Timothy Knight, 85, on Sept. 6. Born in the UK and raised in South Africa, Knight left school at age 17 to follow his calling as a reporter. In South Africa, he worked for the Natal Mercury, the Sunday Express and the Rand Daily Mail, before crossing the border to work with Zambia TV. He went on to cover two wars as a foreign correspondent with United Press International in the Congo and then moved stateside to work in New York with ABC TV and Radio, NBC-TV, and PBS. Knight won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Program Achievement for ABC documentary “LSD: Trip to Where?” in which he infamously dropped acid with Timothy Leary. He went on to produce and report on his own vasectomy operation for NBC and was the network reporter assigned to cover the Brooklyn bank hostage-taking later portrayed in the feature film, “Dog Day Afternoon.” After a decade in the U.S., he joined CBC’s The National as a producer, going on to serve as lead trainer for a decade for CBC’s TV journalists. After 15 years with the public broadcaster, he founded Tim Knight + Associates, coaching communicators in Canada, the U.S., Jamaica, Mauritius, Spain, Ireland, Finland, Germany, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ghana and South Africa. Following the end of apartheid, he returned to South Africa to resume journalism training there, helping the South African Broadcasting Corporation transition from state to public media. He received a 2012 Innoversity Angel Award for playing “an outstanding role in making the media more accessible to persons with disabilities, Aboriginal media professionals, and people of colour.”
