Rosental Calmon Alves
is the first holder of the Knight Chair in Journalism title. A pioneer of online journalism in his native Brazil, Alves had a 27-year career as a journalist and educator before moving to the United States in 1996, where he began his role as Knight Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1997, he has taught classes in online journalism, international reporting, press freedom in Latin America and entrepreneurial journalism at UT Austin.
He is also founding director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, an outreach program that helps thousands of journalists around the world with online training. The Knight Center’s innovative massive open online courses have reached more than 275,000 students from 200 countries and territories.
In Rio de Janeiro, Alves became a journalist at 16 and a journalism professor at 21. After more than a decade as a foreign correspondent in Europe, North America and South America, Alves returned to Rio to become an editor, then executive editor and director of Jornal do Brasil, then a leading national newspaper. Alves launched the first Brazilian online news service specializing in financial news, and Jornal do Brasil Online, the first Brazilian newspaper on the web and a pioneer in Latin America.