Yahoo, which has helped the Chinese government prosecute journalists and acquiesced to its censorship demands, announced today that it will fund a $1 million fellowship for journalists in countries where press freedoms are restricted. Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, is giving the money to Stanford’s John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists. The first Yahoo International Fellow will be the BBC’s Imtiaz Ali, a reporter in Pakistan, where Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in 2002. The San Jose Business Journal provides details of the fellowship.

A year ago, the New York Times reported on Yahoo’s role in the prosecution of a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence. Here’s another version of the Shi Tao story from the Christian Science Monitor. And here’s Yahoo’s Jerry Yang explaining in the Washington Post that his company had no choice but to cooperate with the government if it wanted to do business in China.