Stanford may not have won the contest to build a technology campus in New York, but the creativity of Silicon Valley will still find its way to Manhattan.
Columbia and Stanford announced a $30 million gift Monday to establish a center for digital journalism, in an effort to fuse Columbia's journalism expertise with Stanford's technological savvy.
Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering will jointly establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute of Media Innovation, named for former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, who gave the donation, and her late husband David Brown, who was an alumnus of both Stanford and the Columbia School of Journalism and who worked in the film and media industry.
The partnership will allow Stanford researchers and engineers to work with the most specific and relevant content and information from the Journalism School, while also providing the Journalism School with access to cutting-edge technology, Jamie Beckett, director of communications and alumni relations at the Stanford Engineering School, said.
“Columbia has a leadership role in content creation and news creation, so it is a really great opportunity to partner with them,” she said.
“We’re very excited about this and very grateful to Helen Gurley Brown for having put this opportunity before us,” Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann said. “We’re bound and determined to make the most of it quickly.”
Of the $30 million, $12 million is allocated to each school in order to establish the program. The institute will have a director at each campus, and will also create graduate and postgraduate fellowships. The Institute will also award competitive “Magic Grants” to fund the most creative and feasible models or prototypes presented by any student at either university.
The remaining $6 million will go to the construction of a high-tech newsroom inside the Journalism School building, which is scheduled for completion in mid-summer 2014.
The Institute’s programs will add to an already existing foundation in digital journalism resources and research at the Journalism School, Lemann said.
“We’ve been moving in the direction of doing more and more digital technology,” Lemann said, citing in particular the establishment of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism in 2010. “This project certainly builds on what we’ve already done.”
Stanford administrators praised the interdisciplinary approach and the potential of this collaboration between the East and West coasts.
Beckett said that the Institute “gives us an opportunity to team our technology expertise with the content expertise at Columbia.”
“We’re now at a point where computers can work with more than words and pixels and can begin to understand the meaning of text or a story told in video,” Beckett explained, adding that this “gap between the words and the meaning is what scientists call the semantic gap.”
Lemann also noted the expanded possibilities for project development, as the Institute will provide “a different capability than we’ve had before.”
“The practice that can come out of this can be quite ambitious,” Lemann said.
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