Stanford, Columbia Share Grant to Advance Media
It almost sounds like an assignment from a Steven Spielberg script: Design the high-tech newsroom of the coming decades. That's part of the mission of the new David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a joint endeavor of Stanford's School of Engineering and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
A $30 million gift from Brown, longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, to establish the institute honors the memory of her late husband, David, a graduate of both Stanford ('36) and Columbia's J-school. David Brown was a film and theater producer who worked with Spielberg.
The institute, whose signature newsroom will be built at the J-school, will have directors on both campuses—at Stanford, engineering professor Bernd Girod. Its focus is the interaction between journalism and multimedia technology, with an emphasis on new ideas, products and prototypes.
