The Brown Institute at Columbia is excited to announce two new full-time staff positions — a Director of Creative Research and an “Impact Fellow.” The Brown Institute was founded 10 years ago with a gift from Helen Gurley Brown. We are a unique, bi-coastal partnership between Columbia Journalism School (CJS) and Stanford’s School of Engineering.
MISSING THEM project continues its reporting on the pandemic
For the past year, MISSING THEM, a memorial and journalism project with THE CITY and Columbia Journalism School has tracked down more than thousands of New Yorkers who died and written hundreds of obituaries, free of charge to families. The larger aim has been to close the gap in representation through a new hyper-local crowdsourcing
Two New Impact Grants Awarded!
The Brown Institute is proud to announce two new Impact Grants! Kinfolk will cultivate a national network of community organizations, cultural institutions and schools to change how we teach and learn about Black and Brown historical narratives, building a catalog of augmented reality representations of different historical figures. Nueva Nación will collect and organize data
‘Documenting COVID-19’ Project Wins First Place in National Headliners Awards
The Brown Institute is pleased to announce that our Impact Grant ‘Documenting COVID-19‘ has won first place in the 2022 National Headliners Awards for their “Uncounted: The hidden death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic” investigation. This ongoing collaboration with MuckRock and USA Today found that death certificates, long prone to error, have gotten worse during
They are not alone: lessons for the search of disappeared people in Mexico
Our 2021 – 2022 Magic Grant No están solas: Bridging the search for the disappeared in Mexico has published the first in a series of articles documenting their findings. This piece details the team’s process in interviewing “buscadoras” – groups of women who travel Mexico’s countryside searching for their disappeared family members. As Mónica Trigos
The winners are in!
The Brown Institute announces its 2022-2023 Magic Grants The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a collaboration between Stanford University’s School of Engineering and Columbia Journalism School, is proud to announce its 2022-2023 Magic Grant recipients! This year Brown awarded eight Magic Grants and three “seed” grants. Some of the winning teams are proposing tools to
The Brown Institute Announces Its 2022 Venture Challenge Competition Winners
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation in partnership with the Columbia Venture Competition and Columbia Entrepreneurship are please to announce the winners of their inaugural 2022 Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology. The projects in this group focus on creating sustainable and scalable ventures to enable, empower and facilitate the work of journalists and
Local Live(s) Brings Innovative Live Storytelling to More Newsrooms
People from across Mississippi gathered to hear journalists tell intimate, first-person stories about the behind-the-scenes of their reporting this past February in Jackson, Mississippi. The show was a collaboration between Mississippi Today and Local Live(s), a national storytelling series that brings important journalism back to life. Their next series, which is unified under the theme
MuckRock and the Documenting COVID-19 project are releasing new searchable CDC death data at the county level
Over the past two years, 165,000 more Americans have died of natural causes, such as diabetes and hypertensive heart disease, than historical norms would lead researchers to expect. A smaller group of deaths from specific natural causes that the CDC has identified as potentially COVID-19-related shows a similar figure: 158,212 additional deaths during the pandemic