Rosental C. Alves

ISOJ Founder and Chair, Professor at the School of Journalism, UT Austin
Founder and director, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Rosental Calmon Alves is the founder and director of the International Symposium on Journalism (ISOJ), which he launched in 1999. What began as a small symposium on online journalism has evolved into one of the world’s leading conferences on journalism innovation and the digital transformation of news.
Rosental is the Knight Chair in Journalism and UNESCO Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught since 1996. In 2002, he founded the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas with support from the Knight Foundation. In 2012, he launched the Center’s pioneering Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program for journalists, which has since served more than 380,000 participants from 200 countries and territories.
Before entering academia, Rosental spent 27 years as a journalist and journalism educator in Brazil, including 23 years at Jornal do Brasil, where he served as managing editor and board member. A pioneer of digital journalism in Brazil, he launched the country’s first real-time online financial news service in 1991 and led the creation of Jornal do Brasil’s online edition in 1995, making it the first Brazilian newspaper on the internet.
In 1987, he became the first Brazilian awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. In 2016, he received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia Journalism School for excellence in journalism and contributions to Inter-American understanding. Today, he serves on the boards of both the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes at Columbia University.