The Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program has been awarded $2.2 million by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Of that grant, $2 million -- plus another $1 million in matching funds to be raised by the program -- is to build the endowment, and $200,000 is to enable the program immediately to increase the number of stipends it can award fellows while the new money is phased in over four years.
The new grant, announced earlier this week at the foundation's headquarters in Miami, raises the organization's investment in the MIT fellowships program to $7 million. The Institute itself has contributed $2.5 million to the endowment. The program, which is wholly supported by the endowment, allows working journalists to spend a full academic year studying at MIT.
The enlarged endowment also ensures long-term support for the program's new series of one-week mini-fellowships that bring journalists to MIT for intensive courses in specific fields. The first of these, "Genes and Cells: Boot Camp for the Genetic Revolution," is to be staged in early December.
The Knight Foundation makes national grants in journalism, education and the arts. Its fourth program, community initiatives, is concentrated in 26 towns where the Knight brothers published newspapers, but the foundation is wholly independent of those newspapers.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 22, 1999.
