The Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the Columbia Journalism School is exploring the application of machine learning (ML) and other technologies to support local newsrooms — both advancing their editorial missions as well as creating new business opportunities engaging readers. As is now the hallmark of Brown Institute projects, our approach will be collaborative
2019 At the Brown Institute
As we move into 2020, we thought we would take a moment to reflect on both our struggles and success of 2019. From our new staff additions Ziv Schneider and Alex Calderwood, to project launches (below), to new partnerships, Brown has had a big year! Premiers and Launches This year we saw yet another batch
News Products – A New Course Offering at CJS
For Spring 2020, the Brown Institute is excited to announce a new course on News Products which will be open to all MS, MA, and Dual-Degree students! The course will be led by Julia Beizer, Chief Product Officer at Bloomberg and Dalit Shalom, Senior Product Designer at NYT and is a mix of lecture and
Datashare wins best open source project at #OSSPARIS19
The Brown Institute is pleased to announce that Datashare, a Magic Grant project by ICIJ, has been announced as the winner of the best open source project at the Paris Open Source Summit taking place December 10-11, 2019. DataShare allows for valuable knowledge about people and companies to be “sieved” into indexes and shared securely
Magic Grant “1000 Cut” Featured in The New Yorker
In the December 2019 edition of The New Yorker, Patricia Marx writes about “Taking Virtual Reality for a Test Drive.” Reality being what it is right now, doesn’t an alternative sound tempting? That’s what I was thinking the other day, in my apartment, when I adjusted the Velcro straps on my Oculus Quest, a chunky
Actually, it’s about Ethics, AI, and Journalism
We live in a data society. Journalists are becoming data analysts and data curators, and computation is an essential tool for reporting. Data and computation reshape the way a reporter sees the world and composes a story. They also control the operation of the information ecosystem she sends her journalism into, influencing where it finds
Reporting “on” and “with” Twitter
The last session of the Transparency Series took place last Saturday and featured Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed’s media editor. Silverman has an incredible record of reporting on Twitter and social media platforms generally. During the day-long workshop, he shared his strategies for breaking stories down into “actors, content, behavior, and networks.” His investigative routine when looking
Becoming more mindful about visual information: A Q&A with Alberto Cairo, author of ‘How Charts Lie’
Alberto Cairo is an associate professor and Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the University of Miami. He recorded this interview with Alex Calderwood before delivering a lecture about his recently released book How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information. What spurred you to write this book? Have you been thinking about it for
1000 Cut Journey Announces New Partnership with iNK Stories
We are pleased to announce that the team behind 1000 Cut Journey, which was awarded our 2018-19 Flagship Magic Grant, has partnered with acclaimed visual studio iNK Stories, to expand their Virtual Reality (VR) experience. The project is a bi-coastal initiative between Professor Courtney Cogburn’s research group at the Columbia University School of Social Work