The Brown Institute is pleased to announce Magic Grant project ‘Documenting COVID-19‘ is the 2020 recipient of The First Amendment Coalition’s Free Speech & Open Government award. The project includes a team of journalists, data scientists, and a designer and has worked tirelessly to shed light on how state and local governments have responded to the
CategoryIn the News
The burden of malaria among pregnant women in Nigeria – an update on the reporting grants from Maternal Figures
Data shows that malaria accounts for 11% of maternal deaths in Nigeria. While it is not the lion’s share of the factors that contribute to maternal deaths, it is a significant one. In a story supported by the Maternal Figures Solutions Journalism Fellowship funded by The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Premium Times reporter Chiamaka
Sylvia featured in Variety magazine
“Instagram is full of wannabes, but there was only one Sylvia.” On November 24th, Damon Wise, Writer at Variety magazine interviewed our creative technologist Ziv Schneider about her project Sylvia, which premiered at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) DocLab this month. In the interview, Ziv reflected on this five-month-long social experiment in making an aging
Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth
Our 2020-21 Magic Grant Wolf Pack has published its first piece — a deep dive into the invention of the term “superpredator”. The team “found nearly 300 uses of ‘superpredator’ in 40 leading newspapers and magazines from 1995 to 2000. Fewer than 40% of these articles criticized the term.” As Carroll Bogert and LynNell Hankock
Magic Grant projects ‘Public Analysis of TV News’ and ‘Sports Illustrated’ featured on Bloomberg QuickTake
On October 21, 2020, Ashlee Vance, Senior Writer at Bloomberg Businessweek interviewed Stanford Professor Kayvon Fatahalian and highlighted advancements in artificial intelligence through Magic Grant projects Public Analysis of TV News and Sports Illustrated. In the piece, Vance and Fatahalian highlight the tremendous opportunities that AI has provided for media makers. Both also offer thoughtfulness
Institute Director Agrawala talks Deep Fakes with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
To spot a deep fake, researchers looked for inconsistencies between “visemes,” or mouth formations, and “phonemes,” the phonetic sounds. Using AI to Detect Seemingly Perfect Deep-Fake Videos was published on the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Blog on 10/13/2020, which featured Brown Institute Director Maneesh Agrawala. In the article, Agrawala spoke to the struggles
Contact Tracing: How decisions about COVID-19 were made by city and state governments
Updated 08/11/21: The team behind the 2019-20 Magic Grant Trump Town have made a pivot, and are focusing on state and local governments and their responses to COVID-19. Derek Kravitz and his team have received thousands of pages of emails in response to a large number of very targeted FOIA requests. In these emails we
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
“Follower Factory” by NYT & CJS Comp Journalism Class is Finalist for Pulitzer Prize
On Monday, a package of stories including The Follower Factory — an in-depth investigation of purchased followers on twitter — along with other reporting on how Facebook and the big tech firms allowed the spread of misinformation and failed to protect consumer privacy, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. The Follower