From 1907 to 1933, Charles Landon Knight, publisher of the Akron Beacon Journal, provided tuition assistance to college students in need.

The Knight Foundation incorporated in the state of Ohio with the goal of carrying out the work of the education fund.

At its start, the foundation gave grants for education, social services, cultural organizations and some journalism-related causes.

In its first decade, the foundation's financial resources came from contributions from the Akron Beacon Journal and Miami Herald, and from personal grants from John and James Knight.

With the foundation besieged by requests in the early 1990s for emergency funding to "save our symphony," Penelope McPhee, director of the Arts Program, designed the Magic of Music initiative.

[3] In 2005, to address the Internet's increasingly disruptive impact on the traditional media industry, Knight began a number of systemic changes in its approach to making grants.

As one of his first actions as CEO, Alberto Ibargüen suspended the further creation of endowments of journalism programs at colleges and universities.

In addition to Knight's pivot toward funding digital innovations, the foundation also doubled down on its support of the First Amendment, funding regular surveys that gauged high school students' awareness of it, and helping create organizations like the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University to "preserve and expand First Amendment rights in the digital age through research and education, and by supporting litigation in favor of protecting freedom of expression and the press."

[9] The Knight Foundation funds multimedia training in newsrooms such as National Public Radio and through programs like Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.