John Briggs, senior editor for Yahoo! News Full Coverage, is getting schooled! As a recipient of the prestigious John S. Knight Fellowship, John will join a class of 12 U.S. and eight international journalists given the opportunity to “study and reflect, far away from newsroom deadline pressures” at Stanford University this fall.

The Knight Fellowship is in its 41st year, but John, a nine-year Yahoo! veteran, is the first U.S.-based Fellow in the history of the program whose journalism experience comes exclusively from a web-based news outlet. (Former Knight Fellows Bill Gannon and Elizabeth Osder came from backgrounds in traditional journalism and now work at Yahoo!.) I had a chance to sit down with John to get some skinny on his path to glory and what this distinction means for online news. 

A native of Madison, Wisconsin with a degree in East Asian area studies from his hometown university, John spent four years in Japan after graduating, but when he returned in 1995, he still wasn’t ready to settle down. He began a yearlong global excursion with stops in Latin America, Africa, and Europe, and eventually settled in San Francisco.

In 1997, he got a gig at a little-known company with a funny name. “Yahoo! was looking for people with a lot of general knowledge, so it helped to say I’d seen some of the world,” he explained to me. John began work at Yahoo! as a surfer, finding and categorizing web sites for the Yahoo! Directory, and joined Yahoo! News Full Coverage a little over a year later.

Back then, the Internet was just a baby. John believes that his selection as a Knight Fellow reflects the coming of age of web-based news. “The Internet has such incredible visibility and such immense influence on journalism, and I’m absolutely honored to have been selected,” he said. “Only in this last year has Yahoo! had truly original content, with Yahoo! News correspondents like Kevin Sites. I think picking somebody from Yahoo! really adds to the status and recognition of online journalism.”

Before going back to school, John had to create his own independent study program. His topic is the “framing of political communication, and its effect on news coverage and public opinion.” He became interested in this topic due to his work at Yahoo! Full Coverage, where users can find topical collections of news, analysis, op-ed content, and multimedia from sources all over the Internet, programmed by human editors. Early on though, most online news came from wire services. “They’ll send us version after version,” says John. “But the earliest articles they send are raw communication; there's no analysis, no sourcing, and no second points of view. When we post these early versions of a story, people get unfiltered, framed political communication. I was curious about this process, and I wanted to study it.”

Besides academics, networking is a key advantage of the Fellowship program. “I didn’t work in a newsroom before I worked at Yahoo! so my industry connections are pretty limited,” John said. The program has a strong commitment to selecting a diverse class of Fellows, from reporters at The New York Times and The Washington Post to a representative from UOL, an online publication in Brazil. “That’s why this is a tremendous opportunity for me to get to know 19 other journalists,” he said.

Overall, “the Knight Fellowship will give me the chance to reflect on my work by virtue of the fact that I get to step away,” says John. “Hopefully, I can incorporate the ideas I get, both from my peers and the university, into the ever growing media outlet that is Yahoo!.”

Good luck, John, and make sure to take lots of notes!