The Media Management Center was founded in 1989 as the Newspaper Management Center with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami. The Knight brothers owned a group of newspapers known for their journalistic excellence, including The Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. It was Janet Chusmir, executive editor of The Miami Herald, who expressed a need for a center to teach management across the functions of the newspaper. The Knight Foundation, which is independent of the Knight-Ridder company, picked up the idea. Legendary newspaper editors Lee Hills and Creed Black pushed the idea to fruition in their positions of chairman and president of the foundation.

John Lavine, who owned a media company that included newspapers before becoming the Cowles Professor of Media Management and Economics at the University of Minnesota, was selected to help site and develop the center. Northwestern University offered the combination of a top tier business school, a highly regarded journalism school, and its proximity to the world’s busiest airport. With an inaugural grant from the Knight Foundation, the Newspaper Management Center was born as a joint venture of the Kellogg School of Management and the Medill School of Journalism. Lavine was retained as founding director.

The Center offered its first program — the Senior Executive Program — in 1990. Despite the Gulf War, economic recession and newsprint price hikes, the newspaper industry supported the Center. In 1991, the Middle Management Seminar replaced the Senior Executive Seminar. In 1993, a four-week Advanced Executive Program debuted and the Middle Management Seminar became a more senior-level Management Development Program.

In 1993, the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation of Chicago joined Knight in its support. The foundation was established in honor of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the longtime editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The colonel built his company from a single newspaper to a multi-media giant.

With the McCormick Tribune Foundation support, the Center began to engage in more research and to train more faculty in issues facing the media.

In 1996, the Center was able to offer two Management Development Programs for the newspaper industry. Also in 1996, a Management Development seminar for broadcast executives was added in partnership with the National Association of Broadcasters. In 1998, a Management Development Program — called CTAM U. — for the cable television industry was added through a partnership with the administrative and marketing arm of the cable industry. That seminar was discontinued in 2001.

In the 1998-99 academic year the Center expanded its expertise to the magazine industry and partnered with American Business Media and the Magazine Publishers of America to educate their executives in on-campus seminars.

The Readership Institute was formed after newspaper publishers and CEOs, meeting at a special readership summit convened by the Newspaper Association of America in February 1999, agreed to make a five-year commitment to a Readership Initiative and asked the Center to lead and coordinate it. The Institute, in partnership with both NAA and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, focuses on actionable research, field-testing of readership-building ideas and measurement of their success, and education and training for the newspaper industry on readership-building best practices.

In 1999 the Center launched a Latin American initiative. Creighton Scholarships, named in honor of the former chairman of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, are offered to Latin American media executives to attend AEP. The Editorial Excellence Seminar was presented in Spanish in Argentina and the Executive Development Program, also in Spanish, was developed for the Inter American Press Association. The Center has run the major management study of Latin American daily newspapers for IAPA since 1989. Many Center publications are now available in Spanish.

In the 1999-2000 academic year Center faculty developed the Media Management Program, a three-course sequence in the MBA curriculum at the Kellogg School of Management. Kellogg is the only top-tiered business school to offer a program of this breadth.

Women in Newspapers is an on-going project at the Center to research the progress that has been made for women and what women and the organizations they work for can do to help more women rise to the senior ranks in the industry. In 2000, the Center released the first in a series of reports on the results of the WIN research and began holding conferences for women in leadership positions in the news industries.

In the fall of 2002 the Media Management Center welcomes the senior leadership of the Danish media company Berlingske to campus for a weeklong seminar. This is one of a number of tailored programs developed for individual media companies this year.