with Harvard- and non-Harvard-based organizations focused on Latin America to build a network of scholars and sources that can advance their fieldwork projects. Harvard offers a multitude of Latin American resources and a key partner in the fellowship will be the university’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Fellows will also work with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas in Austin.

Two journalists have been selected as John S. and James L. Knight Latin American Nieman Fellows in the class of 2012: Claudia Méndez Arriaza, an editor and staff writer for El Periódico in Guatemala and Carlos Eduardo Huertas, an investigations editor for Revista Semana in Colombia.

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