Western environmental journalism gets boost from Knight Foundation

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is giving $220,000 to endow the Knight-Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism at Stanford. The prize is co-sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists.

The Knight-Risser Prize recognizes the best environmental reporting on the North American West. An annual Knight-Risser Prize Symposium at Stanford brings journalists, researchers, scholars and policymakers together with public audiences to explore new ways to ensure that sophisticated environmental reporting thrives in the West.

The two-year grant includes $200,000 in challenge funds. The Bill Lane Center and the Knight Fellowships program must raise $100,000 to earn the full match from the foundation and are currently only $40,000 short of their goal.

The prize is named for newspaper publishers JOHN S. and JAMES L. KNIGHT and the foundation they created to advance journalism excellence and freedom of expression and for JAMES V. RISSER, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and former director of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford.