Eric Newton is an American journalist and Senior Adviser to the President at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an organization created by one of the founding families behind the Knight Ridder newspaper group.
Newton earned a B.A. in journalism from San Francisco State University in 1979 and his master's degree in international studies from the University of Birmingham.
He joined the Oakland Tribune as a copy boy in 1977. Turned down for a job as a reporter there in 1979, he edited newspapers in Mill Valley and Richmond before return Sping to the Tribune in 1984 as a copy editor who in six years would be running the newsroom.[1]
Newton was managing editor of the Tribune when it won more than 150 awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. He has since been a Pulitzer Prize juror four times and has written a book on Pulitzer Prize-winning photography.
In 1992, Newton launched the Pacific Coast Center for the Freedom Forum. In 1994, he was founding managing editor for the Newseum, responsible for its story line and content. For four years, from the opening of the original Newseum in 1997 until 2000, he hosted programs in the Newseum's broadcast studio and created dozens of traveling exhibits. Newton joined Knight Foundation in June 2001 as a journalism program director. Later he became VP, Journalism Program. In 2011, he because Senior Adviser to the President.
Newton was founding president of the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit law firm representing citizens seeking access to government records. He shared in a 2004 Peabody Award for Mosaic: World News from the Middle East, a television program created for LinkTV. He has received the Reddick Award for distinguished contributions in communications from the University of Texas at Austin, a special First Amendment Award from the Radio and Television Digital News Association for his role in creating Sunshine Week.
Newton became involved in the 2005 Seigenthaler incident after replacing a vandalized Wikipedia biography of John Seigenthaler Sr. with a copyrighted official biography.[2] After that was removed for violating Wikipedia policy, Newton's subsequent edits explaining how he had tried to correct Wikipedia also were rejected as a violation of Wikipedia's verifiability policy.[2]