• Knight Fellowships

Pam Maples named Knight Fellowships Innovation Director

Pam Maples

Pam Maples — journalist, journalism educator and journalism entrepreneur — has been named Innovation Director at the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University. She will begin the newly created position in March.

Maples is vice president for editorial at Newsy.com, a multi-source video news start-up in partnership with the University of Missouri, where she is an adjunct associate professor of journalism. She is also an advisor to Apture, a media technology company in San Mateo, Calif., hatched in 2006 out of conversations between Stanford computer science students and a group of Knight Fellows.

Maples, a Knight Fellow that year, became involved in a quest by a computer science student to find a way for news site readers to access multiple sources of additional information on stories or topics of interest without surfing endlessly. The BBC and the Washington Post are now using the resulting technology. The process by which this new venture was developed is the kind of collaboration envisioned under the fellowship's growing emphasis on innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership, said Knight Fellowships Director Jim Bettinger.

As the news industry undergoes a time of profound transformation, the Knight Fellowships seek to foster high quality journalism and models for its sustainability, as well as increasing support for press freedom around the world. The innovation director will play a leading role in fostering these changes in the program.

Maples will help guide the 20 Knight Fellows in developing proposals of their choosing, projects that will lead to a tangible result that can eventually be shared with other journalists.

She will also be creating a pool of mentor-advisers among experts at Stanford, in Silicon Valley, among Knight Fellowships alumni and others and building a more robust alumni network.

Maples graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism with honors. In 1994, she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that explored violence against women around the world as a human rights issue. From 2006 to 2009, she was managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where she led the full integration of print and online news production.

Under her leadership, the newspaper and its website were recognized with several national awards for digital and print storytelling, including being named a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for its real-time online coverage of a mass shooting.

The Knight Fellowships program annually brings 12 outstanding mid-career U.S. journalists and as many as nine from other countries to study at Stanford in a one-year program. . During their stay at Stanford, the Knight Fellows pursue independent courses of study, participate in special seminars and work on individual journalism projects. More than 700 journalists have studied at Stanford under the program since it began in 1966. James Bettinger is director of the program. Dawn E. Garcia is deputy director.