Alberto Ibargüen is president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

He is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald. During his tenure, the Miami Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.

He graduated from Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Between college and law school, he served in the Peace Corps in Venezuela’s Amazon Territory and was the Peace Corps Programming and Training Officer in Colombia, based in Bogotá. After law school, he practiced law in Hartford, Connecticut, until he joined the Hartford Courant, then Newsday in New York, before moving to Miami.

Ibargüen is a member of the boards of the Paley Center for Media and the National Museum of the American Latino, and formerly the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Wesleyan University, Smith College, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and ProPublica, as well as the Secretary of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board and the Citizen Advisory Committee of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

Ibargüen served on the boards of American Airlines, PepsiCo, AOL and Norwegian Cruise Lines. He is a former board chair of PBS, the Newseum and the World Wide Web Foundation, founded by web inventor Sir Tim Berners­-Lee to promote a free and universal web. 

Ibargüen is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. For his work to protect journalists in Latin America, Ibargüen received a Maria Moors Cabot citation from Columbia University. He has been awarded honorary degrees by several universities, including Wesleyan University, The George Washington University and the University of Miami.