The New York Times graciously hosted the first meeting of the all-city class “Tech, Media and Democracy.” About 100 students from five campuses enrolled in the course — Columbia Journalism School, Cornell Tech, The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, The New School, and NYU. Broadly, over the next fifteen weeks we’ll cover New
Announcing New Fellowship Opportunities
The Brown Institute at Columbia University sponsors a variety of fellowship opportunities available to students, alumni, faculty, and professionals. Some of our fellowships are targeted, addressing a particular contemporary challenge facing journalism, while others are intended as a professional sabbatical. Some are task-oriented, while others are intended to retrain and retool. Below you’ll find an
Magic Grant Office Hours at Columbia
The Brown Institute at Columbia is hosting office hours starting on January 31, 2019 to discuss our magic grant opportunities. These one-on-one sessions allow you to sit down with a member of the Brown Institute staff to discuss: The types of projects we’re interested in supporting The various types of support we offer to grantees
Mapping and Visual Language Workshops
Mapping Module News unfolds in places and every newsworthy event is shaped by the details of location. Those details might include the specifics of a neighborhood as it is today or of the history leading to its current configurations. With the popularization of cartography, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can make a
Distributed Media Labs, with Dave Gehring and Sam Parnell
Dave Gehring and Sam Parnell, CEO and CTO of Distributed Media Labs, explain how they hope to give publishers the opportunity to grow audience and deepen engagement across the open web through a new platform and information architecture that enables a standard for content distribution across the web. (Illustration: thanks to Stanford DCI Fellow Joseph
Jeff Larson introduces The Markup
Jeff Larson, Managing Editor of The Markup, explains how this new nonprofit news start-up plans to investigate how powerful institutions are using technology in ways that impact people and society. “Whether that is reshaping the news we get and what we believe; how elections play out; our jobs and how we get them; how we
Tonight at Brown at Columbia! Washington Post & NPR Discuss Voice Interfaces for Journalism
Tonight’s the night! We have our second Transparency Series event, this time on Voice User Interfaces (VUIs). VUIs also go by the more familiar names “personal assistants” or “smart speakers” — Think Siri, Alexa, Cortana or Google Assistant. This should be an exciting event! Voice platforms are still young enough that journalists can have a
The NYT’s Kevin Quealy on Innovating with Data & Graphics
Kevin Quealy discusses how The New York Times thinks about data visualization and graphics. Quealy is the Deputy Editor at The Upshot, the Times’s site on politics, economics, and everyday life. The goal of The Upshot, he says, is to use data and graphics effectively and “turn readers into experts.”
‘Hacking Voter Suppression’ Project Begins
For the 2018-19 Magic Grant Season, the Brown Institute at Columbia is funding Hacking Voter Suppression, a project by Columbia Journalism School Professor June Cross and Charlotte Braithwaite, a Theater Director and Assistant Professor of Music and Theater Arts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project seeks to explore how foreign interference, gerrymandering, and