Jon Funabiki is a Professor of Journalism at San Francisco State University. He was appointed in August, 2006, to teach and to develop the Center for Renaissance Journalism, a new interdisciplinary center on emerging opportunities for community, ethnic and other forms of news media.

He joined the university after an 11-year career with the Ford Foundation, one of the world's leading philanthropic institutions, where he was Deputy Director of the Media, Arts & Culture (MAC) Unit and was responsible for the Foundation's multimillion-dollar grantmaking strategies on news media issues.

Funabiki was the founding director of San Francisco State University's Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism, which developed model programs to improve news media coverage of ethnic minority communities and issues.

He is a former reporter and editor with The San Diego Union, where he specialized in U.S.-Asia political and economic affairs. Reporting from Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and throughout the U.S., he covered news stories and developed in-depth series on Asia's emerging democratic movements, economic giants and social trends.

Funabiki serves on the boards of the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the National Economic Development and Law Center.

A graduate of San Francisco State University, Funabiki was awarded the John S. Knight Professional Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, the Jefferson Fellowship at the East-West Center of Honolulu, a National Endowment for the Humanities Professional Summer Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a visiting scholar at the Center on Politics and Public Service at the University of California, Berkeley.