John Temple, a journalist recognized for innovation and excellence in mainstream and startup news organizations, will spend the 2013-14 academic year in residence at the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program.

Temple will be a senior fellow in the program, joining 20 Knight Fellows whose selection was announced earlier this spring.

As a senior fellow, Temple will play several roles that mesh with the Knight Fellowships emphasis on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. He will be a resource for the 2013-14 Knight Fellows, as well as work on special initiatives in concert with the Knight Fellowships directors. He’ll focus on ways to meet the challenges facing newsrooms, with a particular interest in newer platforms, such as mobile.

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with people at the forefront of journalism innovation and to be part of a program that has contributed so much to elevating the quality of journalism around the world,” Temple said.

James Bettinger, director of the Knight Fellowships, said Temple represented a major opportunity for the program. “His unique combination of big-newsroom experience and startup-mentality will be a major resource for the other fellows, and for journalism.”

Under his leadership and vision, the Rocky Mountain News won four Pulitzer Prizes. Until this spring he was managing editor of the Washington Post, and when he left that position, editor Marty Baron noted that Temple had “promoted a spirit of innovation, insisting on both excellence and speed.” In between those positions, he was founding editor at Honolulu Civil Beat, and helped develop it into an important news source.

While Temple was at the Rocky, he launched two online services, in addition to overseeing the paper’s main website: YourHub.com, an early experiment in citizen journalism that was the largest such hyperlocal initiative in the U.S. when it launched in 2005, and RedBlueAmerica.com, a national political/cultural site.

Before becoming an editor, Temple was a reporter at The Albuquerque Tribune and Toronto Star. He served as city editor and managing editor of The Tribune before moving to Denver in 1992. He was the Rocky’s metro editor and managing editor before taking the paper’s top reins in 1998. In 2006, Temple was named vice president/news of Scripps’ newspaper division.